Search

This paper examines the optimal non linear income and commodity tax when the same labor disutility can receive two alternative interpretations, taste for leisure and disability, but the disability is not readily observable. We compare the optimal policy under alternative social objectives, welfarist and non-welfarist, and conclude that the non-welfarist objective, in which the planner gives a higher weight to the disutility of labour of the disabled individuals, is the only reasonable specification. It has some foundation in the theory of responsibility; further, unlike the other specifications it yields an optimal solution that may involve a lower labour supply requirement from disabled individuals.

We incorporate the media priming effects to explain how politicians can affect voters preferences on issues during the political campaign. We adapt well-known terms of international trade, such as absolute advantage and comparative advantage, to the context of parties' competition in political issues. We show that when either each party has an absolute advantage on a different issue or when parties have high comparative advantage on a different issue, the political campaign will consist of issue-emphasis divergence. However, when a party has an absolute advantage on both issues but the parties' comparative advantage is not high enough, the political campaign will consist of issue engagement or dialogue. Our results conciliate two separated theories concerning whether there must be dialogue or issue-emphasis divergence in the political campaign.

We study different extended formulations for the set X = {x [belong] Z exp.n | Ax = Ax exp.0} in order to tackle the feasibility problem for the set X+ = X [intersection] Z+ exp.n . Here the goal is not to find an improved polyhedral relaxation of conv(X+), but rather to reformulate in such a way that the new variables introduced provide good branching directions, and in certain circumstances permit one to deduce rapidly that the instance is infeasible. For the case that A has one row a we analyze the reformulations in more detail. In particular, we determine the integer width of the extended formulations in the direction of the last coordinate, and derive a lower bound on the Frobenius number of a. We also suggest how a decomposition of the vector a can be obtained that will provide a useful extended formulation. Our theoretical results are accompanied by a small computational study.

We distill the main insights from recent trade models on firms responses to globalisation. Our primary aim is to assess the economic impact and the welfare implications of the resulting reallocation of resources across firms and countries. In so doing, we bring theory into life through the numerical implementation of a theoretical framework calibrated on European data, which encompasses aspects of economic geography, firm heterogeneity, and firms organizational choices. Our final purpose is to provide a comprehensive background for empirical investigations and to stimulate further theoretical research.

Two types of agents interact on a pre-existing free platform. Agents value positively the presence of agents of the other type but may value negatively the presence of agents of their own type. We ask whether a new platform can find fees and subsidies so as to divert agents from the existing platform and make a profit. We show that this might be impossible if intra-group negative externalities are sufficiently (but not too) strong with respect to positive inter-group externalities.

The Easter Island tragedy has become an allegory for ecological catastrophe and a warning for the future. In the economic literature the collapse is usually attributed to irrational or myopic behaviors in the context of a fragile ecosystem. In this paper we propose an alternative story involving non-cooperative bargaining between clans to share the crop. Each clan's bargaining power depends on its threat level when fighting a war. The biggest group has the highest probability of winning. A clan's fertility is determined ex ante by each group. In the quest for greater bargaining power, each clan's optimal size depends on that of the other clan, and a population race follows. This race may exhaust the natural resources and lead to the ultimate collapse of the society. In addition to well-known natural factors, the likelihood of a collapse turns out to be greater when the cost of war is low, the probability of succeeding in war is highly responsive to the number of fighters, and the marginal return to labor is not too low. We analyze whether these factors can account for the difference between Easter and Tikopia Islands. The paper also makes a methodological contribution in that it is the first fertility model to include strategic complementarities between groups' fertility decisions.

Recent theoretical models predict gains from international trade coming from intra-industry reallocations, due to a firm selection effect. In this paper we answer two related questions. First, what is the magnitude of this selection effect, and how does it compare to that of intra-national trade? Second, would the removal of 'behind-the-border' trade frictions between integrated EU countries lead to large productivity gains? To answer these questions, we extend and calibrate the Melitz and Ottaviano (2007) model on productivity and trade data for European economies in 2000, and simulate counterfactual trade liberalization scenarios. We consider 11 EU countries and a total of 31 economies, including 21 French regions. Our first result is that, in the French case, international trade has a sizeable impact on aggregate productivity, but smaller than that of intra-national trade. Second, substantial productivity gains (around 20%) can be expected from 'behind-the-border' integration. In both experiments, we predict the corresponding variations in average prices, markups, quantities and profits. We show that the model fits sales and exports data reasonably well, and we perform a number of robustness checks. We also suggest some explanations for the substantial cross-economy and cross-industry variations in our estimates of productivity gains, highlighting the importance of accessibility and competitiveness.

We consider the general issue of estimating a nonparametric function x from the inverse problem r = Tx given estimates of the function r and of the linear transform T. Two typical examples include the estimation of a probability density function from data contaminated by a noise whose distribution is unknown (blind deconvolution) and the nonparametric instrumental regression. We provide a unified framework based on Hilbert scales that synthesizes most of existing results in the econometric literature and also covers new relevant structural models. Results are given on the rate of convergence of the estimator of x as well as of its derivatives.

An explicit description of the convex hull of solutions to the uncapacitated lot-sizing problem with backlogging, in its natural space of production, setup, inventory and backlogging variables, has been an open question for many years. In this paper, we identify valid inequalities that subsume all previously known valid inequalities for this problem. We show that these inequalities are enough to describe the convex hull of solutions. We give polynomial separation algorithms for some special cases. Finally, we report a summary of computational experiments with our inequalities that illustrates their effectiveness.

This paper presents a market design for the management of noise disturbance created by aircraft traffic around large airports. A market for tradable noise permits allows noise generators to compensate harmed residents. We show that the noise permit markets allow the achievement of the planner's optimal allocation of flights provided that she/he does not over-weight the benefit of economic activity compared to the disutility of noise disturbances. The fact that zones are likely to be strategic players does not fundamentally alter this finding. Because of the market auctioneer's information constraints, noise permits are likely to redistribute windfall gains to residents located in non-critical zones. This entices landlords to increase their land/house rents there and to design smaller houses in the long run.

Does legal insider trading contribute to market efficiency? Using the refinement proposed by the recent microstructure literature, we analyze the information content of legal insider trading. Our sample encompasses 2,110 different companies subject to 59,244 aggregated daily insider trades over the period from January 1995 to the end of September 1999. Our main findings are the followings. (i) Consistent with previous literature, financial markets offer a mild response in terms of abnormal returns to insider trading activities. (ii) The univariate analysis of stock prices on insider net purchase and net sale days suggests insiders' market timing ability. (iii) Market liquidity seems to be weaker on insider net purchase days, indicating that net buyer insiders are on average market liquidity consumers. (iv) Market liquidity seems to be higher on insider net sale days, indicating that net seller insiders are on average market liquidity providers. (v) The analysis of the considered information proxy reveals that insiders enhance market efficiency. Insider trading clearly permits faster price discovery on insider trading days.

We present an indirect estimation approach for elliptical stable distributions which relies on the use of a multivariate t distribution as auxiliary model. This distribution is also elliptical and we show that its parameters have a one-to-one relationship with those of the elliptical stable, therefore making the proposed indirect approach especially suitable. Standard asymptotic properties are also shown and we analyze the finite sample behavior of the estimators via a comprehensive Monte Carlo study. An application to 27 emerging markets stock indexes concludes the paper.

We introduce a class of games with complementarities that has the quasisupermodular games, hence the supermodular games, as a special case. Our games retain the main property of quasisupermodular games: the Nash set is a nonempty complete lattice. We use monotonicity properties on the best reply that are weaker than those in the literature, as well as pretty simple and linked with an intuitive idea of complementarity. The sufficient conditions on the payoffs are weaker than those in quasisupermodular games. We also separate the conditions implying existence of a greatest and a least Nash equilibrium from those, stronger, implying that the Nash set is a complete lattice.

The aim of this paper is to test the predictions of Sutton's model of independent submarkets for the Italian retail banking industry. This industry, in fact, can be viewed as made of a large number of local markets corresponding to different geographical locations. In order to do that, I first develop a model of endogenous mergers that shows how the number of firms is determined by the initial number of firms, by the intensity of competition, and by the degree of product differentiation, and how this in turn affects the one-firm concentration index. Then, in the second part, the number of banks in each submarket is estimated using a truncated model and a Poisson model. The size of the submarkets turned out to be at most provincial. Finally, the one-firm concentration ratio of each province is regressed on the number of banks, also in interaction with market size variables. As argued by Sutton for industries with exogenous sunk costs, a stronger and negative relationship is found as the market becomes larger.

This paper studies the possibilities of technical progress to deal with the growth limit problem imposed by the usage of non-renewable energy resources, when physical capital production is relatively more energy-intensive than consumption. In particular, this work presents the conditions under which energy-saving technologies can sustain long-run growth, although energy is produced by means of non-renewable energy resources. The mechanism behind that is energy efficiency.

In this paper we propose benchmark values for the coefficients of relative risk aversion and relative prudence on the basis of a binary choice model where the decision maker chooses between aggregating or disaggragating multiplicative risks. We relate our results to the decison maker's willingness to trade-off the second with the first and the third (central) moment of his wealth distribution.

Since Collier and Hoeffler (1998, 2004), it has been supported that inequality, measured at national level, does not affect the risk of conflict. Based on a renewed theoretical framework, the purpose of the paper is to explore the role of inequality in localized conflicts. We argue that previous findings might be biased by the myopic nature of cross-country analysis. Consistently with the model, Probit estimations indicate that income inequality measured at municipal level was significant in motivating people to support the rebellion in South Mexico. At this geographical level, we also find an increase in income per capita could exacerbate the risk of conflict in a situation where the rebel leader would have greater incentives to loot the local production compared to the opportunity cost associated with fighting for the worker.

This paper proposes a simple OLG model which is consistent with the essential facts about consumer behavior, capital accumulation and wealth distribution, and yields some new and surprising conclusions about fiscal policy. By considering a society in which individuals are distinguished according to two characteristics, altruism and wealth preference, we show that those who in the long run hold the bulk of private capital are not so much motivated by dynastic altruism as by preference for wealth. Two types of social segmentation can result with different wealth distribution. To a large extent our results seem to fit reality better than those obtained with standard optimal growth models in which dynastic altruism (or rate of impatience) is the only source of heterogeneity: overaccumulation can appear, public debt and unfunded pensions are not neutral, estate taxation can improve the welfare of the top wealthy.

We analyse a (differentiated good) industry where an incumbent firm owns a network good (essential input) and faces potential competition in the (downstream) retail market. Unlike the traditional approach, we consider a scenario where the decision to compete or not in the downstream segment is endogenous, and this decision depends on the particular mechanism designed by the utilitarian regulator. We assume that the technology of the potential entrant is private information. We derive the efficient (Ramsey) prices and access charge taking the impact of a non-discriminatory mechanism on entry decision into account. We assert that the optimal pricing formula must include a Ramsey term that is inversely related to the "modified" superelasticty of the retail good under consideration. We further show, under unknown cost, that there might be "excess" or "too little" entry compared to the socially optimal level.

Most papers on returns to languages are concerned with immigrants. We use the European Community Household Panel Survey (ECHP) to infer returns on non-native languages by non-immigrants in nine countries of the European Union. We differ from the few other studies that deal with the same problem in three respects. First, we correct for time-dependent measurement errors in self-reporting as suggested by Dustmann and Van Soest and find that the resulting IV estimates are much larger than those obtained by OLS. We also suggest that there is little room for time-persistent errors and heterogeneity, and that therefore our estimates should not suffer from the other usual biases. Secondly, instead of using a dummy for each language, we use the ratio of the population that is not proficient in a language in each country considered. Finally, we estimate instrumental variable quantile regressions to illustrate how returns to languages vary at different points of the distribution of earnings.

We analyse a model of two-sided matching and incentive contracts where expert investors (venture capitalists) with different monitoring capacities are matched with firms with different levels of initial wealth. Firms do not have sufficient start-up capital to cover their project costs and hence, seek external financing. In equilibrium, the matching and the payoffs of the venture capitalists and the firms are determined simultaneously. More effective VCs and higher-wealth firms consume higher pay- offs. We also show that, in equilibrium VCs with higher monitoring ability invest in firms with lower initial wealth following a negatively assortative matching pattern

In this paper, based on the cyclic scheduling formulation of Schilling and Pantelides [22], we propose a continuous time mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the cyclic scheduling of a mixed plant, i.e. a plant composed of batch and continuous tasks. The cycle duration is a variable of the model and the objective is to maximize productivity. By using strengthening techniques and the analysis of small polytopes related to the problem formulation, we strengthen the initial formulation by tightening some initial constraints and by adding valid inequalities. We show that this strengthened formulation is able to solve moderate size problems quicker than the initial one. However, for real size cases, it remains difficult to obtain the optimal solution of the scheduling problem quickly. Therefore, we introduce MILP-based heuristic methods in order to solve these larger instances, and show that they can provide quite good feasible solutions quickly.

Recent empirical papers report a declining trend in the cumulative abnormal return (CAR) of acquirers during an M&A program. Does this necessarily imply that acquiring CEOs are infected by hubris and are not learning from previous mistakes? We first confirm the existence of this declining trend on average. However, we find a positive CAR trend for CEOs likely to be infected by hubris, which is significantly different from the negative trend found for CEOs who are more likely to be rational. We also explore the time between successive deals and find empirical evidence to suggest that many CEOs learn substantially during acquisition programs.

The famous Mincer equation regressing log earnings on years of schooling is derived from a linear human capital accumulation equation at the individual level. Even if the cross-sectional Mincer equation holds at the level of individuals, it does not hold at the macro level of countries because aggregation of human capital has to take into account its vintage structure: human capital is embodied in people of different generations whose lifespan is finite. Finiteness of people's lives imposes also a limit on the potential of human capital accumulation to drive aggregate economic growth. Aggregate human capital accumulation may however become an engine of growth thanks to human capital externalities (knowledge spillovers). We use these findings to revisit the assumptions of the well-known Uzawa-Lucas growth model from an aggregation perspective.

I examine the behavior of subjects in common value auctions with both experienced and inexperienced bidders in the same market. Subjects know that they are competing against both experienced and inexperienced subjects and can observe bidding behavior of their opponents after an auction round. The existence and common knowledge of mixed experience levels in the same auction market affects the bidding behavior of inexperienced bidders, and gender plays an important role: Inexperienced males bid more aggressively in auction market with mixed bidders compared to markets with only inexperienced bidders, but inexperienced females bid less aggressively. The mixed markets only have an effect on inexperienced bidders. Experienced bidders (males and females) do not react significantly different in mixed auction markets than in markets with only experienced bidders.

There exist congenital diseases that reduce newborns' potential opportunities. This reduction is sometimes alleviated if the congenital disease is early detected thanks to a newborn screening program. We propose an outcome measurement of newborn screening programs based on the opportunity gains they offer. We show that, under plausible assumptions, the ranking of the available screening programs for a particular disease, according to this new outcome measurement, do not depend on the metric of opportunity. We also apply our model to the current debate about choosing between a selective or a universal newborn hearing screening program to detect congenital hearing impairment.

We develop a Markov-switching GARCH model (MS-GARCH) wherein the conditional mean and variance switch in time from one GARCH process to another. The switching is governed by a hidden Markov chain. We provide sufficient conditions for geometric ergodicity and existence of moments of the process. Because of path dependence, maximum likelihood estimation is not feasible. By enlarging the parameter space to include the state variables, Bayesian estimation using a Gibbs sampling algorithm is feasible. We illustrate the model on SP500 daily returns.

Providing a good formulation is an important part of solving a mixed integer program. We suggest to measure the quality of a formulation by whether it is possible to strengthen the coefficients of the formulation. Sequentially strengthening coefficients can then be used as a tool for improving formulations. We believe this method could be useful for analyzing and producing tight formulations of problems that arise in practice. We illustrate the use of the approach on a problem in production scheduling. We also prove that coefficient strengthening leads to formulations with a desirable property: if no coefficient can be strengthened, then no constraint can be replaced by an inequality that dominates it. The effect of coefficient strengthening is tested on a number of problems in a computational experiment. The strengthened formulations are compared to reformulations obtained by the preprocessor of a commercial software package. For several test problems, the formulations obtained by coefficient strengthening are substantially stronger than the formulations obtained by the preprocessor. In particular, we use coefficient strengthening to solve two difficult problems to optimality that have only recently been solved.

We propose a quantity-based `dual' version of the gravity equation that yields an estimating equation with both cross-sectional interdependence and spatially lagged error terms. Such an equation can be concisely estimated using spatial econometric techniques. We illustrate this methodology by applying it to the Canada-U.S. data set used previously, among others, by Anderson and van Wincoop (2003) and Feenstra (2002, 2004). Our key result is to show that controlling directly for spatial interdependence across trade flows, as suggested by theory, significantly reduces border effects because it captures `multilateral resistance'. Using a spatial autoregressive moving average specification, we find that border effects between the U.S. and Canada are smaller than in previous studies: about 8 for Canadian provinces and about 1.3 for U.S. states. Yet, heterogeneous coefficient estimations reveal that there is much variation across provinces and states.

In this paper, we analyze the static interaction in prices between two newspapers that compete with each other in the circulation and in the advertising markets. We exploit the two-sided nature of the newspaper industry to analyze a demand-side effect that generates an endogenous mechanism of concentration in the press industry: "the circulation spiral" effect.

This paper examines a three-stage model of divisionalization where, first, two parent firms create independent units, second, the parent firms allocate cost reduction levels over these units, and third, the resulting units compete in a Cournot market given their current costs of production. The introduction of the cost reduction phase is shown to reduce the incentives toward divisionalization severely, relative to other existing models. Namely, the scope for divisionalization in equilibrium reduces as the marginal cost of the cost reducing investment decreases, and eventually vanishes. A second-best welfare analysis shows that, for any given market structure, the equilibrium investment decisions of the parent firms are socially optimal. In addition, the no divisionalization outcome is sustainable in equilibrium only if it is socially optimal.

In this paper we use a new analytical approach to the Lucas-Uzawa model (Boucekkine and Ruiz Tamarit, 2007) to extend the existing results on the dynamics, and notably on the imbalance effects arising in the model. The approach does not only allow to extend the traditional analysis to any initial conditions and for all variables in level, but it also permits a more general investigation of imbalance effects.

The policy of official multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the Union. However, a large number of official languages imposes substantial financial, communication and legal costs. We address the merits of extensive multilingualism and formulate an analytical framework to determine the optimal number of official languages in the EU. First, we derive the sequence of optimal sets of languages which identifies the sets of languages that minimize aggregate linguistic disenfranchisement of the Union's citizens for any given number of languages. We then proceed by discussing the political-economy framework and feasibility of a potential linguistic reform in the EU under various voting rules, including the Nice Treaty, the proposed European Constitution and the Penrose law. We argue that a six-language regime would be a reasonable intermediate choice: a lower number of official languages results in excessive linguistic disenfranchisement whereas adding further languages increases the costs but brings only modest benefits. We also show that even though a linguistic reform reducing the number of official languages to six is unlikely to gain sufficient support at the present, this may change in the future since young people tend to be more proficient at speaking foreign languages.

We present a model of political competition, in a multi-dimensional policy space and with policy-oriented candidates, to analyze the problem of health care finance. In our model, health care is either financed publicly (by means of general taxation) or privately (by means of a copayment). The extent of these two components (as well as the overall tax schedule) is the outcome of the process of political competition. Our results highlight, from a political-economy perspective, the key role of technological change in explaining the widely observed phenomenon, in advanced democracies, of a rising share of total economic resources spent on health.

We characterize the unique mixed-strategy equilibrium of an extension of the "television news sheduling game" of Cancian, Bergstrom and Bills (1995) where viewers want to watch the first newscast broadcast after they return home. A fraction of the viewers record randomly one of the newscast to watch them in case they are too late. At equilibrium, neither of the two stations broadcasts its evening news in the first part of the evening and the density function is strictly decreasing.

The label "Keynes-Negishi equilibria" is attached here to equilibria in a monetary economy with imperfectly competitive product and labor markets where business firms and labor unions hold demand perceptions with kinks - as posited in Negishi's 1979 book Microeconomic Foundations of Keynesian Macroeconomics. Such equilibria are defined in a general equilibrium model, and shown to exist. Methodological implications are briefly discussed in a concluding section.

We analyze the empirical relationship between journal prices, their quality measured by their citation counts, their age, as well as conduct of publishers. The database covers 22 scientific fields and over 2600 among the most highly reputed and cited journals in 2003. We show that (a) for-profit journals charge roughly 3 times more than journals run by scientific societies; (b) the number of citations has a positive impact on prices; (c) there are large differences in prices across fields that vary from 1 and 6; these are highly (and positively) correlated with the degree of concentration in the industry.

In this paper, based on the cyclic scheduling formulation of Schilling and Pantelides [22], we propose a continuous time mixed integer linear programming (MILP) formulation for the cyclic scheduling of a mixed plant, i.e. a plant composed of batch and continuous tasks. The cycle duration is a variable of the model and the objective is to maximize productivity. By using strengthening techniques and the analysis of small polytopes related to the problem formulation, we strengthen the initial formulation by tightening some initial constraints and by adding valid inequalities. We show that this strengthened formulation is able to solve moderate size problems quicker than the initial one. However, for real size cases, it remains difficult to obtain the optimal solution of the scheduling problem quickly. Therefore, we introduce MILP-based heuristic methods in order to solve these larger instances, and show that they can provide quite good feasible solutions quickly.

We raise the problem of the minorities survival in the presence of positive network externalities. We rely on the example of thematic clubs to illustrate why and in which circumstances such survival problems might appear, first considering the case of simple network externalities and then the case of cross network externalities

In the modeling of competition on networks it is usually assumed that users either behave following the Wardrop equilibrium or the Nash equilibrium concept. Nevertheless, in several equilibrium situations, for instance in urban traffic flows, intercity freight flows and telecommunication networks, a mixed behavior is observed. This paper presents a time-dependent network model shared by two types of users: group users (Nash players) and individual users (Wardrop players). A group user has a significant impact on the load of the network, whereas an individual user has a negligible impact. Both classes of users choose the paths to ship their jobs so as to minimize their costs, but they apply different optimization criteria. The source of interaction of users is represented by the travel demand, which is assumed to be elastic with respect to the equilibrium solution. Thus, the equilibrium distribution is proved to be equivalent to the solution of an appropriate time-dependent quasi-variational inequality problem. A result on the existence of solutions is discussed as well as a numerical example.

It is the study of the trade cycle during the thirties that made imperfectly competitive output markets a major theme in macroeconomics, principally under the lead of Harrod. Both him and Keynes were referring at the same time to a supposed feature of business cycles, namely the counter cyclicality of real wages, which was however going to be very soon contested. Empirical evidence, as well as other more speculative considerations, induced an important flow of theoretical arguments developed by several authors during a very short period, at the eve of the second World War. We propose to examine these aborted guidelines already exhibiting the main ingredients of the New Keynesian research programme only developed one half century later: imperfectly competitive goods markets (with costly price adjustment, economies of scale and cyclical behaviour of markups), imperfectly competitive labour markets (with wage negotiations, implicit contracts and efficiency wages), and finally coordination failures.

We develop a tractable general theory for the study of the economic and demographic impact of epidemics. In particular, we analytically characterise the short and medium term consequences of epidemics for population size, age pyramid, economic performance and income distribution. To this end, we develop a three-period overlapping generations where altruistic parents choose optimal health expenditures for their children and themselves. The survival probability of (junior) adults and children depend on such investments. Agents can be skilled or unskilled. The model emphasizes the role of orphans. Ophans are not only penalized in front of death , they are also penalized in the access to education. Epidemics are modeled as one period exogenous shocks to the survival rates. We identify three kinds of epidemics depending on how the epidemic shock alters the marginal efficiency of health expenditures. We first study the demographic dynamics, and prove that while a one-period epidemic shock has no permanent effect on income distribution, it can perfectly alter it in the short and medium run. We then study the impact of the three kinds of epidemics when they hit children and/or junior adults. We prove that while the three epidemics have significantly different demographic implications in the medium run, they all imply a worsening in the short and medium run of economic performance and income distribution. In particular, the distributional implications of the model mainly rely on orphans: if orphans are more penalized in the access to a high llevel of education than in front of death, they will necessarily lead to the medium-term increase in the proportion of the unskilled, triggering the impoverishment of the economy at that time horizon.

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a trade-off between the number of children they have and the spending they can afford on each of them in childhood. These childhood development spending will determine children longevity when adults. It is in this sense that we refer to Wordsworth's aphorism that "The Child is Father of the Man". Parents face a second trade-off in allocating their time between increasing their own human capital and rearing children. The model displays different regimes. In a Malthusian regime with no education fertility increases with adult life expectancy. In the modern growth regime, life expectancy and fertility move in opposite directions. The dynamics display the key features of the demographic transition, including the hump in both population growth and fertility, and replicate the observed rise in educational attainment, adult life expectancy and economic growth. Consistent with the empirical evidence, a distinctive implication of our theory is that improvements in childhood development precede the increase in education.

Rectangularization of the survival probability seems to be an ongoing process. It results from a higher concentration of the ages at death; but it can be reversed by a continuous increase in the limit of life time. In this paper, we assume that these two factors are endogenous and we show that risk averse decision makers exhibit a bias towards rectangularization. More specifically, the importance of the bias depends upon the intensity of the "fear of ruin" which is another measure of the degree of absolute risk aversion.

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane, that faces a problem of locating public facilities to be used by its members. The cost of every facility is financed by its users, who also face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We assume that the facilities' cost is independent of location and access costs are linear with respect to the Euclidean distance. We show that an external intervention that covers 0.19% of the facility cost is sufficient to guarantee secession-proofness or no cross-subsidization, where no group of individuals is charged more than its stand alone cost incurred if it had acted on its own. Moreover, we demonstrate that in this case the Rawlsian access pricing is the only secession-proof allocation.

We establish the precise connections between progressive taxation and inequality reduction, in a setting where the level of tax revenue to be raised is endogenously fixed and tax schemes are balanced. We show that, in contrast with the traditional literature on taxation, the equivalence between inequality reduction and the combination of progressivity and income order preservation does not always hold in this setting. However, we show that, among rules satisfying consistency and, either revenue continuity, or revenue monotonicity, the equivalence remains intact.

Recent empirical research has shown that, from deal to deal, serial acquirers' cumulative abnormal returns (CAR) are declining. This has been most often attributed to CEOs hubris. We question this interpretation. Our theoretical analysis shows that (i) a declining CAR from deal to deal is not sufficient to reveal the presence of hubris, (ii) if CEOs are learning, economically motivated and rational, a declining CAR from deal to deal should be observed, (iii) predictions can be derived about the impact of learning and hubris on the time between successive deals and, finally, (iv) predictions about the CAR and about the time between successive deal trends lead to testable empirical hypotheses.

We analyze the relationship between Antidumping (AD) Protection and the productivity of EU domestic firms in import-competing industries. For this purpose we identify a panel of domestic firms between 1993 and 2003 that at some point during this period are affected by AD initiations. Using a difference-in-difference approach, we find that AD measures result in improvements of measured productivity for domestic firms. Total Factor Productivity (TFP) of protected firms increases by 2% in the short-run and by 5% to 13% in the long-run. However, there is substantial heterogeneity across firms. The effect of protection depends on the initial "distance-to-the-frontier firm" in the industry. While protection raises TFP of "laggard" domestic firms, it lowers TFP for "efficient" firms that operate close to the efficiency frontier. These results are consistent with recent theoretical work supporting the view that trade policy, under certain conditions, can induce technological catching-up. While this paper evaluates the effectiveness of AD policy it does not engage in a welfare analysis.

We analyze the equilibrium and the optimal resource allocations in a monocentric city under monopolistic competition. Unlike the constant elasticity of substitution (CES) case, where the equilibrium markups are independent of the city size, we present a variable elasticity of substitution (VES) case where the equilibrium markups fall with the city size. We then show that, due to excess entry triggered by such pro-competitive effects, the 'golden rule' of local public finance, i.e., the Henry George theorem (HGT), does not hold in the second best. We finally prove, within our framework, that the HGT holds in the second best if and only if: (i) the second-best allocation is first-best efficient, which turns out to be equivalent to the CES case; or (ii) a marginal change in the city size has no impact on equilibrium product diversity at the second best.