Two countries strategically invest in productive infrastructure within a general equilibrium model with endogenous growth. These public investments generate externalities. Dynamic analysis reveals that: (1) under constant returns, the two countries growth rates differ during the transition but are identical on the balanced growth path, (2) a country with decreasing returns can experience sustained growth provided that the other country grows at a positive constant rate, (3) cooperation does not necessarily lead to higher growth for each country, and it can increase or decrease the gap between countries growth rates depending on the countries consumption preferences regarding domestic and foreign goods.

Many scholars argue that environmental issues can be addressed through technological innovation, a proposal which echoes a lasting debate between environmental and ecological economics about the substitution rate between natural and manufactured capital. In addition to these two established types of capital, this paper introduces the idea of ‘behavioral capital’. We define behavioral capital as the latent potential of behavioral change to affect improvement in environmental quality. Our contribution argues that technological and traditional regulatory innovations serve as insufficient tools for addressing modern environmental issues and ensuring sustainable development. Without discarding these solutions, we contend that because human behavior is a significant contributor to environmental problems, it should be regarded as a key component of continued solutions. We suggest that the dual interest theory can serve as an integrative framework for behavioral innovations related to environmental issues. In suggesting this, we assume that behavioral innovations can both overcome some of the limitations of technological innovations and offer new solutions. Our main insight is to suggest that some depletion of natural capital – but not all – can be offset by behavioral changes without decreasing, or even increasing, subjective well-being.

We examine experimentally how and why voluntary contributions are affected by sequentiality. Instead of deciding simultaneously in each round, subjects are randomly ordered in a sequence which differs from round to round. We compare sessions in which subjects observe the contributions from earlier decisions in each round ("sequential treatment with information") to sessions in which subjects decide sequentially within rounds, but cannot observe earlier contributions ("sequential treatment without information"). We also investigate whether average contributions are affected by the length of the sequence by varying group size. Our results show that sequentiality alone has no effect on contributions, but that the level of contributions increases when subjects are informed about the contributions of lower-ranked subjects. We provide evidence that the so-called "leadership effect" vanishes within rounds, and that group size has no significant impact on the average level of contributions in our sequential contribution games. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Chichilnisky's criterion for sustainability has the merit to be, so far, the unique explicit, complete and continuous social welfare criterion that combines successfully the requirement of Weak Pareto with an instrumental notion of intergenerational equity (no dictatorship of the present and no dictatorhsip of the future). But it has one important drawback: in the context of renewable resources, there exists no exploitation path that maximizes this criterion. The present article suggests a way to cope with this weakness. We give good reasons to restrict admissible controls to the set of convex combinations between the discounted utilitarian program and the golden rule program. It is shown that optimal paths in this set exists under rather weak sufficient conditions on the fundamentals of the problem. (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)