infonet-economy

In recent years the benefits of WTO membership has been called into question, notably in the context of discussions on WTO accessions. Previously it was widely thought that better access to the markets of existing WTO members was the quid pro quo for adopting commitments to reform domestic policies, including border measures. Here we revisit this matter and do so by focusing on the...

Employing an approach devised by Goldberg and Knetter (1999), we estimate whether European exporters exercised market power in selected East Asian markets during 1989- 2004. We find that in one-third of product lines considered here European firms exercised market power in East Asian markets for manufactured goods. Exporters from the United Kingdom were able to pass-through exchange...

This paper analyzes the likely economic consequences of a specific proposal for corporate income tax reform in Switzerland that is based on the recent ERU (2001) report. The proposal includes a partial dividend tax relief, more effective taxation of capital gains, and a property tax reduction, all relating to qualified stakes in corporate firms. Based on an analytical and...

"This paper extends the convergence result on Bayesian learning in Kalai and Lehrern(1993a, 1993b) to a class of games where players have a payoff function continuous for the product topology. Provided that 1) every player maximizes her expected payoff against her own beliefs, 2) every player updates her beliefs in a Bayesian manner, and 3) prior beliefs other players’...

World governance today is characterized by international organizations lacking democratic legitimacy and control by the citizens they claim to represent. They are also criticized for being inefficient. This leads to violent protests and to NGOs having great influence. To address these problems, we propose international governance base on the democratic idea of citizen participation:...

In small groups norm enforcement is provided by mutual punishment and reward. In large societies we have enforcement institutions. This paper shows how such institutions can emerge as a decentralized equilibrium. In a first stage, individuals invest in a public enforcement technology. This technology generates a sanctioning system whose effectiveness depends on the aggregate amount...