No voters cast their votes based on perfect information, but better educated and richer voters are on average better informed than others. We develop a model where the voting mistakes resulting from low political knowledge reduce the weight of poor voters, and cause parties to choose political...

We identify exogenous variation in incumbent policymakers’ re-election probabilities and explore empirically how this variation affects the incumbents’ investment in physical capital. Our results indicate that a higher re-election probability leads to higher investments, particularly in the...

The topic of this note is issues related to R&D expenditures leading to improved technologies for reducing environmentally harmful emissions. The focus is on the following questions: Will a market economy where environmental policies are restricted to taxes or quotas give the socially efficient...

Consider a model for optimal timing of emissions reduction, trading off the cost of the reduction against the time-additive aggregate of environmental damage, the disutility from the pollutant stock M(t) the infrastructure contributes to. Intuitively, the optimal timing for an infinitesimal...

Some kinds of corporate crime can be characterized as accidents, such as many types of environmental damage. These crimes are oflen expensive to deter because conviction costs are high and maximum fines are constrained by firms' ability to pay. The paper derives how enforcement costs can be...

This paper addresses the impact of endogenous technology through research and development (R&D) and learning by doing (LbD) on the timing of environmental policy. We develop two models, the first with technological change through R&D and the second with LbD. We study the interaction between...

In order to reach a Pareto optimal outcome with transboundary environmental problems, there must be some kind of international environmental agreement. One possibility is to have an international environmental agreement focusing directly on emissions in each country. Given such an agreement, an...