The goal of this paper is to explore how the connection between political ideology and voters’ preferences is able to generate different equilibria in a yardstick competition game, where good incumbents are forced to create a bad reputation or, in other words, to mimic the bad incumbents’...

This paper investigates the presence of Granger-causality amongst market indices in six Asian stock markets: Malaysia, India, China, Pakistan, the Philippine and Japan, from April 7th 1992 to July 23rd 2008. Using daily market returns I performed a Granger-causality test, based on the Vector...

In this paper I analyse a probabilistic voting model where self-interested governments set their taxation policies in order to maximise the probabil- ity of winning elections. Society is divided into groups which have di¤erent preferences for the consumption of goods. Results show how...

This very brief paper aims to provide some little microeconomic hints in order to explain the early retirement of workers. In particular, the hipothesis of quasi-concavity of the utility function, differences in wage rates and in pension benefits are all factors which may contribute to force a...

In this paper I will introduce a new political economy model, where there exists a competition amongst two political candidates, which aim to set a policy which enables them to win elections, max- imising the probability of winning. I will show that, if taxes neces- sary to repay the debt are...

In this paper I test the normality of returns of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) from January 1st 1990 to December 5th 2008. Results obtained by Kolmogorov - Smirnov, Shapiro - Wilk and Skewness - Kurtosis tests are robust in demonstrating that the hypothesis of...

The central purpose of this paper is to introduce a new political economy approach which explains the characteristics of Social Security Systems. This approach is based on the Single-Mindedness Theory (SMT), which assumes that the more single-minded groups are able to exert a greater power of...

In this paper I analyse a labour market where the wage is endogenously determined according to an Efficient Bargaining process between a firm and a labour union whose members are partitioned into two social groups: the old and the young. Furthermore, I exploit the Single-Mindedness theory, which...

In this paper I perform a panel data analysis to evaluate whether �- nancial technical indicators are able to predict stock market returns. By using a panel of 40 stocks taken from the Financial Times Stock Exchange (FTSE) observed in 2004, I test the ability of 75 amongst the most famous...

The aim of the following work is to exploit principal econometric tecniques to test the Capital Asset Pricing Model theory in Italian equity markets. CAPM is a financial model which describes expected returns of any assets (or asset portfolio) as a function of the expected return on the market...