Contributions published at Finance (Alexander Wagner)

We use data on announced and actual exchange rate arrangements to ask which countries follow de facto regimes different from their de iure ones, that is, do not do what they say. Our results suggest that countries with poor institutional quality have difficulty in maintaining pegging and abandon it often. In contrast, many countries with relatively good institutions display fear of floating, that is, they manage more than announced, perhaps to signal their differences from those countries incapable of maintaining promises of monetary stability.

How should an organization’s center allocate resources to units under its control which are better informed? Even with conscientious productivity reviews, important information will remain asymmetrically held. If units value their own expenditures more than those of their peers, they will seek excess budgets and expenditures. Fortunately, budget authorities can infer productivities from units’ expenditure patterns across spending categories and over time. Optimal screening budgets reward more productive units with greater overall budgets. Such screening provides significant welfare gains over traditional fixed or reallocable budgets. Empirical results for a large electricity and infrastructure provider fit an important version of the model.

We develop and apply a new method for estimating the economic benefits of an environmental amenity. The method is based upon the notion of estimating the derived demand for a privately traded option to utilize an open access good. In particular, the demand for state fishing licenses is used to infer the benefits of recreational fishing. Using panel data on state fishing license sales and prices for the continental United States over a 15-year period, combined with data on substitute prices and demographic variables, a license demand function is estimated with instrumental variable procedures to allow for the potential endogeneity of administered prices. The econometric results lead to estimates of the benefits of a fishing license, and subsequently to the expected benefits of a recreational fishing day. In contrast with previous studies, which have utilized travel cost or hypothetical market methods, our approach provides estimates that are directly comparable across geographic areas. Our findings show substantial variation in the value of a recreational fishing day across geographic areas in the United States. This suggests that current practice of using benefits estimates from one part of the country in national or regional analyses may lead to substantial bias in benefits estimates.

Der Emissionshandel als Instrument der Umweltpolitik erlebt derzeit in Europa eine erste große Blüte. Bei dem infolge des Kyoto-Protokolls geschaffenen europäischen Treibhausgasemissionsmarkt soll eine Reduktion von (derzeit vor allem) Kohlendioxid-(CO 2 )-Emissionen möglichst kostengünstig erreicht werden. Dieser Artikel geht der Frage nach, ob und unter welchen Voraussetzungen bestimmte Tätigkeiten, die Marktteilnehmer - von den verpflichteten Unternehmen über Broker bis hin zu Privatpersonen - auf diesem "emerging market" ausüben, konzessionsbedürftig nach dem BWG oder WAG sein können. Mitentscheidend dafür ist der Rechtscharakter der Emissionszertifikate. Obwohl das Emissionszertifikategesetz (EZG) Emissionszertifikate als Waren definiert, spricht vieles für eine Qualifikation als Warenderivate.

null

The stability of the international financial system depends on the consistency of announcements, beliefs, and actions by countries and international organizations like the IMF. This article considers the first element in this trinity and analyzes the incentives of a rational policy maker to announce a fixed or flexible exchange rate regime. In a cross-sectional analysis for the 1990s, I find that countries with a non-functioning legal system, a low degree of the rule of law, high expropriation risk, low infrastructure quality and similar characteristics are more ikely to announce fixed exchange rates. This result is consistent with a theoretical argument about announcing a fixed regime as a signal of “goodness” to the international community.

Economists have confined the concept of "sustainability" to intertemporal distributional equity.We propose a broader definition, combining dynamic efficiency and intergenerational equity, and relate it to two concepts from neoclassical economics: potential Pareto-improvements and inter-personal compensation.

High-quality institutions of conflict management can serve to mitigate the negative effects of adverse external shocks and social conflict on long-run economic growth. But in addition to the benefits (production-enhancing cooperation), there are also costs (taxes and rent-seeking) of conflict-management institutions like corporatism and trust. We examine both positive and negative influences in the context of a simple growth model. Contrary to previous research, we predict a non-linear relationship between institutions and growth. The empirical evidence from a panel for the years 1961-1995 shows that neo-corporatism and trust have each had independent positive effects on long-run growth in the EU, suggesting that the diminishing product range of institutions has not yet been reached. Under an increasing size of government, however, both institutions lead to a dominating negative rent-seeking effect.