To Have To Do With The Law: An Essay

This is an experimental text with three voices. The first one is an autoethnographic study of being called on jury service at the Old Bailey, London. The second is a theoretical voice, analysing the theory of the lawscape as I have developed it in my writings, in combination with issues about atmospherics, enclosures, control of bodies and spaces, and temporalities of law. The third voice operates as commentary on the other two and the whole chapter as such, offering an antilogos to the traditional understanding of essay writing, especially for law students but also for academics. This last voice suggests the disruption of the flow of textuality in order for materiality to flood in

Choosing Club Membership under Tax Competition and Free Riding

We study the choice of club membership, when member-countries’ national governments set their tax policies non-cooperatively. Federal policy (in the form of club membership) has a higher constitutional status than national policies (in the form of income tax rates). This allows federal policy to reduce the inefficiencies arising from uncoordinated national policies. We show that equilibrium membership decreases with any factors that generate Nash-type inefficiencies; growing capital mobility is one such factor. In the particular case in which these inefficiencies take the form of tax competition for mobile tax bases and free riding on other countries’ contribution to international public goods, one can rationalize the formation of very small economic unions only. The normative result is that union enlargement requires a switch from uncoordinated to coordinated national fiscal policies.clubs, capital mobility, federalism

The Role of Government in Anti-Social Redistributive Activities

It is known that anti-social redistributive activities (rent seeking, tax evasion, corruption, violation of property rights, delay of socially beneficial reforms, etc) hurt the macroeconomy. But it is less known what is the role of government size as a determinant of such activities. We use data from 64 counties (both developed and developing) in 5-year periods over 1980-2000. As a measure of anti-social activities, we use the ICRG index; as a measure of government size, we use the government share in GDP; and as a measure of government efficiency, we construct an index by following the methodology of Afonso, Schuknecht and Tanzi (2003). Our regressions show that what really matters to social incentives is the relation between size and efficiency. Specifically, while a larger size of government is bad for incentives when one ignores efficiency, the results change drastically when government efficiency is also taken into account. Only when our measure of size exceeds our measure of efficiency, larger public sectors are bad for incentives. By contrast, when efficiency exceeds size, larger public sectors are not bad; actually, in the case where efficiency is measured by government performance in the policy areas of administration, stabilization and infrastructure, larger public sectors significantly improve incentives.government and behaviour of agents, collective decision-making

Pollution and Resource Extraction: Do they Matter for the Dynamics of Growth?

This paper shows that whether pollution occurs as a by-product of economic activity (which is supposed to be the case in DCs), or as resource extraction (which is supposed to be the case in LDCs), matters for the dynamics of the optimal growth-environment-policy link. The context is a dynamic general equilibrium model of endogenous growth, in which private agents treat natural resources as a public good and the government chooses second-best environmental policy. We show that resource extraction can lead to indeterminacy, i.e. many different equilibrium transition paths. This can partly explain the observed persistent differences in growth among LDCs with similar fundamentals and endowments.Pollution and resource extraction, growth, dynamics, second-best policy

“An Absurdly Quiet Spot”: The Spatial Justice of WW1 Fraternizations

Recent research on WW1 shows that incidents of fraternization across enemy lines took place regularly. However, fraternization remains a taboo in many contexts. The fact that the 2005 film Joyeux Noel by Christian Caron, which explicitly deals with the subject, encountered resistance from the authorities, is an indication of the kind of difficulty associated with the issue. I am drawing my inspiration from the way fraternizations are depicted in the film and in the literature in order to explore the concept of spatial justice. I define spatial justice as the question that emerges when a body desires to occupy the same space at the same time as another body. Defined like this, the question of spatial justice opens up in the dread of No Man’s Land and in particular the exchange of affects, objects and narratives that went on during fraternizations. I trace the movement of spatial justice as one of withdrawal from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the war and the propaganda machine. This withdrawal is not one of unpatriotic stance but of a courageous and difficult detachment from the supposed legality of the war that could only function on the basis of hate and demonization. While fraternizations did not end the war, they allowed for the possibility of spatial justice to emerge, as an opportunity to reorient the space and the bodies within

Environmental public good provision under robust decision making

We study public good provision in a two-country dynamic setup with environmental externalities. In this framework, we examine robust decision making under potential misspecification of the process that describes the evolution of the environmental public good. Robust policies, arising from fear of model misspecification, help to correct for the inefficiencies associated with free riding and thus increase the provision of the public good. As a result, there can be welfare gains from robust policies even when the fear of model misspecification proves to be unfounded

Can Poductive Government Spending be the Engine of Long-Run Growth When Labor Supply is Engogenous?

We reexamine the properties of optimal fiscal policy and their implications for implementable capital accumulation. The setup is a standard endogenous growth model with public production services, augmented by elastic labor supply. We show that, when a benevolent government chooses a distorting income tax rate to finance public production services by taking into account the competitive decentralized equilibrium, public production services can no longer play their traditional role as an engine of long-run endogenous growth. This follows from a simple combination of Ramsey second-best fiscal policy and endogenous labor/leisure choices.second-best policy, elastic labor supply, endogenous growth

Spatial justice in a world of violence

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos opens the book with his latest contribution to his comprehensive project of re-theorising spatial justice with a piece titled ‘Spatial Justice in a World of Violence’. Through a close reading of the photographic series Fortunes of War, Life Day by artist Eric Lesdema, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is interested in how these images reveal peripheral spaces at the edge of violence which impose an ethic of spatial responsibility on the viewer in the act of turning away and looking elsewhere. While no acts of explicit violence are shown in the images, we are left with no doubt that violence is ubiquitous along the spatio-temporal continuum. This continuum of violence between bodies raises questions of complicity and responsibility. Do we submit to a state of affairs in which space is saturated with the everyday and immobilised violence of the ‘engineered atmosphere’ – or is it also possible for bodies to withdraw from the atmosphere, through ruptures and folds within the continuum? Such a notion raises the ethical possibility of the ‘emergence of spatial justice’