The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 has focused considerable attention on the potential liability and the operating conduct of big oil companies. This paper shows that limiting the ability of a company to insure and diversify its risks creates incentives to internalize the welfare effects of catastrophic events, leading to a welfare improvement. We model an economy with complete financia...

Recent studies on the so-called double dividend hypothesis find that environmental tax swaps exacerbate the costs of the tax system and therefore do not produce a double dividend. We extend these models by incorporating a fixed-factor in the production of the polluting good and, therefore, allowing Ricardian rents to be generated in the economy. In this setting, an environmental tax reform with...

Article history: Received 1 April 2009 Received in revised form 3 December 2010 Accepted 3 December 2010 Available online xxxx This paper considers the effects of voluntary international environmental protocols on emissions, in particular the effect of the 1985 Helsinki Protocol and the 1994 Oslo Protocol on the reduction of sulphur oxides. The analysis employs panel data from 30 European count...

This paper studies generic properties of Markov Perfect equilibrium of coalitional bargaining games. We show that in almost all games (except in a set of measure zero of the parameter space) the equilibrium is locally unique and stable, and comparative statics analysis are welldefined and can be performed using standard calculus tools. Global uniqueness does not hold in general, but the number ...

Fixed-path methods (FPMs) were introduced to manage situations where several individuals jointly operate a single technology (see [4]). In the production context, they consist in allocating marginal increments of output according to a proportions vector which changes along an arbitrary path. While very appealing from an incentives viewpoint under diminishing marginal returns, the asymmetry of t...

When n agents decide to pool their private, decreasing returns technologies, single-path methods are a natural way to share joint output because of their strong incentives properties (Friedman, 2002). They are a non-anonymous generalization of the serial rule (Moulin and Shenker, 1992) sharing a production function along a prespeci…ed path. We show that only one of these methods satis…es volunt...

In many matching problems, it is natural to consider that agents may have preferences not only over the set of potential partners but over the whole matching. Once such externalities are considered, the set of stable matchings will depend on what agents believe will happen if they deviate. Sasaki and Toda (1996, J. of Econ. Theory, 70, 93) have examined the existence of stable matchings when th...

This paper revisits the economic analysis of contract law for a setting of cooperative investments. While Che and Chung (1999) have shown that expectation damages perform rather poorly, the present paper argues that this negative result follows from their impicit assumption of unilateral expectation damages. Yet, the very nature of cooperative investments gives rise to the possibility that both...

A combined spectroscopic method utilizing surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) and infrared reflection–absorption spectroscopy (IRRAS) has been employed to study the structural complexities of a model bilayer system. These two vibrational spectroscopic techniques offer complementary information, and when used in concert, present an extremely powerful tool for the structural elucidation of u...