Solar geoengineering has received increasing attention as an option to temporarily stabilize global temperatures. A key concern surrounding these technologies is that heterogeneous preferences over the optimal amount of cooling combined with low deployment costs may allow the country with the...

Limited liability and asymmetric information between an investment bank and its lenders provide an incentive for a bank to undercapitalise and finance overly risky business projects. To counter this market failure, national governments have imposed solvency constraints on banks. However, these...

We extend the trade restrictiveness index approach to the case of market imperfections and domestic regulations addressing them. We focus on standard-like non-tariff measures (NTMs) affecting cost of production and potentially enhancing demand by reducing negative externalities. We apply the...

We study how public policies affects an economy where production emits pollutants and investment in productive assets raises the economy’s overall productivity. We explore two hypotheses about how the accumulation of pollutants affects human well-being. Under the first one, there is no limit...

We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We...

The paper analyzes a very stylized model of crises and demonstrates how the degree of strategic complementarity in the actions of investors is a critical determinant of fragility. It is shown how the balance sheet composition of a financial intermediary, parameters of the information structure...

This paper investigates the domestic government's antidumping duty choice in an asymmetric information framework where the foreign firm's cost is observed by the domestic firm, but not by the government. To induce truthful revelation, the government can design a tariff schedule, contingent on...

This paper characterizes analytically the optimal tariff of a large one-sector economy with monopolistic competition and firm heterogeneity in general equilibrium, thereby extending the small-country results of Demidova and Rodriguez-Clare (JIE, 2009) and the homogeneous firms framework of Gros...

Following the Brent Spar controversy, the OSPAR countries reached a unanimous agreement in 1998 for the future rules for disposal of petroleum installations. The vast majority of existing offshore installations will be re-used or returned to shore for recycling or disposal. For installations...

Calling upon both positive and normative economics, we attempt to characterize the issues at stake in the current international negotiations on climatic change. We begin (section 2) by reviewing the main features of the Protocol. Then (Section 3), we identify by means of an elementary economic...