The Externalities
In: Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization, S. 154-176
In: Peace by Peaceful Means: Peace and Conflict, Development and Civilization, S. 154-176
In: Capitalism, nature, socialism: CNS ; a journal of socialist ecology, Band 34, Heft 2, S. 40-56
ISSN: 1548-3290
The book offers practical and theoretical insights in regional externalities. Regional externalities are a specific subset of externalities that can be defined as externalities where space plays a dominant role. This class of externalities can be divided into three categories: (1) externalities related to mobility and transport, (2) external economies of scale and cluster effects, and (3) spatial environmental externalities. The book offers examples of the above mentioned categories.
In: Cowen, Nick and Eric Schliesser, 'Novel externalities', Public Choice (Forthcoming)
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In: Public choice
ISSN: 1573-7101
AbstractGovernments are expected to tackle externalities such as pollution, epidemics and environmental catastrophes, but whether and how governments themselves generate externalities is a question equally important for exploring socially beneficial policies and institutional reforms. The problem with defining government externalities is that governments, through regulation and distribution, inevitably allocate costs and benefits asymmetrically due to preference heterogeneity in society. This problem also concerns the rules and rights governing market transactions, blurring the boundaries between market failure and government failure. In this paper, I define government externalities as costs passed on us by government actions taken outside a decision-making system in which we participate as insiders. Views about what being an insider is differ. Some will be content with democratic citizenship in majoritarian decision-making processes. Others may subscribe to Buchanan and Tullock's liberal and more demanding normative theory based on constitutional consent. In either case, I argue, there will be externalities generated by clientelism, namely informal deals between politicians and special interests for the distribution of benefits that occur outside, and in violation of, the formal norms of participation. These are complex externalities, infiltrating policymaking and distorting institutions governing the operation of markets too. They create government failure on the same grounds that some market externalities are considered market failure: (a) the costs fall on outsiders and (b) negatively affect the terms for the production and exchange of goods and services. Government externalities influence both governance and markets simultaneously and illustrate the limits of what institutional design can constrain or achieve.
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Working paper
In: Public Choice
Novel externalities are social activities for which the emerging cost (or benefit) of the spillover is unknown and must be discovered. Negative novel externalities have regained international salience following the COVID-19 pandemic. Such cases frequently are invoked as evidence of the limits of liberal political economy for dealing with public emergencies. Through a re-reading of classical political economy with the modern state's confrontation with infectious disease in mind, we defend the comparative efficacy of liberal democracy against authoritarian alternatives for coping with these social problems. Effective responses to novel externalities require producing and updating trustworthy public information and an independent scientific community to validate and interpret it. Those epistemic capacities are prevalent in liberal democratic regimes with multiple sources of political power, an independent civil society, and practices of academic freedom. Our analysis highlights the theoretical value of polycentrism and self-governance beyond their more familiar role, of increasing accountability and competition in the provision of local public goods, towards facilitating effective national policy.
In: Public choice
ISSN: 1573-7101
AbstractNovel externalities are social activities for which the emerging cost (or benefit) of the spillover is unknown and must be discovered. Negative novel externalities have regained international salience following the COVID-19 pandemic. Such cases frequently are invoked as evidence of the limits of liberal political economy for dealing with public emergencies. Through a re-reading of classical political economy with the modern state's confrontation with infectious disease in mind, we defend the comparative efficacy of liberal democracy against authoritarian alternatives for coping with these social problems. Effective responses to novel externalities require producing and updating trustworthy public information and an independent scientific community to validate and interpret it. Those epistemic capacities are prevalent in liberal democratic regimes with multiple sources of political power, an independent civil society, and practices of academic freedom. Our analysis highlights the theoretical value of polycentrism and self-governance beyond their more familiar role, of increasing accountability and competition in the provision of local public goods, towards facilitating effective national policy.
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In: Final versio published in Public Choice (2022)
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In: University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Working Paper No. 392
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In: European journal of political economy, Band 26, Heft 2, S. 176-184
ISSN: 1873-5703
The efficiency of mechanisms to control activities with negative externalities is limited by uncertainty about the social costs of these activities. Existing regulatory mechanisms require negotiated compromise about either the prices of activities or the levels to be tolerated. We offer a mechanism in which today's price of an activity is a market-based estimate of future informed beliefs about the social cost of today's activity. This can be expected to increase the precision and accuracy of estimates of the right price and to make it likely that agents will base their decisions on better estimates of the harm they cause. [Copyright Elsevier B.V.]
In: European Corporate Governance Institute - Law Working Paper No. 603/2021
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According to the previous literature on hiring, ?rms face a trade-off when deciding on external recruiting: From an incentive perspective, external recruiting is harmful since admission of external candidates reduces internal workers' career incentives. However, if external workers have high abilities hiring from outside is bene?cial to improve job assignment. In our model, external workers do not have superior abilities. We show that external hiring can be pro?table from a pure incentive perspective. By opening its career system, a ?rm decreases the incentives of its low-ability workers. The incentives of high-ability workers can increase from a homogenization of the pool of applicants. Whenever this effect dominates, a ?rm prefers to admit external applicants. If vacancies arise simultaneously, ?rms face a coordination problem when setting wages. If ?rms serve the same product market, weaker ?rms use external recruiting and their wage policy to offset their competitive disadvantage.
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In: Against the Personification of Democracy : A Lacanian Critique of Political Subjectivity