We model a labor market in which workers’ level of education might be a signal of skills. We show that whenever the wage premium for education increases over time – as it might happen under skill biased technological progress – the investment in education needed to sustain a separating...

In a game with positive externalities, such as e.g. the standard environmental externality game used in the analysis of international environmental agreements, the solutions having the property of coalitional internal stability, when they exist, are compared in this paper with the solutions with...

In this paper we analyze the negotiation strategy of the European Union regarding the formation of an international climate agreement for the post-2012 era. We use game theoretical stability concepts to explore incentives for key players in the climate policy game to join future climate...

International environmental agreements aiming at correcting negative externalities generated by transboundary pollution are difficult to achieve for many reasons. Important obstacles arise from asymmetry in costs and benefits, and instability may occur due to the fact that coalitions of...

The literature on the use of differential commodity taxes/subsidies and that on quantity controls to supplement income taxation have developed separately from each other. The purpose of this paper is to combine these two strands in the standard framework of optimal non-linear income taxation. We...

International environmental agreements aiming at correcting negative externalities generated by transboundary pollution are difficult to achieve for many reasons. Important obstacles arise from asymmetry in costs and benefits, and instability may occur due to the fact that coalitions of...

The literature on the use of Differencial commodity taxes/subsidies and that on quantity controls to supplement income taxation have developed separately from each other. The purpose of this paper is to combine these 2 strands in the standard framework of optimal non-linear income taxation.

This paper identifies the optimal two-period price sequence in the attempt for selling a good, with take-it-or-leave-it offers, when the seller faces ambiguity about the buyers' willingness to pay. If the first round fails, the seller updates its beliefs on the state of the market in accordance...

Studies of second-b est environmental regulation ofiden tical polluting agents have invariably ignored potentially welfare-improving asymmetric regulation by imposing equal regulatory treatment of identical firms at the outset. Yet, cost asymmetry between oligopoly firms may well give rise to...

I analyze a market where there is a homogeneous good, which quality is chosen, and therefore known, by a single producer. Consumers do not know the quality of the good but they use their acquaintances in order to obtain information about it. Information transmission exhibits decay and consumers...