In this paper we study the mechanics of ``leading by example'' in teams. Leadership is beneficial for the entire team when agents are conformists, i.e., dislike effort differentials. We also show how leadership can arise endogenously and discuss what type of leader benefits a team most.

We develop a model where agents obtain information about job opportunities through an explicitly modeled network of social contacts. We show that an improvement in the employment status of either an agent's direct or indirect contacts leads to an increase in the agent's employment probability...

Removal of tariff restrictions from the relatively low-skill sectors; growth in foreign direct investment; and, decline of trade union strength of the unskilled workers are cited in the empirical literature as the prime factors responsible for the growing incidence of wage inequality in many of...

The paper is purported to analyze the impact of skill formation on the skilled-unskilled wage inequality using a few variants of the HOS-type framework. It shows that the effect of skill formation on the wage inequality depends crucially upon the technologies of production of the economy and...

The present note develops a three sector general equilibrium structure with diverse trade pattern and imperfection in the unskilled labour market to analyze the consequences of international mobility of skilled and unskilled labour on the skilled-unskilled wage inequality in the developing...

The objective of this work is to analyse the income inequality in the 15 EU countries during the convergence process to the Monetary Union. Using the information contained in the European Community Household Panel, corresponding to the four first waves. Using the inverse second order stochastic...

The national budget affects life and death via its allocations in areas such as traffic safety, flood control, public health and the like. When the cost-effectiveness of an intervention is evaluated, common effect measures are the number of lives extended (saved) and the expected lifeyears...

This note is motivated by recent arguments made by Martin Feldstein in which the relevance of inequality is dismissed (if everybody's income goes up, who cares if inequality is up too?), and the argument is made that only poverty alleviation should matter. This note shows that we all do care...

This paper contributes to the growing literature on happiness research by examining whether happiness affects the ethical decisions of individuals. First, a recursive model of ethical decision making is developed in which an agent's utility is assumed to be a function of money, ethical...

We examine the characteristics and relative strength of third-party sanctions in a series of experiments. We hypothesize that egalitarian distribution norms and cooperation norms apply in our experiments, and that third parties, whose economic payoff is unaffected by the norm violation, may be...