infonet-economy

We consider a regulator's choice between environmentally motivated emissions taxes and output taxes. We investigate how the optimal instrument depends on the monitoring cost function, the firm's technology, and on social preferences regarding output and environmental quality. Pure emissions taxes are usually not optimal with monitoring costs. Pure output taxes are optimal…

This paper proposes the following incentive scheme for the private provision of public goods: government should reward and penalize deviations from the mean contribution by an appropriate factor. This makes efficient contribution individually rational even if individuals see through the government budget constraint.

The growing demand for long-term care (LTC) causes the relationship between children and their parents to gain increased importance for society. Parents may create incentives for children to provide LTC through bequests, or they may purchase LTC insurance. While these instruments have been analyzed separately in the literature, this article shows that optimal LTC insurance must be…

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel for 1984-90, the author analyzes the entrance of young individuals into the German labor market, comparing the experience of apprenticeship graduates to that of graduates from universities, full-time vocational schools, and secondary schools. Apprentices experienced fewer unemployment spells in the transition to their first full-time…

We use wehn-issued transactions data to assess the Treasury's current experiment with uniform auctions, suggesting a higher information release, which should reduce pre-auction uncertainty and the winner's curse. Under uniform auctions, wehn-issued volatility falls after the auction and again after the outcome announcement. The pattern is the opposite for discriminatory…

This paper describes three insolvency codes, those of the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, and the United States (US) and compares their efficiency against a number of benchmarks. These codes have been chosen because they cover a broad spectrum of debtor- and creditor-oriented insolvency procedures. The paper also compares the plans of distressed firms' reorganizations both within…

Tone onset and normal tone offset in Nd tasks are formally similar to the S1 and S2 events in a CNV task requiring perceptual discrimination (tone duration) for designated tones. If the Nd thus reflects more than mere stimulus selection, increasing the duration of all tones should lengthen the Nd wave. Eight subjects participated to three Nd tasks, with short tones of 50, 150, and…

Because of the public good character of global emissions it is difficult to implement reduction
targets as formulated at Toronto or Rio. This paper presents a simple mechanism for inducing
efficient contributions to the reductions of emissions as a non-cooperative equilibrium. The
world is partitioned into groups of countries, and then each country is taxed or…

This paper employs ICP expenditure data to investigate the relationship between income and product diversity. It turns out that per-capita income has a strong positive impact on the number of products consumed at a non-negligible level in a country, and a significant negative impact on the concentration of consumers' expenditure across different goods categories. Inequality in…