We study the impact of import protection on relationship-specific investments, organizational choice and welfare. We show that a tariff on intermediate inputs can improve social welfare through mitigating hold-up problems. It does so if it discriminates in favor of the investing party, thereby improving its bargaining position. On the other hand, a tariff can prompt inefficient organizational c...

A narrative integrative review on the evidence for hoof trimming found 16 articles on efficacy, frequency, and associations with behavior and physiologic parameters. Review of these studies revealed (1) hoof trimming is associated with behavior and physiologic changes; (2) increasing the frequency of hoof trimming seems to decrease the incidence of hoof lesions; (3) there is limited research to...

In this paper, we show that a price-regulated market for tradable permits improves upon an unregulated market and upon an emission tax, when there is uncertainty about abatement costs. We derive a scheme of open market operations that allows to achieve ex-post efficiency and analyze its effects on the expected profits of the regulated firms and the expected revenue of the regulator. For the cas...

This paper studies the consequences of opening asset markets more often for the properties of asset prices and social welfare. For all reasonable parameter values, increasing trading hours lowers average asset prices, increases unconditional asset price volatility at a given point in time, and decreases unconditional asset price volatility when averaged over the period of time that includes the...

In the past decades, the inappropriate subsidy policies in many nations have caused problems such as serious oversupply, fierce competition and subpar social welfare in the photovoltaic (PV) industry in many nations. There is a clear shortage in the PV industry literature regarding how dual supply chains compete and the key decision issues regarding the competition between dual PV supply chains...

This paper examines the economic consequences of tightening auditing standards. We recognize that both auditors’ incentives and expertise are relevant for audit effectiveness. On one hand, tighter auditing standards counter the misbehavior of rogue auditors. On the other hand, tighter standards restrict auditors’exercise of professional judgement, leads to auditors’compliance mentality, and red...

We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality risk reduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost-benefit analysis--i.e., the "value per statistical life" (VSL) approach-and various social welfare functions (SWFs). The SWFs are either utilitarian or prioritarian, applied to policy choice under risk in either an "ex post" or "...

When deciding how to weigh benefits to different groups, standard economic models assume that people focus on the final distribution of utility, health or whatever. Thus, an egalitarian is assumed to be an egalitarian in the outcome space. But what about egalitarianism in the gains space, such that people focus instead on how equally benefits are distributed? This paper reports on a study in wh...

The debate over the impact of government regulation on innovation in the United States is framed in the context of the gradual decline of economic regulation since the 1960s, and the gradual increase in social welfare regulation over the same period. Fueling much of the economic deregulation movement has been classical economic theory, which holds that regulation imposes a cost burden on firms,...

This paper investigates how the formation of larger buyers affects a supplier's profits and, by doing so, his incentives to undertake non-contractible activities. We first identify two channels of buyer power, which allows larger buyers to obtain discounts. We subsequently examine the effects of buyer power on the supplier's incentives and on social welfare. Contrary to some informal claims in ...