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Full-Text Articles in Business
Toward A Total-Cost Approach To Environmental Instrument Choice, Daniel H. Cole, Peter Z. Grossman
Toward A Total-Cost Approach To Environmental Instrument Choice, Daniel H. Cole, Peter Z. Grossman
Scholarship and Professional Work - Business
Much of the theoretical literature on environmental instrument reflects a normative presumption that only "economic" instruments, such as effluent taxes or tradable quotas, can produce an efficient outcome. Other potential alternatives, such as non-tradable quotas or more general Pigovian taxes are ruled out as inherently inefficient. Moreover, most of the literature relies on an important but unwarranted presumption: that cost and benefit functions, although they may be subject to uncertainty, are identical regardless of the regime that is chosen; that is price and quota systems are assumed to face the same cost and benefit curves with the same expected values. …
The Meaning Of Property Rights: Law Versus Economics? , Daniel H. Cole, Peter Z. Grossman
The Meaning Of Property Rights: Law Versus Economics? , Daniel H. Cole, Peter Z. Grossman
Scholarship and Professional Work - Business
Property rights are fundamentals to economic analysis. There is, however, no consensus in the economic literature about what property rights are. Economists define them variously and inconsistently, sometimes in ways that deviate from the conventional understandings of legal scholars and judges. This article explores ways in which definitions of property rights in the economic literature diverge from conventional legal understandings, and how those divergences can create interdisciplinary confusion and bias economic analyses. Indeed, some economists' idiosyncratic definitions of property rights, if used to guide policy, could lead to suboptimal economic outcomes.