This paper shows that with a strong labour union, bargaining over piece rate generates higher social welfare than bargaining over fixed wage. Moreover, this social welfare exceeds the social welfare under efficient bargaining level, if the union is very strong.

We describe the relation between welfare growth and productivity growth. We argue that differences in productivity and productivity growth between sectors or countries are irrelevant from a policy perspective. Specialisation is based on the comparative advantages of countries. Since, by nature,...

The point of departure in this paper is the diagnosis of Hoehn and Szymanski (1999) that the interlocking system of European football creates an unbalanced system. To secure competitive balance at both the European and the national level, they recommend to reform European football into a closed...

With all the talk in Europe about “Islam” and “Muslim culture” it is surprising how little hard-core empirical evidence exists on the compatibility of “Muslim culture” with positive patterns of political, social, and ecological development in the world system in the 1980s, 1990s, and...

SOMMARIO: Introduzione. - 1. Misurare l'equilibrio competitivo del calcio europeo - 2. Il mercato per i diritti di trasmissione televisiva del calcio - 2.1 Il lato dell'offerta - 2.2 il lato della domanda - 2.3 Policy implications - 3. Conclusioni

This paper develops a positive analysis of alliance formation that builds on a simple economic model featuring a “winner-take-all” contest for control of some resource. When an alliance forms, members pool their efforts in that contest and,if successful, apply the resource to a joint...

Several recent papers argue that price matching policies raise equilibrium prices. We add to this literature by considering potential welfare losses, which have two sources: Harberger triangles from high prices and Posner rectangles from over-entry. We compare markets with price matching and...

This paper presents a model of smoking choice in which rationality is bounded by limitations in intertemporal computational abilities. The model is applied to the youth decision to initiate smoking. Lifetime smoking paths of representative smokers indicate that youths may experience a reduction...

We identify and investigate the basic `hold-up' problem which arises whenever each party to a contingent contract has to pay some ex-ante cost for the contract to become feasible. We then proceed to show that, under plausible circumstances, a `contractual solution' to this hold-up problem is not...

We investigate the role that self-control problems modeled as time-inconsistent, present-biased preferences and a person's awareness of those problems might play in leading people to develop and maintain harmful addictions. Present-biased preferences create a tendency to over-consume addictive...