Intellectual protection via patents and copyright provisions, among other mechanisms, has been defended on the grounds that, without it, intellectual works would not be produced in the first place. Consequently, the monopoly granted by the patents or the copyright was considered a second best. This rational has been challenged in recent times, as it did […]
Raluca et al . (2014) provide a survey of the economic studies regarding the performance of Fair Trade certifications. They focus on the coffee industry, by large the most important product under the Fair Trade label. In this article I summarize their main findings and conclusions. The aim of Fair Trade certification is to improve […]
In his book Climate Matters , John Broome (2012) examines climate change from the point of view of moral philosophy. Unlike many other essays that consider the ethics of social choice in this matter, Broome’s book contains some chapters that focus on the implications for individual ethics: “ Should you stop flying to distant places […]
In the first part of this series, I presented the rationale for government intervention in the health sector and, then, summarized the findings of Stabile and Thomson (2014) on the problems of financing and risk pooling in different health systems. In this second part I continue with the problems on demand, coverage decisions, evaluation and […]
Insurance markets are far from meeting the conditions that make competitive markets efficient. Here is an incomplete but illustrative list of problems in the case of health insurance: Externalities : my health quality affects me, but also affects people around me, like in the case of contagious diseases. Economic theory predicts that consumers will not […]
This is the English version of a section in Ferreira (2014) , a paper dedicated to overview the experiments in Industrial Organization that appeared in Revista de Economía Industrial, and is reproduced here with the permission of the journal. Until a couple of decades ago many of the so called natural monopolies were regulated through […]
This is the English version of a section in Ferreira (2014) , a paper dedicated to overview the experiments in Industrial Organization, to appear in Revista de Economía Industrial, and is reproduced here with the permission of the journal. The great majority of water collection and distribution in the world rely on a central authority […]
This is the English version of a section in Ferreira (2014) , a paper dedicated to overview the experiments in Industrial Organization, to appear in Revista de Economía Industrial, and is reproduced here with the permission of the journal. In 1994, the American FCC (Federal Communications Commission) decided to conduct an auction to allocate the […]
In Economics, an efficiency wage is defined as a wage above the equilibrium price paid to obtain a more efficient job from the employee. For this to be the case, there must be some sort of market failure that prevents the equilibrium from being efficient. One such a scenario occurs when there are some forms […]
Slonim et al . (2014) discuss the problems of blood allocation in different countries and suggest a mechanism that can improve it. The present article is a summary of their main ideas. In the wealthy countries blood is mostly supplied via voluntary donations. The way blood is collected varies from country to country. Some have […]