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This paper explains how, in the context of incomplete coordination among all countries, unilateral policies that might at first sight seem pro-green could actually turn out to harm the global environment. The free-riding motives and the difficulty of reaching an effective international environmental agreement are reviewed. As a first step, the various channels that lead to carbon leakage in static models of open economies are identified, and some simulation results are reported. This is complemented by a review of the possibility of green paradox outcomes in dynamic open-economy models with an exhaustible resource exploited by far-sighted firms. It is shown that border tax adjustments can lead to a green paradox outcome. Directions for future research are suggested.

This paper surveys the development of the theory of endogenous growth, with special emphasis on models that deal with the interactions between trade and growth. A unified framework is presented and is shown to contain many models as special cases. International factor mobility is also dealt with in the context of trade and growth.

We consider an economy in which some taxpayers behave in a Kantian way in their donation behavior while others are Nash players. A Kantian taxpayer holds the norm that any suggested deviation from a proposed equilibrium profile would be adopted by him only if when all members of their community adopted the same deviation, they would all achieve a higher level of welfare. In contrast, a Nash player follows the individual rationality criterion: He would deviate if, assuming all others do not deviate, he would improve his own payoff. We show that if all taxpayers are Nash players, then there is an efficiency-inducing tax credit scheme for charitable contributions. In contrast, if all taxpayers are Kantian, the optimal tax credit for charity is zero. If both types of taxpayers co-exist, and the government does not know who is of what type, then it is not possible for the government to induce the first-best outcome, but it must rely on a second-best tax-credit scheme.

How do economic agents manage expected shifts in regimes? How do they try to influence or prevent the arrival of such shifts? This paper provides a selective survey of the analysis of regime shifts from an economic view point, with particular emphasis on the use of the tech-niques of optimal control theory and differential games. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives an overview of the concepts of regime shifts, thresholds, and tipping points. Section 3 shows how unknown tipping points affect the optimal current policy of decision makers, with or without ambiguity aversion. Section 4.s focus is on political regime shifts in a two-class economy: how the elite may try to prevent revolution by using policy instruments such as repression, redistribution, and gradual democratization. Section 5 reviews models of dynamic games in resource exploitation involving regime shifts and thresholds. Section 6 reviews some studies of regime shifts in industrial organization theory, with focus on R&D races, including efforts to sabotage rivals in order to prevent entry. Section 7 reviews games of regime shifts when players can manage a Big Push. Section 8 discusses some directions for future research.

This paper is a brief review of the literature on contests, with focus on rent-seeking. A fairly general contest model is presented. We show that the Tullock contest model and the first-prize sealed-bid auction model are obtained as special cases. Some important modifications of the basic model are reviewed: hierarchical rent-seeking, rent-seeking under risk aversion, insecure rents, sabotage in rent-seeking contests, contest design, commitment and endogenous order of moves, and dynamic rent-seeking. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]

AbstractWe consider a dynamic model of an industry consisting of a few large firms, which can manipulate the market outcome, and a mass of small enterprises, each of which has a negligible impact on the market. The production costs of the respective firms depend on the stock of knowledge capital, which accumulates over time through research and development (R &D) investment made by large firms. The model is a variant of the differential game of voluntary provision of public goods, but in contrast to previous studies, we focus on the interaction between market competition and dynamic game outcomes. We derive both open-loop and Markov-perfect Nash equilibria. There exists a unique open-loop Nash equilibrium. By contrast, depending on the parameters of the model, there can be two linear Markov-perfect Nash equilibria. We also examine the short- and long-run effects of a change in the number of large firms. An increase in the number of large firms unambiguously harms both types of firms in the short run but may benefit them in the long run. In the open-loop Nash equilibrium, the relationship between the number of large firms and the steady-state stock of knowledge capital is inverted-U shaped. Concerning the Markov-perfect Nash equilibria, the effect of increased competition from large firms depends on the specific feedback strategy chosen in equilibrium.

This paper develops a two-country model of intraindustry trade with trade costs, which can be reduced by public investment in an international infrastructure capital, the stock of which accumulates over time. Depending on the trade costs and international distribution of manufac-turing firms, equilibrium patterns of trade are determined, and national welfare in each country is affected by these trade patterns. Taking the relationship between trade costs and national welfare into consideration, the governments carry out a dynamic game of public investment. We show that the dynamic equilibrium of the policy game may exhibit history dependency; if the initial stock of international infrastructure is smaller (larger) than a certain level, the infrastructure stock decreases (increases) over time, and the world economy will end up in autarky (two-way free trade) in the long-run. We also show that international cooperation is beneficial in the sense that it may enable the world economy to escape from a "low development trap."