Consumption, production, and investment decisions of individuals, households, and firms often affect people not directly involved in the transactions. Sometimes these indirect effects are tiny. But ...

The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics begins its article on public goods and externalities with the statement that “most economic arguments for government intervention are based on the idea that the ...

We study the optimal design of subsidies in an equilibrium setting, where the decisions of individual recipients impose externalities on one another. We apply the model to the case of post-Katrina ...

Neal Urwitz is a vice president at Antenna Group, a public relations firm working with companies combating the climate crisis. Back in college, I thought positive economic externalities – i.e., when ...

There are differences between private returns or costs and the costs or returns to society as a whole Consumption, production, and investment decisions of individuals, households, and firms often ...