Although movements of capital, goods and services are growing in importance, workers movements are impeded by restrictive policies in rich countries. Such regulations carry substantial economic costs for developing countries, and prevent global inequality from declining. Even if rich countries are averse to global inequality, a single country lacks incentives to welcome additional migrants as i...

Welfare Migration in Europe and the Cost of a Harmonised Social Assistance The enlargement of the European Union has increased concerns about the role of generous welfare transfers in attracting migrants. This paper explores the issue of welfare migration across the 15 countries of the pre-enlargement Union and finds a significant but small effect of the generosity of welfare on migration decis...

A monopolist faces a partially uninformed population of consumers, interconnected through a directed social network. In the network, the monopolist offers rewards to informed consumers (influencers) conditional on informing uninformed consumers (influenced). Rewards are needed to bear a communication cost. We investigate the incentives for the monopolist to move to a denser network and the impa...

Many existing welfare programs (“work-first” programs) require participants to work, often in non-profit or public agencies, in exchange for cash benefits. Others (“job search-first” programs) emphasize private job-search and provide assistance in finding and retaining a durable employment. We study the optimal design of welfare programs when the principal/government cannot observe the agent’s ...

This short paper analyzes whether a federal transfer system can be designed to increase welfare, when state governments create political budget cycles to increase the likelihood of reelection. The results show how the federal government may announce a transfer scheme in advance for the post-election year that counteracts the welfare costs of political budget cycles. JEL Classification: D61, D72...

This paper investigates ethical aggregation of infinite utility streams by representable social welfare relations. We prove that the Hammond Equity postulate and other variations of it like the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle are incompatible with positive responsiveness to welfare improvements by every generation. The case of Hammond Equity for the Future is investigated too. JEL classificatio...

As the chances of a successful conclusion to the Doha Round of trade liberalization under the WTO become increasingly problematic, so the pace of negotiating local free trade agreements (FTAs) is increasing. According to the WTO report, countries in the Asia-Pacific region are “consolidating their drive towards regionalism at an accelerated pace”. After the trade agreements between China an...

Contracts that reference rivals have long been a focus of antitrust law and the subject of intense scholarly debate. This paper compares two such contracts, exclusive-dealing contracts and market-share contracts, in a model of naked exclusion. We discuss the different mechanisms through which each works and identify the fundamental tradeoff that arises: marketshare contracts are better at maxim...

This paper assesses the economic impacts of the Swiss climate policy formulated under the Kyoto Protocol; the impacts on the carbon price, the welfare cost, and trade effects are examined. Our analysis is based on a multi-sectoral and multi-regional, computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of the world economy (GEMINI-E3) which includes a representation of the Swiss economy. The model is use...

This paper discusses the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on market entry and welfare. It assumes that firms may enter markets in the first period as national firms only. In the second period, however, FDI is possible. The paper demonstrates that FDI reduces market entry because equilibrium profits in the second period decline with a decrease in the fixed cost of FDI. Therefore, compar...