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.     

Corporate governance in Germany: The changing role of the banks

The article analyses the different channels ‐ industrial stakes, supervisory board mandates, proxy voting ‐ by which German banks can exert influence on industrial companies. The central thesis is that even where the banks have such influence they do not dominate the companies. A recent empirical study on the effects of the alleged bank dominance over industrial companies with detrimental effects on their performance is shown to contain major methodological mistakes. The relationship between banks and industry is undergoing some distinct changes. Banks have substantially reduced their industrial stakes as well as their representation on supervisory boards, which underlines that they are not striving for industrial leadership. Despite a clear trend in the German corporate sector to pay increasing attention to shareholder value and to provide more transparency in accounting, it seems premature to expect the German capital market, including the corporate governance system, to incorporate fully the Anglo‐Saxon model in the immediate future.