We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that causes prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. This constrained suboptimality of competitive allocations might provide a rationale for economic policy in economies with externalities....

In this paper we extend the Lucas (1988) endogenous growth model to include sector-specific external effects and depreciation in both sectors. We derive analytically, the restrictions on the parameter space that are necessary and sufficient for the existence of balanced growth paths and equilibria. We demonstrate that in contrast to the original model, with the addition of an external effect an...

When scientists choose research projects with the highest expected value an externality can appear; slight variations on existing work will be selected in preference to new lines of research that would ultimately generate more value. New research enjoys two advantages: it is riskier and hence more likely to lead to high-value follow-up projects and it can generate more follow-up projects. Less ...

Sen’s libertarian paradox is ascribed to the inevitable conflict between the Pareto criterion and individuals’ rights to create negative externalities. Finite coalitions can effect exchanges of rights through Coaseian bargains in order to resolve inefficiencies due to local externalities. With a continuum of agents, however, finite coalitions are powerless to affect widespread externalities, ex...

Economic activities, both on the macro and micro level, often entail wide-spread externalities. This in turn leads to disputes regarding the compensation levels to the various parties affected. We propose a method of deciding upon the distribution of the gains (costs) of cooperation in the presence of externalities when forming the grand coalition is efficient. We show that any sharing rule sat...

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...

We apply the idea of evolution to a spatial model. Prisoners’ dilemmas or coordination games are played repeatedly within neighbourhoods where players do not optimise but instead copy successful strategies. Discriminative behaviour of players is introduced representing strategies as small automata, which can be in different states against different neighbours. Extensive simulations show that co...

An employer-employee panel is used to study whether the movement of workers across firms is a channel of unintended diffusion of R&D-generated knowledge. Somewhat surprisingly, hiring workers from others’ R&D labs to one’s own does not seem to be a significant spillover channel. Hiring workers previously in R&D to one’s non-R&D activities, however, boosts both productivity and profitability. Th...

Allowing for innovation dynamics in the software market, this paper studies the conditions under which standardization in the hardware market arises and persists over time. In the model, software firms repeatedly invest in quality upgrades, compete in the product market, and make exit as well as entry decisions. The results show that, in general, excess inertia does not occur. A platform become...