Voluntary Environmental Agreements and Competition Policy

Voluntary environmental agreements are oftensuspected to promote collusive practicesbetween participating firms. The paperaddresses the antitrust implications ofGermany's voluntary Dual Management System forPackaging Waste Collection and Recycling (DSD). It uses analytical tools of the economictheory of the firm to examine features ofDSD's governance structure that were oftenidentified to impede competition. While thepaper does not argue that DSD performs asefficiently as a hypothetical solution in amore competitive setting, it shows that thesefeatures have an economic rationale from theviewpoint of the theory of the firm. Thegeneral conclusion is that it is necessary tocarefully analyze the institutional fine-tuningof a voluntary agreement in order to derive theoverall impact stemming from a formal lack ofcompetition. A more case-to-case-oriented,institutional research approach could thereforefruitfully supplement model-driven, theoreticalanalyses of voluntary environmental agreementsand their effect on market competition.     

Environmental Policy in Open Economies and Monopolistic Competition

This paper analyses the implications of international trade for non-cooperative environmental policy in the case of local production externalities. A particular focus is on the potential effects of regulations on the variety of goods and the resulting international spillover caused by trade. A tougher domestic standard negatively affects the utility of the households abroad, since such a policy reduces their variety of imports (due to fewer domestic product inventions) or their consumption of each imported brand (due to higher import prices). Ignoring the negative spillover, non-cooperative governments implement inefficiently strict standards in equilibrium. In contrast to this clear-cut inefficiency result, the impact of international trade on the state of the environment is ambiguous.     

Optimal Tax Policy under Environmental Quality Competition

This paper studies the socially optimal emission and commodity tax policy when consumers are willing to pay a price-premium for environmentally friendlier variants of a commodity vertically differentiated in environmental quality. The first-best levels of quality can be obtained by a combination of a uniform ad valorem tax and an emission tax (or a subsidy for buying green products). The first-best emission tax is higher than the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality. Regardless of environmentally conscious consumers, if only one instrument is available, the second-best emission tax is equal to the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality. A uniform ad valorem tax increases welfare only if the social valuation of the positive externality associated with average environmental quality is low enough.     

Political Competition, Rent Seeking and the Choice of Environmental Policy Instruments

This paper investigates the impact of political lobbying on the choice of environmental policy instruments. It is argued that the prevalence of pollution emission standards over more efficient policy instruments may result from rent seeking behaviour. The model further predicts that when an emission standard is used to control pollution, rival political parties have an incentive to set the same standard. There is therefore a convergence of policies. Moreover, it is shown that emission taxes are more likely to be supported and proposed by political parties which represent environmental interest groups. This feature appears to accord with the observed support for environmental taxes by Green parties in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere.     

Cognitive Rules, Institutions, and Competition

Rules exert an important influence on rational individual behaviour. In economic analyses, two different types of rules occur that both induce rule-following behaviour. However, they are rarely distinguished. The differentiation of institutions (as interpersonal rules) and cognitive rules (as intrapersonal rules) allows for a clarification of substantial differences between the two types of rules, for example, concerning the incorporated knowledge and rule-persistence. Furthermore, the analysis of the interrelation of the two types of rules offers fruitful insights that still are not much explored in economics. The important dimensions to be considered are rule-harmony that stabilises institutional arrangements, and rule-conflict that induces pressure on persistent institutions. In this context, competition can be seen as a medium of interaction that allows individual agents to learn both about the behaviour of interacting agents and the nature and effects of the institutional framework. The integration of competition - as the core concept of economics - into the interplay of institutions and cognitive rules explores a missing point within the analysis of the economics of rules.     

WTO非违反之诉与竞争政策

竞争政策与贸易自由化政策存在相互促进和补充的关系,对竞争政策进行国际协调有助于WTO贸易自由化政策的推进.在WTO尚未明确是否将竞争政策纳入其多边贸易框架之前,不宜以非违反之诉的方式使WTO对竞争政策进行事实上的全面规范.     

Mass Media Competition, Political Competition, and Public Policy

If better informed voters receive favourable policies, then mass media will affect policy because mass media provide most of the information people use in voting. This paper models the incentives of the media to deliver news to different groups. The increasing-returns-to-scale technology and advertising financing of media firms induce them to provide more news to large groups, such as taxpayers and dispersed consumer interests, and groups that are valuable to advertisers. This news bias alters the trade-off in political competition and therefore introduces a bias in public policy. The paper also discusses the effects of broadcast media replacing newspapers as the main information source about politics. The model predicts that this change should raise spending on government programmes used by poor and rural voters.     

Political Competition, Rent Seeking and the Choice of Environmental Policy Instruments: Comment

In this comment, I analyze Damania's political economy model (Environmental and Resource Economics 13: 415–433, 1999), correcting some flaws and clarifying some ambiguities. I arguethat the political parties are identical at the outset of the game. Onlyafter the parties have chosen the instrument (standards or taxation) and thestrictness of environmental policy do the environmentalists and thepolluting firms know which party to support in the election campaign. Inequilibrium, both parties choose the same platform, so that both have anequal probability of winning the election.     

竞争、效仿与政策创新

本文描述和评论了政策创新文献,评估了他们的整体贡献。政策推广的研究来源于某种共享的信念,政策推广研究有变量研究和过程研究,它们之间是可以互相学习的。本文解释了在美国为什么有些州首先接受新的观念而其他的州却落在后面,论述了政策推广的内在决定因素和外在条件。     

垄断、竞争与市场规制：美国的经验与中国的实践

经济学上的垄断是指对市场的控制和干预,它包括企业垄断和政府垄断,垄断的危害极大,各国法律对其限制严格。我国现有的《反不正当竞争法》不足以限制垄断行为,尤其是政府经济垄断;美国《反托拉斯法》的经济与法律思想及其实施给我们提供了一个很好的参考模式,因此,借鉴美国的经验,修订和完善《反不正当竞争法》规范政府垄断行为,是建立完善的市场经济秩序的重要保证。     

Regulation,Local Monopolies and Spatial Competition

Many regulated industries involve an oligopoly market structure. We examine optimal incentive regulation for a duopoly model of spatial competition when firms have private cost information. Market structure is endogenous as regulation determines market segments for firms and output distribution across consumers in each firm's market. By varying the assignment of consumers to firms, a relatively more efficient firm can be rewarded with a larger market, thus reducing quantity incentive distortions. We derive the optimal policy, assess the impact of asymmetric information relative to full information, and examine extensions to allow for ex ante asymmetries in firm structure.     

Banking Competition,Risk and Regulation*

In a dynamic framework, commercial banks compete for customers by setting acceptance criteria for granting loans, while taking into account regulatory requirements. By easing its acceptance criteria a bank faces a trade‐off between attracting more demand for loans, thus making higher per‐period profits, and deterioration in the quality of its loan portfolio, thus tolerating a higher risk of failure. Our main results state that more stringent capital adequacy requirements lead banks to set stricter acceptance criteria, and that increased competition in the banking industry leads to riskier bank behaviour. It is shown that risk‐adjusted regulation is effective. In an extension of our basic model, we show that it may be beneficial for a bank to hold more equity than prescribed by the regulator, even though issuing equity is more expensive than attracting deposits.     

(In)Efficient Environmental Policy with Interacting Pollutants

Many environmental problems involve the transformation of multiple harmful substances into one or more damage agents much in the same way as a firm transforms inputs into outputs. Yet environmental management differs from a firm’s production in one important respect: while a firm seeks efficient input allocation to maximize profit, an environmental planner allocates abatement efforts to render the production of damage agents as inefficient as possible. We characterize a solution to the multiple pollutants problem and show that the optimal policy is often a corner solution, in which abatement is focused on a single pollutant. Corner solutions may arise even in well-behaved problems with concave production functions and convex damage and cost functions. Furthermore, even concentrating on a wrong pollutant may yield greater net benefits than setting uniform abatement targets for all harmful substances. Our general theoretical results on the management of flow and stock pollutants are complemented by two numerical examples illustrating the abatement of eutrophying nutrients and greenhouse gases.     

Economic Competition,Policy Interdependence,and Labour Rights

Extant scholarship treats national policies concerning labour rights as a function of economic factors and yet neglects influences of policies among economically competing states. Relying on the policy interdependence theory, this study argues that labour rights policy in a state is dependent on its economic competitors’ labour policy decisions. It specifically maintains that the intensifying competition for foreign direct investment and exports as well as against imports channels negative externalities of deteriorating labour protection in competing states which drives expansive downward policy mimicking and leads to a global decline in labour rights – a race to the bottom. Utilising spatial econometric technique to analyse a new data on labour rights for the period 1994–2009, it finds that labour rights practices are interdependent among economic competitors and experience global deteriorations; whereas labour rights laws remain largely independent due to high policy and reputational costs of lowering them and show more fluctuations.     

Trade, Vertical Production Chain, and Competition Policy

The authors build a trade model that renders tractable the process in which imperfect competition in a country's downstream sector affects the rest of the world through international trade. For this purpose, internationally traded goods are viewed as middle products in the vertical chain of production, in which middle products are produced upstream and transformed into final consumption goods downstream. Suppression of competition in a country's downstream sector may serve as a beggar-thy-neighbor policy, increasing that country's own utility while reducing that of its trading partner countries.