In spite of the great U-turn that saw income inequality rise in Western countries in the 1980s, happiness inequality has fallen in countries that have experienced income growth (but not in those that did not). Modern growth has reduced the share of both the “very unhappy” and the...

We develop a simple dynamic model of decision making in the presence of moral constraints. Norm violations induce a temporal feeling of guilt that depreciates with time. Due to endogenous fluctuations of guilt, people exhibit a dynamic inconsistency in social preferences—a behavior we term...

We introduce the papers in this volume and put them into the context of the literature on land use regulation. We then synthesise and draw some conclusions from existing research on land use regulation and interpret the evidence currently available. In the light of this review we then identify...

Drawing on recent work concerning the statistical robustness of inequality statistics we examine the sensitivity of poverty indices to data contamination using the concept of the influence function. We show that poverty and inequality indices have fundamentally different robustness properties,...

After some decades of relative oblivion, the interest in the optimality properties of monopolistic competition has recently re-emerged due to the availability of an appropriate and parsimonious framework to deal with firm heterogeneity. Within this framework we show that non-separable utility,...

We study a dynamic general equilibrium model in which firms choose their investment level and their capital structure, trading off the tax advantages of debt against the risk of costly default. The costs of bankruptcy are endogenously determined, as bankrupt firms are forced to liquidate their...

With L∞ as the commodity space, the equilibrium price density is shown to be a continuous function of the commodity characteristics. The result is based on symmetry ideas from the Hardy-Littlewood-Pólya theory of rearrangements; and it includes, but is not limited to, the case of symmetric...

This is a new formal framework for the theory of competitive equilibrium and its applications. Our “short-run approach” means the calculation of long-run producer optima and general equilibria from the short-run solutions to the producer’s profit maximization programme and its dual. The...

The “short-run approach” calculates long-run producer optima and general equilibria by building on short-run solutions to the producer’s profit maximization problem and on profit-based valuation of the fixed inputs. We outline this method and illustrate it on an example of peak-load pricing.

This paper studies how differences in the size of barriers to capital accumulation can account for differences in long run economic development paths. In this model barriers affect both the beginning date and the pace of the modern economic growth. A fundamental property of the model is that...