Tax coordination with different preferences for public goods: Conflict or harmony of interest?

The paper analyzes strategic commodity taxation in a model with trade in a single private good that is simultaneously imported by consumers of a high-tax country and exported by its producers. Conditions for the existence of a Nash equilibrium are given, and an asymmetry is introduced through different preferences for public goods. Two tax coordination measures are discussed—a minimum tax rate and a coordinated increase in the costs of cross-border shopping. It is shown that tax coordination generally benefits the high-tax country while the low-tax country will gain only if the intensity of tax competition is high in the initial equilibrium or if governments are pricesensitive toward the effective marginal costs of public good supply.     

Tax competition,tax coordination and tax harmonization: The effects of EMU

There is little doubt that the step towards a monetary union in Europe will increase both the distorionary effects of existing differences in national tax systems and the intensity of tax competition for internationally mobile commodity and factor tax bases. This paper discusses selected issues of commodity and capital tax coordination that are likely to be affected by monetary unification. Starting from the distortive present scheme of value-added taxation in Europe we first analyze the effects of a switch to a general origin-based VAT as a way to maintain national tax rate autonomy over this important tax base. While an origin-based VAT would neither distort trade flows — both within the EU and with third countries — nor investment decisions in the long-run, its short-run effects are likely to be severe in the absence of exchange rate flexibility. In the field of capital taxation the focus switches to the feasibility of regional harmonization measures when there is no cooperation with the rest of the world. We argue that in a monetary union the mobility costs of capital will be significantly lower within the EU as compared to outside investments. This provides an efficiency argument for minimum source taxes on both interest income and corporate profits even if cooperation with third countries is infeasible.     

The Impact of Equity-preferences on the Stability of International Environmental Agreements

This paper uses a coalition formation model to explore how equity considerations affect countries’ cooperation on global environmental issues, e.g. on climate change. When developing countries are exempted from obligations to reduce their emissions, I find that opening them for abatement projects financed by industrialized countries changes the incentives to cooperate in a way which can increase emissions and decrease welfare. Equity- concerns in industrialized countries regarding the difference between their per capita emission levels and those of developing countries lead to increased abatement but do not qualitatively change the incentives to cooperate. Inequality-aversion with respect to differences to abatement targets across industrialized countries generally induces larger coalition sizes and stricter abatement. Here, the inclusion of developing countries improves upon the prospects of cooperation.     

Climate Change and the Irreversibility Effect – Combining Expected Utility and MaxiMin

This paper analyzes decisions on emissions of a stock pollutant under uncertaintyin a two period model. Decisions are based on a weighted average of expected utility (EU) and the MaxiMin criterion. I first show that more weight on the worst case (less weight on EU) may lead to increased first period emissions. The effect of learning possibilities on emissions is not clear in general, but depends qualitatively on the weight given to MaxiMin: For the quadratic utility case, considering prospective learning increases today's abatement effort, i.e. the irreversibility effect holds, if the weight on EU is small. This contrasts standard results on the irreversibility effect for EU which translates to small weights on MaxiMin. There is, however, the possibility of a negative value of learning. It is shown that the irreversibility effect holds if and only if thevalue of learning is negative. Consequences for the applicability of generalized EU-MaxiMin are discussed.     

Economic development by the creation of new sectors

The basic theme underlying this paper is qualitative change taking place during economic development. These changes in the composition of the economic system should become one of the most important variables in models of economic growth and development. Our knowledge of the relationship between economic development and qualitative change, however, is still very limited. This paper attempts to shed light on some important aspects of the role played by qualitative change in economic development, by laying the foundations of a model in which changes in the composition of the economic system are endogenously generated by the evolution of the system itself and, in turn, affect its future development. The model has a strong Schumpeterian flavour in that the first entrepreneur entering a market enjoys a temporary monopoly. This temporary monopoly is eroded by the entry of imitators, that gradually increases the intensity of competition. The saturation is reinforced as the demand for what was a new product comes to be satisfied. In this way the adjustment gap initially created by the innovation is eliminated transforming a niche into a mature market, which becomes one of the routines of the economic system. As soon as a sector becomes saturated there is an increasing inducement for incumbent firms to exit and to create a new niche, where once more they will have a temporary monopoly. To put it in another, slightly different, form, we can say that economic development is a process in which new activities emerge, old ones disappear, the weight of all economic activities and their patterns of interaction change.JEL Classification: O0, O12; O30Correspondence to: Pier Paolo Saviotti     

When and why? A critical survey on coordination failure in the laboratory

Coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria have attracted major attention over the past two decades. Two early path-breaking sets of experimental studies were widely interpreted as suggesting that coordination failure is a common phenomenon in the laboratory. We identify the major determinants that seem to affect the incidence, and/or emergence, of coordination failure in the lab and review critically the existing experimental studies on coordination games with Pareto-ranked equilibria since that early evidence emerged. We conclude that there are many ways to engineer coordination successes.      

Private monitoring in auctions

We study infinitely repeated first-price auctions in which a bidder only learns whether or not he won the object. While repetition of the stage-game equilibrium is the unique Nash equilibrium in public strategies, with patient bidders there are simple Nash equilibria in private strategies that improve on bid rotation. Sequential rationality is appropriately captured by essentially perfect Bayesian equilibrium (EPBE), which ignores behavior after irrelevant histories. Our main result is the construction of EPBEa that improve upon bid rotation. Assuming symmetry, the exclusionary schemes of Skrzypacz and Hopenhayn [Tacit collusion in repeated auctions, J. Econ. Theory 114 (2004), 153–169], including asymptotically efficient ones, are supported as EPBEa.     

Fiscal federalism and the composition of public investment in Europe

We analyse the determinants of the composition of public investment in Europe, with a special focus on the role of fiscal decentralisation. The results suggest that fiscal decentralisation boosts economically productive public investment, notably infrastructure, and curbs the relative share of economically less productive investment, such as recreational facilities. While not readily reconcilable with the traditional theory of fiscal federalism, these findings can be interpreted in terms of the literature on fiscal competition, with not only tax rates but also the quality of public expenditure weighing in firms' location decisions.