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Natural languages with their speech communities tend to compete for speakers, very much like firms compete for market shares. As a result, some languages suffer a shifting pressure which might lead them to their extinction. This work studies the dynamics of language shift in the context of modern bilingual societies like the Basque Country, Ireland and Wales. They all have two official languages, linguistically distant: A, spoken by all, and B, spoken by a bilingual minority. They also have a bilingual education system that ensures a steady flow of new bilinguals. However, a decay in the use of B is observed, signalling that shift processes are at work. To investigate this apparent paradox, we use a novel approach in the literature of language competition. We build a behavioural game model with which bilinguals choose either language A or B for each interaction. Thus, they play repeatedly the game. We present a theorem predicting that under reasonable assumptions, any given population of bilinguals will converge into a linguistic convention, namely into an evolutionary stable equilibrium of the game, that always embeds a proportion of bilinguals shifting to A. We validate this result by means of an empirical version of the model, showing that the predictions fit well the observed data of street use of Basque and daily use of Irish and Welsh.

Although the transition to renewable energies will intensify the global competition for land, the potential impacts driven by solar energy remain unexplored. In this work, the potential solar land requirements and related land use change emissions are computed for the EU, India, Japan and South Korea. A novel method is developed within an integrated assessment model which links socioeconomic, energy, land and climate systems. At 25-80% penetration in the electricity mix of those regions by 2050, we find that solar energy may occupy 0.5-5% of total land. The resulting land cover changes, including indirect effects, will likely cause a net release of carbon ranging from 0 to 50 gCO(2)/kWh, depending on the region, scale of expansion, solar technology efficiency and land management practices in solar parks. Hence, a coordinated planning and regulation of new solar energy infrastructures should be enforced to avoid a significant increase in their life cycle emissions through terrestrial carbon losses.

154 p., A lo largo de cinco capítulos, esta tesis explora algunas de las cuestiones críticas entorno a la economíade la adaptación al cambio climático y a la toma de decisiones en ciudades. El Capítulo 2 explora estudios previos en donde se aplica el análisis de coste-beneficio a medidas de adaptación en zonas urbanas de todo el mundo, centrándose en el papel que el análisis de coste-beneficio desempeña en el apoyo a la toma de decisiones. Dadas las crecientes tensiones ejercidas en entornos naturales, tanto porel cambio climático como por la creciente urbanización, el Capítulo 3 examina la viabilidad de un nuevo enfoque económico que puede integrarse fácilmente en el análisis de coste-beneficio. Dicho enfoque,promueve la conservación del entorno natural y se aplica al área de planificación del uso del suelo endiferentes regiones de Europa. El Capítulo 4 explora tres aspectos, a menudo descuidados, del análisis coste-beneficio de la adaptación, relacionados con el empleo, la equidad y la aversión al riesgo. A través de un estudio específico a nivel de ciudad, examina cómo la inclusión de estos valores afecta a los resultados de la decisión final. Los últimos dos capítulos de la tesis profundizan en el creciente cuerpo de investigación conductual y experimental sobre la toma de decisiones bajo riesgo e incertidumbre. Se utilizan dos experimentos de laboratorio económico para probar teorías emergentes en un contexto de adaptación a nivel de ciudad. Específicamente, examinan cómo, por un lado, los diferentes marcos de comunicación de riesgos, y por otro lado, la experiencia con el cambio climático, pueden afectar los niveles individuales de aceptabilidad del riesgo y el comportamiento de inversión en medidas dea daptación.

This paper analyzes the interaction between two political economy decisions by a government: whether to privatize a public firm and what environmental policy to choose (an environmental tax or an emission standard). We find that when market competition is weak the government does not privatize the public firm and sets an environmental tax. When it is intermediate the public firm is not privatized and the government sets an environmental standard. Finally, when market competition is strong the government privatizes the public firm and is indifferent between a tax and a standard.

Heavy reliance on traditional biomass for household energy in eastern Africa has significant negative health and environmental impacts. The African context for energy access is rather different from historical experiences elsewhere as challenges in achieving energy access have coincided with major climate ambitions. Policies focusing on household energy needs in eastern Africa contribute to at least three sustainable development goals (SDGs): climate action, good health, and improved energy access. This study uses an integrated assessment model to simulate the impact of land policies and technology subsidies, as well as the interaction of both, on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, exposure to air pollution and energy access in eastern Africa under a range of socioeconomic pathways. We find that land policies focusing on increasing the sustainable output of biomass resources can reduce GHG emissions in the region by about 10%, but also slightly delay progress in health and energy access goals. An optimised portfolio of energy technology subsidies consistent with a global Green Climate Funds budget of 30-35 billion dollar, can yield another 10% savings in GHG emissions, while decreasing mortality related to air pollution by 20%, and improving energy access by up to 15%. After 2030, both land and technology policies become less effective, and more dependent on the overall development path of the region. The analysis shows that support for biogas technology should be prioritised in both the short and long term, while financing liquefied petroleum gas and ethanol technologies also has synergetic climate, health and energy access benefits. Instead, financing PV technologies is mostly relevant for improving energy access, while charcoal and to a lesser extend fuelwood technologies are relevant for curbing GHG emissions if their finance is linked to land policies. We suggest that integrated policy analysis is needed in the African context for simultaneously reaching progress

This paper extends the traditional analysis of the output effect under monopoly (third-degree) price discrimination to a multimarket oligopoly. The author shows that under oligopoly price discrimination, differences in competitive pressure, measured by the number of firms, across markets are more important than the relative demand curvature when determining the effect on total output.

123 p., The transition to low carbon economies is one of the most urgent challenges society needs to face in order to prevent and reduce the harmful effects of climate change. Every mitigation strategy requires the energy system to be substantially transformed. Additionally, changing the energy systems has a diverse range of associated co-benefits and side effects, with substantial economic implications, that are not usually integrated in policy design.The aim of this PhD thesis is to analyze air pollution driven co-effects of different climate change scenarios and mitigation options, with a special focus on health and agriculture by developing an innovative methodology which combines the use of an integrated assessment model (GCAM), an air quality model (TM5-FASST) and economic valuations methods.Chapter 2 analyzes air pollution driven damages in crop yields and the resulting effects on agricultural markets of a scenario where there is no climate policy established. Afterward, Chapter 3 examines which are the implications of reverting current fossil fuels subsidies into clean solar technologies in terms of air pollution. Then, the subsequent chapters analyze health co-benefits associated to different transition pathways. While Chapter 4 estimates the potential co-benefits of achieving both the 2°C and the 1.5°C objectives following different burden-sharing criteria, Chapter 5 focuses on co-benefits associated to achieving the 2°C target under different technological scenarios.

131 p., The large degree of transformational change that would be necessary to limit global temperature change to 2°C would not only avoid dangerous climate change, but will affect societies in many more aspects. Depending how these transformations are designed, they can have co-benefits and trade-offs for other economic, social or environmental objectives and influence the policy costs of reaching such objectives.The aim of this thesis is to assess synergies and trade-offs of climate change mitigation policies. For this purpose, an IAM has been used that integrates socioeconomic, energy, land and climate systems. Additional modules to this model have been designed throughout the course of the PhD, as well as a link with another method to process model outputs with the aim of assessing synergies and trade-offs and check for robustness of specific policies.More concretely, chapter 2 analyses the role of behavioural change in the climate change mitigation portfolio, and its impact on climate policy costs. Chapter 3 looks at the land use occupation of solar energy and the related environmental impacts in terms of land cover change and land use change emissions. In the next chapters, a link is introduced between an integrated assessment model and robust portfolio analysis. Chapter 4 uses this link to optimise low-carbon power technology investment portfolio in order to achieve both greenhouse gas emission savings and energy security improvement, while chapter 5 uses the link by optimizing energy technology subsidies, mixed with land policies, in developing countries to achieve simultaneous progress in three different Sustainable Development Goals.

188 p., The present thesis is entitled "Ecosystem services valuation for improved water resource management under climate change in Africa". Through four chapters, ecosystem services valuation is used as a tool to inform water resource management. After a first chapter at continent-level, the geographic focus of the remainder chapters shifts to Ghana and its northern region.The research draws links to the existing literature on ecosystem based adaptation, smallholder farmers' livelihoods strategies and risk coping, poverty alleviation, nature based-solutions, climate change adaptation and the political economy of water resource management.Given the pressures water related ecosystem are under, ES valuation can play a role in providing economic evidence to policy-makers. The main objective of the present work is to apply ES valuation and use its results to produce tailored evidence that is of value in specific policy contexts.

176 p., Esta tesis presenta tres estudios sobre teoría de juegos del comportamiento, estudiando las desviaciones del comportamiento racional, utilizando técnicas experimentales y econométricas.El primer capítulo estudia el comportamiento en el juego del ciempiés, juego con gran interés y tradición en economía. Para ello tiene en cuenta múltiples modelos de comportamiento y gracias a un novedoso diseño intenta discernir cuál es el más relevante a la hora de explicar y predecir el comportamiento. El estudio concluye que mayoritariamente el comportamiento es explicado por el fallo del conocimiento común de la racionalidad, y que además no hay uno si no varios modelos que explican distintas proporciones de la población, lo cual explica la literatura.El segundo capítulo evalúa la capacidad predictiva de exitosos modelos de comportamiento basados en evitar el arrepentimiento. Los compara de forma teórica y en la literatura con otro modelo exitoso basado en el fallo del conocimiento común de la racionalidad, y concluye este último es el que explica mejor comportamiento atribuido originalmente a los modelos basados en arrepentimiento.El tercer capítulo compara el comportamiento en el juego del ciempiés jugando de forma simultanea o secuencial. Las diferencias se dan o no dependiendo de las características particulares del juego.

148 p., La presente tesis doctoral plantea tres ensayos de economía aplicada mediante métodos cuantitativos al campo de la economía de la educación y la economía de las competencias y el empleo. El primer ensayo trata de responder a la cuestión de por qué el País Vasco experimentó una fuerte caída en la encuesta de aprendizaje PISA en el año 2015 con respecto a la edición anterior de 2012. Los resultados muestran una multiplicidad de factores: un aumento de las tasas de repetición, un aumento de la proporción de alumnos que realizan la prueba en un idioma distinto al del hogar y un aumento de problemas de conducta del alumnado reportados por los directores de centro. El segundo ensayo evalúa el impacto que tuvo la reforma de elección de escuela distrito único en la Comunidad de Madrid en 2013, que otorgó un mayor número de opciones de elección de escuela a las familias. A través de datos administrativos nunca explotados, se encuentra que las familias reaccionaron positivamente a la reforma ejerciendo una mayor movilidad y desplazamiento fuera del distrito a los centros educativos. En particular se encuentran diferencias notables por nivel educativo de los padres y origen nacional de los alumnos. Finalmente se estima una leve caída de la segregación social (según nivel educativo de los padres) y fuerte aumento de la segregación por origen nacional. Los resultados están asociados a la red de escuelas concertadas y a la composición social de los centros educativos de destino.El tercer ensayo analiza por primera vez las diferencias en tareas (a través de la encuesta PIAAC) en el empleo en un grupo de 20 países usando información precisa sobre el contenido de trabajo para cada trabajador. Se analiza la relación entre dichas tareas y características individuales y del trabajo, y a su vez, la relación entre dichas tareas y los salarios, asumiendo un modelo de auto-selección basado en ventaja comparativa. Los resultados muestran que los países más avanzados (como Nueva Zelanda o Gr

252 p., La tesis tiene como objetivo incorporar los servicios del ecosistema de no mercado a la contabilidad nacional de forma consistente con los bienes y servicios de mercado. Esto requiere estimar precios y cantidades de mercado. Para ello, se ha desarrollado y aplicado el método de Valor de Cambio Simulado, el cual consiste en simular valores de cambios para estos servicios. Para confirmar la efectividad de este método, se ha combinado un modelo teórico de control óptimo con dos estudios aplicados a dos de los servicios más importantes proporcionados por los bosques, como son el uso recreativo y la conservación de la biodiversidad. Otra contribución de la tesis ha sido la estimación de la acumulación neta del capital forestal. Los estudios teóricos centrados en los bosques asumen que el crecimiento de los árboles es instantáneo. Este supuesto facilita el desarrollo matemático del modelo porque permite estimar el Producto Nacional Neto utilizando únicamente valores del año en curso. No obstante, la propuesta de los sistemas contables requiere realizar proyecciones a futuro. En la tesis se ha demostrado que el Producto Nacional Neto debe incorporar el futuro. Para ello, se han utilizado ecuaciones de Volterra, las cuales se han aplicado, por primera vez, al ámbito de la contabilidad nacional verde.

Do adversarial environmental conditions create social cohesion? We provide new answers to this question by exploiting spatial and temporal variation in exposure to earthquakes across Chile. Using a variety of methods and controlling for a number of socio-economic variables, we find that exposure to earthquakes has a positive effect on several indicators of social cohesion. Social cohesion increases after a big earthquake and slowly erodes in periods where environmental conditions are less adverse. Our results contribute to the current debate on whether and how environmental conditions shape formal and informal institutions.

133 p., Esta tesis presenta tres ensayos los cuales abordan temas importantes en Economía desde el punto de vista de la economía del comportamiento y la economía experimental.El primer ensayo trata sobre los efectos de los estereotipos sobre la decisión de dónde competir. Un modelo teórico permite concluir que los estereotipos generan auto-estereotipación lo que contribuye a la segregación social entre torneos. Esto puede explicar parte de la segregación laboral observada en los datos macroeconómicos. Un experimento de laboratorio realizado ex-profeso permite validar las conclusiones de dicho modelo.El segundo ensayo evalúa las diferencias de género en negociaciones con datos de campo. El estudio concluye que el emparejamiento entre un hombre ocupando la posición fuerte negociadora y una mujer ocupando la débil es distinto a cualquier otro emparejamiento pues en esta situación, la parte fuerte obtiene mejores resultados que en cualquier otro emparejamiento. La razón principal es que las mujeres en posiciones débiles demandan menos dinero a los hombres que a otras mujeres.El tercer ensayo presenta un experimento de laboratorio en el que los sujetos deben negociar ante la existencia de distintas fuentes de asimetría. Los resultados indican que en situaciones simétricas no existen diferencias de género pero que una vez se introducen asimetrías en la negociación éstas surgen, especialmente con negociadores inexpertos.

The question discussed in this paper is whether a political society not emancipated from labor can be a free society. In a less abstract way, the question can be posed as follows; can a society with a laboring class and a labor market be free? The question arises because labor and freedom seem to be in conflict, so a society with a working class and a labor market can neither be free nor democratic. The opposition between labor and freedom has always been a central theme in Practical Philosophy, and its recurrent idea that labor involves an irretrievable loss of self-consciousness and, thereby, of freedom has survived right up to this day. The Marxian treatment of alienation is just an outstanding example of this old idea, but not a real novelty. In this paper I intend to explore an alternative path to the still dominant idea of Practical Philosophy by examining the ontological foundations of the alternative response developed by Hegel in his Philosophy of the Spirit.

140 p., En el Acuerdo de Copenhague (2009), los países de desarrollados se comprometieron a movilizar 100.000 millones de dólares anuales para apoyar la acción climática en los países en desarrollo a partir de 2020. Desde entonces, el financiamiento climático se ha convertido en un tema candente de estudio y discusión. Sin embargo, el impacto económico del mismo no ha sido investigado a fondo. Mi tesis se centra en el análisis de este impacto económico desde una perspectiva global. Utilizando una base de datos de insumo-producto multi-regional y global, hallamos el impacto en las economías de los países receptores y el impacto fuera de los mismos (es decir, los efectos de derrame). El análisis abarca diferentes países donantes y receptores y un conjunto variado de acciones de mitigación y adaptación. Por ejemplo, cuantificamos para cada dólar invertido en el despliegue de energía eólica en México cuántos centavos son retenidos por México y cuántos van a otros países. Tras comprobar que cada donante y cada receptor tienen distinta capacidad para atraer y retener el impacto, realizamos análisis de descomposición estructural, para explicar dichas diferencias. Por último, se analiza el efecto de la ayuda vinculada y de los requisitos de contenido local en la magnitud de los efectos derrame sobre los donantes. Esta tesis aporta nuevos hallazgos sobre las implicaciones económicas del financiamiento climático e información valiosa para los gobiernos de países desarrollados y en desarrollo.

116 p., En los últimos años ha habido un creciente interés sobre la desigualdad así como sobre los análisis distributivos de las distintas políticas. La desigualdad también se ha convertido en uno de los principales temas de debate en las agendas de las políticas medioambientales y numeroso estudios se han centrado en conocer quienes soportan los costes derivados de la protección medioambiental. En esta tesis intentamos evaluar el impacto distributivo que las políticas medioambientales tienen en los distintos grupos sociales. Nuestro principal objetivo es contribuir al conocimiento de los análisis distributivos a través de cuatro casos de estudios aplicados a diferentes políticas dirigidas a reducir el cambio climático. Así, esta disertación está estructurada en cuatro diferentes aplicaciones, en cada cuál de ellas tratamos de analizar distintas cuestiones relacionadas con los impactos distributivos.

El Modelo de Simulación de la Economía Española proporciona una herramienta para la representación de la realidad socioeconómica española y para el análisis de los impactos asociados tanto a las modificaciones en las políticas públicas – fundamentalmente presupuestarias – como a los cambios producidos en el entorno exterior. La metodología utilizada es la Dinámica de Sistemas (DS), técnica que resulta muy efectiva para medir el impacto de diferentes escenarios tanto a corto como a medio plazo. Más concretamente, el objetivo es analizar cómo los cambios en las principales palancas del modelo (en las políticas económicas o en las condiciones del contorno económico) pueden afectar a variables macroeconómicas como el PIB, el déficit público y el empleo, entre otras. Como en cada modelo de DS, la recopilación y en su caso elaboración de las series históricas de las variables relevantes es el paso previo para la construcción de un modelo que sea susceptible de reproducir el comportamiento de las principales magnitudes de la economía española en el pasado. Una vez estimado el modelo, y una vez definido el escenario base a corto y medio plazo, los resultados de las diferentes políticas y cambios en el entorno se evalúan comparando los resultados derivados de dichos cambios con los que se obtienen bajo las condiciones definidas en el escenario base.

Documento de trabajo, We consider a coalition formation model in which agents have the possibility of forming part of several coalitions but are limited to participate in only one of them. Coalitions of agents produce outputs to be distributed among their members according to their aspirations and to a rationing rule prevailing in society. The outcome of such a process is a hedonic game. Using monotonicity and consistency we characterize the continuous rationing rules that induce core-stable hedonic games.

Documento de trabajo, Electoral rules translate votes into seats on different basis. Politicians respond differently to alternative electoral rules, and consequently, economic performance is expected to vary across rules. This paper empirically investigates whether electoral rules have an effect –and if so, under which circumstances–on the economic performance of industries. Applying panel data techniques to an extensive dataset covering 61 manufacturing industries from 58 democracies over 1990-2010, we find that industry size –measured by the number of workers to total population– grinds industry economic growth. However, we find very robust evidence that large industries grow less slowly under majoritarian rules than under proportional representation and mixed systems. Based on previous theories suggesting that majoritarian rules are more likely to target narrow-interest groups, we conjecture a multilateral political linkage among officed-oriented politicians, industries and voters which might explain the differential effect of electoral rules on the economic performance of industries.

We develop a network-formation model where the quality of a link depends on the amount invested in it and is determined by a link-formation "technology" , an increasing strictly concave function which is the only exogenous ingredient in the model. The revenue from the investments in links is the information that the nodes receive through the network. Two approaches are considered. First, assuming that the investments in links are made by a planner, the basic question is that of the efficient investments, either relative to a given infrastructure (i.e. a set of feasible links) or in absolute terms. It is proved that efficient networks belong to a special class of weighted nested split graph networks. Second, assuming that links are the result of investments of the node-players involved, there is the question of stability in the underlying network-formation game, be it restricted to a given infrastructure or unrestricted. Necessary and sufficient conditions for stability of the complete and star networks, and nested split graph networks in general, are obtained.

268 p., Los Modelos Ambientales de Evaluación Integrada (MEIs) constituyen una potente herramienta que integra diferentes disciplinas y dimensiones para informar en la toma de decisiones hacia la sostenibilidad. En esta tesis doctoral se aplican dos MEIs centrados en el cambio climático (GCAM y WoLiM) para analizar: (1) las implicaciones de la incertidumbre en la disponibilidad futura de los recursos energéticos fósiles para la futura evolución de los sistemas energéticos, el clima y la sociedad, y (2) las implicaciones de diferentes coaliciones climáticas en el contexto de los acuerdos de París (2015) para el clima y la fuga de carbono de origen industrial y terrestre. En relación a la disponibilidad de los recursos energéticos fósiles, los resultados obtenidos considerando el rango de recursos recuperables en la literatura muestran que potenciales límites a su extracción futura no resolverían por sí solos el problema del cambio climático, aunque se prevé la transición hacia las energías renovables mucho antes que lo estimado por la mayoría de modelos. En relación a las implicaciones de diferentes coaliciones climáticas para el clima y la fuga de carbono de origen industrial y terrestre, los resultados muestran que, la fuga de carbono de origen terrestre podría ser el tipo dominante de fuga de carbono hacia 2050, debido a la deforestación masiva inducida en los países no participantes.

We introduce and analyze a new solution concept for TU games:The Surplus Distributor Prekernel. Like the prekermel, the new solu- tion is based on the an alternative motion of complaint of one player against other with respect to an allocation. The SD-prekernel contains the SD-prenucleolus and they coincide in the class of convex games. This result allows us to prove that in bankruptcy problems the SD-prekernel and the Minimal Overlapping rule select the same allocation.

This paper studies how the size of the labour market aff ects workers' decision to invest in human capital. We consider a model of mismatch where firms rank workers according to their level of skills. The matching process operating in the market has the property that the job fi nding probability of workers depends on market size, market tightness and their ranking. An interesting feature is that, while the job finding probability of workers with a given rank di ffers with market size, the probability of workers with a given level of human capital is constant with the size of the market. The model is consistent with several facts highlighted in empirical studies: In bigger markets the distribution of human capital is more unequal and the returns to skill are higher. We fi nd numerically that the mean level of human capital increases with market size.

In this paper we study ternary trichotomous rules, that allows for three levels of input, positive, neutral and negative and three levels of output, positive, undetermined and negative. We illustrate the interest of such rules on collective identity functions that deal with formation of clubs. Usually the question addressed is whether the individual quali es or does not, and the answer is either positive or not. In some situations it may be relevant to distinguish between unquali cation and disquali cation.

Texto completo, We consider a state holding corporation with two plants that may produce complement or substitute goods and that compete with one or two private firms. We find that the government partially privatizes the two plants of the state holding corporation and is indifferent between selling them partially to a single investor or to different investors. However, in the former case the government retains a greater (lower) stake in the state corporation if goods are substitutes (complements).

This paper presents a role-play game designed by the authors, which focuses on international climate negotiations. The game has been used at a university with students all drawn from the same course and at summer schools with students from different levels (undergraduate, master’s and doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers) and different knowledge areas (economics, law, engineering, architecture, biology and others). We discuss how the game fits into the process of competence-based learning, and what benefits games, and role-play games in particular, have for teaching. In the game, students take on the role of representatives of national institutions and experience at first hand a detailed process of international negotiation concerned with climate change.

The ADAPTECC Climate Change Adaptation Game is a role-play game designed to enable players to experience the difficulties that arise at local and regional levels when authorities have to implement adaptation measures. Adaptation means anticipating the advert effects of climate change (CC) and taking measures to prevent and minimise the damage caused by its impacts. Each player takes the role of the mayor or a councillor of a town affected by CC who must decide what adaptation strategies and measures to take, or of a member of the Regional Environment Department which must distribute funding for adaptation among the various towns. At the end of the game, players should have a greater understanding of the challenges posed by adaptation to CC

El Juego de la Adaptación al Cambio Climático (ADAPTECC) es un juego de Rol diseñado para que los participantes experimenten las dificultades que surgen, tanto a nivel local como a nivel regional, cuando las autoridades correspondientes tienen que adoptar medidas de adaptación. La adaptación requiere anticipar los efectos adversos del Cambio Climático (CC) y tomar medidas para prevenir y minimizar el daño debido a los impactos del CC. Cada jugador se introduce en el rol de un alcalde o concejal de un municipio afectado por el CC, que debe decidir sobre las estrategias y medidas de adaptación de su municipio, o bien en el rol de un miembro del Departamento de Medio Ambiente de la región que debe repartir el presupuesto para adaptación entre los diferentes municipios. Al finalizar el juego, los participantes tendrán una mejor comprensión de los retos que plantea la adaptación al CC.

This study revisits different experimental data sets that explore social behavior in economic games and uncovers that many treatment effects may be gender-specific. In general, men and women do not differ in "neutral" baselines. However, we find that social framing tends to reinforce prosocial behavior in women but not men, whereas encouraging reflection decreases the prosociality of males but not females. The treatment effects are sometimes statistically different across genders and sometimes not but never go in the opposite direction. These findings suggest that (i) the social behavior of both sexes is malleable but each gender responds to different aspects of the social context; and (ii) gender differences observed in some studies might be the result of particular features of the experimental design. Our results contribute to the literature on prosocial behavior and may improve our understanding of the origins of human prosociality. We discuss the possible link between the observed differential treatment effects across genders and the differing male and female brain network connectivity, documented in recent neural studies.

Documento de trabajo, In an extended Uzawa-Lucas model that includes labor-leisure decisions, sector-speci c externalities in the production of goods generate a market failure relative to the socially optimal decisions. We show that, regardless of whether agents value pure or effective units of leisure, the first best solution can be attained either by using a time-varying subsidy to the human capital employed to produce goods or by combining consumption and labor income taxes with this type of subsidy. Moreover, when leisure is de ned as raw time, we fi nd that even when there is global determinacy, local indeterminacy may arise for several combinations of the parameters that are consistent with empirical evidence and previous literature. Importantly, under local indeterminacy the optimal policy does not ensure that identical economies will converge to the same per capita levels. Thus, not only the size and type of human capital externalities are important for optimal policy but also the indeterminacy aspects are relevant.

This paper investigates whether the effect of political institutions on sectoral economic performance is determined by the level of technological development of industries. Building on previous studies on the linkages among political institutions, technology and economic growth, we employ the dynamic panel Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) estimator for a sample of 4,134 country-industries from 61 industries and 89 countries over the 1990-2010 period. Our main findings suggest that changes of political institutions towards higher levels of democracy, political rights and civil liberties enhance economic growth in technologically developed industries. On the contrary, the same institutional changes might retard economic growth of those industries that are below a technological development threshold. Overall, these results give evidence of a technologically conditioned nature of political institutions to be growth-promoting.

This chapter studies multilingual democratic societies with highly developed economies. These societies are assumed to have two languages with official status: language A, spoken by every individual, and language B, spoken by the bilingual minority. We emphasize that language rights are important, but the survival of the minority language B depends mainly on the actual use bilinguals make of B. The purpose of the present chapter is to study some of the factors affecting the bilingual speakers language choice behaviour. Our view is that languages with their speech communities compete for speakers just as fi rms compete for market share. Thus, the con ict among the minority languages in these societies does not take the rough expressions such as those studied in Desmet et al. (2012). Here the con flict is more subtle. We model highly plausible language choice situations by means of choice procedures and non-cooperative games, each with different types of information. We then study the determinants of the bilinguals ' strategic behaviour with regard to language. We observe that the bilinguals' use of B is shaped, essentially, by linguistic conventions and social norms that are developed in situations of language contact.

In this paper we study a simple mathematical model of a bilingual community in which all agents are f luent in the majority language but only a fraction of the population has some degree of pro ficiency in the minority language. We investigate how different distributions of pro ficiency, combined with the speaker´attitudes towards or against the minority language, may infl uence its use in pair conversations.

This paper studies the impact of "liberalizing " the cost-sharing of links on some basic models of network formation. This is done in a setting where both doubly supported and singly supported links are possible, and which includes the two seminal models of network formation by Jackson and Wolinsky and Bala and Goyal as extreme cases. In this setting, the notion of pairwise stability is extended and it is proved that liberalizing cost-sharing for doubly supported links widens the range of values of the parameters where the efficient networks formed by such type of links are pairwise stable, while the range of values of the parameters where the efficient networks formed by singly supported links are pairwise stable shrinks, but the region where the latter are e¢ cient and pairwise stable remains the same.

This paper studies the e ect of home-owners' migration costs on migration and unemployment in an economy where workers move both for work- and nonwork- related reasons. To this end, a search model with heterogeneous locations is developed and calibrated to the U.S. economy. Consistent with the empirical evidence, the model predicts that home-owners have a lower unemployment rate than renters despite their higher migration costs. The result is due to home-owners' higher transition rate to employment and lower transition rate to unemployment.In addition, the model generates lower inequality in home-owners' local unemployment rates than in renters'. In line with this result, it is documented that, for the period 1996-2013, home-owners had less unemployment dispersion across metropolitan areas than renters.

This paper investigates zoning in a cross-border linear city that consists of two bordering towns. In each town a local regulator has a say in the location of the local firm. The incentive to gain consumers from the other town, or not to lose local consumers, may push regulators to approve only locations for firms close enough to the frontier. When zoning is costly an asymmetric equilibrium may emerge: only one regulator resorts to zoning. In the case of towns of different sizes the regulator of the larger town is the only one that zones in an asymmetric equilibrium.

Documentos de Trabajo, The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, the incomplete results relative to effciency in a transitional model introduced in a previous paper, distinguishing two types of links, strong or doubly-supported and weak or singly-supported, are completed with a full-characterization. Second, as it turns out, effcient structures are stable only for a small range of values of the parameters within the much wider range where they are effcient. This motivates the study of the impact on stability of allowing players to negotiate bilaterally the shares of the cost of doubly-supported links.

En este artículo presentamos un juego de rol sobre negociación climática internacional que ha sido diseñado por los autores. El juego ha sido utilizado tanto en la universidad, con alumnos que están cursando los mismos estudios, como en cursos de verano con alumnos de diferentes niveles de formación (estudiantes de grado o master, estudiantes de doctorado e investigadores postdoctorales) y áreas de conocimiento (economía, derecho, ingeniería, arquitectura, biología,.. etc.). Se muestra, además, cómo encaja el juego en el proceso de aprendizaje por competencias, así como los beneficios que tiene el uso de juegos, y concretamente juegos de rol o “role-playing” en la docencia. A través del juego, los alumnos asumen el rol de representante institucional de un país y viven, en primera persona, los pormenores de una negociación internacional sobre Cambio Climático.

In elections voters have generally four options: to abstain, to cast a blank vote, to cast a null vote, or to vote for a candidate or party. This last option is a positive expression of support, while the other three options reflect lack of interest, or dissatisfaction with the parties or the political system. However only votes for parties or candidates are taken into account in the apportionment method. In particular the number of seats allocated to parties remains constant even if the number of non votes (i.e. blank votes, null votes or abstention) is very large. This paper proposes to treat the non votes as a party in the apportionment method and to leave empty the corresponding seats. These empty seats are referred to as "ghost seats". How this would affect the decision-making is quantified in terms of power indices. We apply this proposal to a case study:the regional Parliament of the Basque Autonomous Community (Spain) from 1980 till 2012.

Documento de trabajo, In this paper we analyze the welfare effects of third-degree price discrimination when competitive pressure varies across markets. In particular, we study the economic aspects of the Robinson-Patman Act associated with the “meeting competition defense.” Using equilibrium models, the main result we find is that this defense might be used successfully in cases of primary line injury precisely when it should not be used, namely when price discrimination reduces social welfare. This result obtains both when discrimination appears in the final good market and when it is used in the intermediate goods market. We also find that these results may drastically change under secondary line injury.

Documento de trabajo, We provide a model that merges two basic models of strategic network formation and incorporates them as extreme cases: Jackson and Wolinsky' s connections model based on bilateral formation of links, and Bala and Goyal' s two-way flow model, where links can be unilaterally formed. In our model a link can be created unilaterally, but when it is only supported by one of the two players the flow through it suffers some friction or decay, but more than when it is supported by both players. When the friction in singly-supported links is maximal (i.e. there is no fl ow) we have Jackson and Wolinsky 's connections model, while when fl ow in singly-supported links is as good as in doubly-supported links we have Bala and Goyal' s two-way flow model. In this setting, a joint generalization of the results relative to efficiency and stability in both seminal papers is achieved, and the robustness in both models is tested with positive results.

Sex workers are traditionally considered important vectors of transmission of sexually transmitted infections (STI). The role of clients is commonly overlooked, partially due to the lack of evidence on clients' position in the sexual network created by commercial sex. Contrasting the diffusion importance of sex workers and their clients in the map of their sexual encounters in two Web-mediated communities, we find that from diffusion perspective, clients are as important as sex workers. Their diffusion importance is closely linked to the geography of the sexual encounters: as a result of different movement patterns, travelling clients shorten network distances between distant network neighborhoods and thus facilitate contagion among them more than sex workers, and find themselves more often in the core of the network by which they could contribute to the persistence of STIs in the community. These findings position clients into the set of the key actors and highlight the role of human mobility in the transmission of STIs in commercial sexual networks.

In this paper we propose a simple method of characterizing countervailing incentives in adverse selection problems. The key element in our characterization consists of analyzing properties of the full information problem. This allows solving the principal problem without using optimal control theory. Our methodology can also be applied to different economic settings: health economics, monopoly regulation, labour contracts, limited liabilities and environmental regulation.

The aim of this paper is to propose a new solution for the roommate problem with strict preferences. We introduce the solution of maximum irreversibility and consider almost stable matchings (Abraham et al. [2])and maximum stable matchings (Ta [30] [32]). We find that almost stable matchings are incompatible with the other two solutions. Hence, to solve the roommate problem we propose matchings that lie at the intersection of the maximum irreversible matchings and maximum stable matchings, which are called Q-stable matchings. These matchings are core consistent and we offer an effi cient algorithm for computing one of them. The outcome of the algorithm belongs to an absorbing set.

Roughly one half of World's languages are in danger of extinction. The endangered languages, spoken by minorities, typically compete with powerful languages such as En- glish or Spanish. Consequently, the speakers of minority languages have to consider that not everybody can speak their language, converting the language choice into strategic,coordination-like situation. We show experimentally that the displacement of minority languages may be partially explained by the imperfect information about the linguistic type of the partner, leading to frequent failure to coordinate on the minority language even between two speakers who can and prefer to use it. The extent of miscoordination correlates with how minoritarian a language is and with the real-life linguistic condition of subjects: the more endangered a language the harder it is to coordinate on its use, and people on whom the language survival relies the most acquire behavioral strategies that lower its use. Our game-theoretical treatment of the issue provides a new perspective for linguistic policies.

Documento de trabajo, We provide a model that bridges de gap between the simplest variation of two benchmark models of strategic network formation: Bala and Goyal s one-way ow model without decay, where links can be unilaterally formed, and a variation without decay of Jackson and Wolinsky s connections model based on bilateral formation of links. In the model introduced here, a link can be created unilaterally, but when it is only supported by one player the ow through the link only occurs towards the player supporting it and su¤ers some degree of decay, while when it is supported by both the ow runs without friction in both directions. When the decay in links supported by only one player is maximal (i.e. there is no ow) we have Jackson and Wolinsky s connections model without decay, while when ow in those links is perfect towards the player supporting them, we have Bala and Goyal s one-way ow model. We study Nash, strict Nash and pairwise Nash stability for the intermediate models. E¢ ciency and dynamics are also discussed.

In everyday economic interactions, it is not clear whether sequential choices are visible or not to other participants: agents might be deluded about opponents'capacity to acquire,interpret or keep track of data, or might simply unexpectedly forget what they previously observed (but not chose). Following this idea, this paper drops the assumption that the information structure of extensive-form games is commonly known; that is, it introduces uncertainty into players' capacity to observe each others' past choices. Using this approach, our main result provides the following epistemic characterisation: if players (i) are rational,(ii) have strong belief in both opponents' rationality and opponents' capacity to observe others' choices, and (iii) have common belief in both opponents' future rationality and op-ponents' future capacity to observe others' choices, then the backward induction outcome obtains. Consequently, we do not require perfect information, and players observing each others' choices is often irrelevant from a strategic point of view. The analysis extends {from generic games with perfect information to games with not necessarily perfect information{the work by Battigalli and Siniscalchi (2002) and Perea (2014), who provide different sufficient epistemic conditions for the backward induction outcome.

This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of a permanent increase in foreign aid in a model that takes into account environmental quality. We develop a dynamic equilibrium model in which both public investment in infrastructure and environmental protection can be financed using domestic resources and international aid programs. The framework considers four scenarios for international aid: untied aid,aid fully tied to infrastructure, aid fully tied to abatement, and aid equally tied to both types of expenditures. We find that the effects of the transfers may depend on (i) the structural characteristics of the recipient country (the elasticity of substitution in production and its dependence on environment and natural resources) and on (ii) how recipient countries distribute their public expenditure. These results underscore the importance of these factors when deciding how and to what extent to tie aid to infrastructure and/or pollution abatement.

We study the language choice behavior of bilingual speakers in modern societies, such as the Basque Country, Ireland andWales. These countries have two o cial languages:A, spoken by all, and B, spoken by a minority. We think of the bilinguals in those societies as a population playing repeatedly a Bayesian game in which, they must choose strategically the language, A or B, that might be used in the interaction. The choice has to be made under imperfect information about the linguistic type of the interlocutors. We take the Nash equilibrium of the language use game as a model for real life language choice behavior. It is shown that the predictions made with this model t very well the data about the actual use, contained in the censuses, of Basque, Irish and Welsh languages. Then the question posed by Fishman (2001),which appears in the title, is answered as follows: it is hard, mainly, because bilingual speakers have reached an equilibrium which is evolutionary stable. This means that to solve fast and in a re ex manner their frequent language coordination problem, bilinguals have developed linguistic conventions based chie y on the strategy 'Use the same language as your interlocutor', which weakens the actual use of B.1