Robert Tollison and operationalizing public choice

In this tribute to Robert Tollison, I will outline his contributions to the development of public choice. I focus on Tollison’s work on rent-seeking, the political economy of reform, and the rules level of analysis in sports economics. Throughout his career, Tollison brilliantly figured out ways to take insights from price theory and public choice theory and operationalize them using multiple methods of empirical analysis, including historical interpretation and statistical testing.     

A Different Carbon Tax: The Sustainable Green Tariff

Two heated current political arguments focus on carbon taxes and tariffs. This essay will develop an argument for linking carbon emissions with tariffs, through a tax on goods entering a country based on the method of transport and distance traveled, rather than based on the country of origin or category of the product. The result would be to encourage more sustainable local production, to reduce currently externalized costs of carbon emissions, to generate new tax revenues to fund reductions in regressive social insurance taxes, and to provide benefits for those adversely affected by carbon emissions.     

Appeal rate and caseload: evidence from civil litigation in Korea

Courts of modern democratic societies have generally implemented appeal procedures to correct potential errors in ruling. However, considering the time and effort that both litigants spend, availability of an appeal cannot be better than reaching the correct judgment in the original case. This difficulty raises the policy issue of how to reduce the rate of appeals and improve welfare of litigants. In this paper, we assert that lower caseloads allow judges to expend more time and effort on each case, contributing to lower appeal rates. Analysis of court-level data from Korea corroborates our inference.     

生物银行运作中的知识产权问题探析

全球范围内,日益增多的生物银行为生命科技研究和转化医学提供研究资源以及合作平台。以生物银行所存储的人类遗传材料和遗传数据进行研究时,由于涉及到人类遗传材料提供者、生物银行、研究资助者和研究者等多方主体,研究成果的知识产权保护范围、权利归属、利益分享等议题变得更加复杂。知识产权法律和政策关于上述议题的立场对于生物银行的建置与运作具有关键意义。生物银行自身亦应从制定知识产权管理规范、在材料转让协议或数据获取协议中对利益分享进行约定、推动人类遗传数据共享、探索"开源专利"模式等方面着手,在实践中探寻适宜的知识产权保护和利益分享机制。