That historical inequality can affect long run macroeconomic performance has been argued by a large literature on ‘endogenous inequality’ using models of indivisibilities in occupational choice, in the presence of borrowing constraints. These models are characterized by a continuum of steady...

Executive Directors of the International Monetary Fund elect the Fund’s Managing Director from a shortlist of three candidates; financial quotas of IMF members define the respective numbers of votes. The implied a priori distribution of success (preference satisfaction) is compared across...

Traditional power indices ignore preferences and strategic interaction. Equilibrium analysis of particular non-cooperative decision procedures is unsuitable for normative analysis and assumes typically unavailable information. These points drive a lingering debate about the right approach to...

The European Union (EU) has moved towards bicameralism, making the codecision procedure its most important mechanism for decision making. To gauge if European Parliament (EP) and Council of Ministers (CM) are equally powerful codecision makers', understanding of the final stage of the procedure...

This paper analyzes the a priori influence of the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of Ministers (CM) on legislation of the European Union adopted under its codecision procedure. In contrast to studies which use conventional power indices, both institutions are assumed to act...

The paper investigates the effects of intra-family talent transmission when human capital exhibits indivisibilities and parental financing of education involves borrowing constraints. Positive talent correlation reduces social mobility but steady state inequality and macroeconomic...

The paper analyzes the appointment of the European Commission as a strategic game between members of the European Parliament and the Council. The focal equilibrium results in Commissioners that duplicate the policy preferences of national Council representatives. Different internal decision...

Power indices are mappings that quantify the influence of the members of a voting body on collective decisions a priori. Their nonlinearity and discontinuity makes it difficult to compute inverse images, i.e., to determine a voting system which induces a power distribution as close as possible...

The paper investigates price formation in a decentralized market with random matching. Agents are assumed to have subdued social preferences: buyers, for example, prefer a lower price to a higher one but experience reduced utility increases below a reference price which serves as a common...