A profit-maximizing auctioneer can provide a public good to a group of agents. Each group member has a private value for the good being provided to the group. We investigate an auction mechanism where the auctioneer provides the good to the group, only if the sum of their bids exceeds a reserve...

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...

This chapter analyzes the effects of an aging population on individual skill choices and the production structure by means of a dynamic general equilibrium model with overlapping generations and probabilistic aging. The model allows for capital-skill complementarity, which strongly affects the...

In this paper we first show that if a not-necessarily-self-financing portfolio has instantaneously riskless internal gains, then on an infinitesimal time-interval, the increase in the internal gains on the portfolio is the same as the change in the price of that amount of bonds which has the...

Mature federations have relatively transparent delineations of authority among levels of government; subnational governments enjoy considerable autonomy in their expenditure, revenue, and debt policies. In other countries, problems of soft budget constraints, bailouts, and fiscal and financial...

In the model of Funaki and Yamato (1999) the tragedy of the commons can be avoided with pessimistic players, while this does not hold for optimistic players. We propose a new core concept to overcome this puzzle and provide numerical simulations of simple games where the conclusions coincide or...