This paper considers education investment and public education policy in closed and open economies with an extortionary government. The extortionary government in a closed economy chooses an education policy in order to overcome a hold-up problem of time-consistent taxation similar to benevolent governments. The two types of government differ in their education policies if highly productive lab...

This paper studies an overlapping generations model with selfish agents, natural resources and human capital externalities. The initial result is to quantify the economic effects of intergenerational transfers by comparing a complete markets allocation with transfers to an allocation without transfers due to incomplete markets. The core contribution is then to show that a higher resource regene...

Among environmental economists instrument choice has tended to come down to the task of ’getting the prices right’. Command-and-control interventions were viewed with suspicion. Recently, behavioral economics has revealed undesired interactions between price regulation and intrinsic motivation. We contribute by experimentally testing direct and persistence effects of taxes and command-and-contr...

We introduce public spending, financed through income taxation, in the Ramsey model with heterogeneous agents. Public spending as a source of welfare generates more complex dynamics. In contrast to previous contributions focusing on similar models but with wasteful public spending, limit cycles through Hopf bifurcation and expectation-driven fluctuations appear if the degree of capital-labor su...

We analyse congestion pricing in a road and rail network, where the two modes are imperfect substitutes. On the road there is bottleneck congestion; in each train there is crowding congestion. We model two dimensions of preference heterogeneity, where these two dimensions have opposite effects on the welfare impact of congestion pricing and lead to different distributional effects. The distribu...

This paper has a twofold objective. First, we develop a new method to assess the monetary value for individuals of external effects. The method makes use of an ordinal index of life satisfaction as scored by individual respondents who are subjected in varying intensity to the external effect. Our second objective is to assess, with this method, to what extent noise nuisance effects around Amste...

Previous research on landowner willingness to retire land into the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is based on cross-sectional data prior to 2002. Using enrollment data on a CRP subprogram from 1998 to 2010 we find that incentives matter more for pasture than cropland, and we find that counties producing cattle respond more strongly to current incentives. We also see an idiosyncratic lack of...

Taking advantage of the structure of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA), we study the tradeoff between efficiency and equity associated with different levels of discretionary power when delegating regulatory authority to lower levels of government. Exploiting an instrumental variables approach, we provide evidence that the benefits of the 1990 CAAA were highly localized and accrued dispro...

We consider the joint effect of profit and Pigouvian taxation in a model of imperfect competition. We show that, when both profit taxation and Pigouvian taxation/subsidy are used, the former is no longer neutral. The two fiscal tools are substitutes, and for any profit taxation rate there exists a unique Pigouvian tax that entails the first best outcome as an equilibrium. Our analysis therefore...

IGF-I and IGF-II are potent mitogens, postulated to exert autocrine/paracrine effects on growth regulation in human lung cancer. Their proliferative effects are modulated by IGF-binding proteins (IGFBPs), which are found in conditioned medium (CM) of lung cancer cell lines. The biological role of the IGFBPs, which are ontogenetically and hormonally regulated, is not fully understood. Both inhib...