This paper analyzes the effect that passive investment in rival firms has on the setting of cooperative and non-cooperative environmental taxes. We consider two firms located in different countries, one of which owns a stake in its rival. We show that partial cross-ownership affects the taxes set by the countries in the cooperative and non-cooperative cases. Depending on the stake that one firm has in its rival we show that cooperative taxes may be higher or lower than non-cooperative taxes. Moreover, for intermediate values of the stake, the non-cooperative tax is higher in one country and lower in the other than the cooperative tax.

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This paper analyses how the structure of wage bargaining affects R&D investment by firms that increases the productivity of labour in a Cournot duopoly. We find that total expenditure on R&D is greater when wages are set simultaneously than when they are set sequentially. Thus sequential wage negotiations reduce the incentive for firms to innovate and affect the productivity of labour. When wage negotiations are sequential the productivity of labour is greater (lower) in the follower (leader) firm than when negotiations are simultaneous. We also obtain that for same parameter values it is possible for the firm with the lower productivity to end up paying a higher wage than the firm with the higher level of labour productivity.

This paper analyzes whether vertical integration between firms and suppliers encourages governments to behave as leaders in environmental policies. To study this issue, we consider transboundary pollution and two countries, with one firm in each country. We find that whether governments prefer to be leaders or followers in environmental taxes depends on two factors: whether firms are vertically integrated or not and the degree to which environmental pollution spills over to trading partners. When this overspill takes an intermediate value, taxes are set sequentially under vertical integration, but they are set simultaneously without it.