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This article extends the multi-period agri-environmental contract model of Fraser (Journal of Agricultural Economics, Vol. 55, (2004) pp. 525-540) to include a more realistic specification of the inter-temporal penalties for non-compliance, and therefore of the inter-temporal moral hazard problem in agri-environmental policy design. It is shown that a farmer has an unambiguous preference for cheating early over cheating late in the contract period based on differences in the expected cost of compliance. It is then shown how the principal can make use of this unambiguous preference to target monitoring resources intertemporally, and in so doing, to encourage full contract duration compliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the principal claims made for the Resource Rent Tax (RRT) by Garnaut and Clunies-Ross (1975, 1979) relating to its efficiency and potential for generating tax revenue relative to other forms of resource taxation, and also their concern about the greater uncertainty of these revenues. An analysis of the risk-return trade-off associated with a shift from ad valorem royalties to an RRT finds this shift to be worthwhile. Estimates are also provided of the foregone tax revenue from the North West Shelf associated with the use of ad valorem royalties rather than the RRT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a method of quantifying variation in quality in an amenity as a component of an hedonic property amenity valuation. The paper considers the residential land amenity of an ocean view, a situation where there is typically substantial variation in the quality of the view between sites. The method is effectively a scoring system based on three sub-characteristics of the ocean view. It is illustrated by application to a coastal housing subdivision in Western Australia. The results provide an estimate of the increase in the sale price of a site attributable to the quality of the site's ocean view. The method has a potential role in coastal land use management decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the existence of an investment-neutral Resource Rent tax using a model of optimal investment to extract an unknown quantity of resource stock. Levels of profit margin; Resource stock uncertainty.

This paper examines the role of price-cap regulation in influencing the relationship between the costs and prices of a multi-product monopoly. Based on a simple model of mark-up pricing, a combination of analytical and numerical analysis is used to show how cost increases among the firm's products can cause a divergence of prices from the Ramsey structure if the cost increases are non-uniform or if the demand elasticities for the products are non-uniform. However, in the absence of additional cost changes, profit-maximising prices which are subject to a price-cap constraint converge to the Ramsey structure if the previous period's quantities are used as weights in the firm's price-cap constraint. Consequently, given this formulation of the firm's price-cap constraint, only in situations of recurring cost changes are prices likely to show on-going divergence from the Ramsey structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]