Many important intertemporal decisions, such as investments of firms or households, are made by groups rather than individuals. Little is known what happens to such collective decisions when group members have different incentives for waiting, because the economics literature on group decision...

This study investigates the influence of gender composition on allocation decisions involving a rank–inequality tradeoff. In a laboratory experiment, participants chose to either alleviate inequality by relinquishing their current relative rank or exacerbate inequality by maintaining their...

Despite the growing concern about actual on-going climate change, there is little consensus about the scale and timing of actions needed to stabilise the concentrations of greenhouse gases. Many countries are unwilling to implement effective mitigation strategies, at least in the short-term, and...

This paper provides a quantitative comparison of the main architectures for an agreement on climate policy. Possible successors to the Kyoto protocol are assessed according to four criteria: economic efficiency; environmental effectiveness; distributional implications; and their political...

We analyze equally competitive spouses competing for promotion in their respective workplaces and show that an asymmetric equilibrium featuring household specialization can arise. Examples where the asymmetric equilibrium is welfare-superior to the symmetric equilibrium are highlighted. By...

We analyze optimal redistribution in the presence of labor market signaling where innate productive ability is not only unobserved by the government, but also by prospective employers. Signaling in both one and two dimensions is considered, where in the latter case firms have an informational...

We study the joint design of nonlinear income and education taxes when the government pursues redistributive objectives. A key feature of our setup is that the ability type of an agent can affect both the costs and benefits of acquiring education. Market remuneration of agents depends on both...