The paper is devoted to an econometric analysis of learning foreign languages in all parts of the world. Our sample covers 193 countries and 13 important languages. Four factors significantly explain learning. All four affect the broad decision to learn but the last two also point to the choice...

Polarization measures, that are used in examining the empirical relationship between ethnic divisions and violent conflict, heavily rely on mechanisms of group identification and often use somewhat arbitrary divisions of a society into ethnic groups. In this paper we construct two new measures...

We discuss a subscription game in which service providers (e.g., museums)team up in offering a limited time subscription or access pass allowing unlimited usage of their services. In this game, a natural way to allocate the subscription income among the service providers is by using the Shapley...

We show how the general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets can be represented by a welfare program and we use this program to prove several well-known results. The approach is general in the sense that it uses a nonlinear specification for returns on assets and does not require...

We consider a linguistically diversified society that has to select a set of languages to be used for official purposes. We examine the notion of language disenfranchisement that is created when one or more languages fail to be included in the list of the official ones, implying that some...

Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but need, in most cases, to be translated. According to some authors, this may lead to a form of cultural domination, in particular of English, on other languages. All these papers ignore that thepopulation speaking English as a first...

Most papers on returns to languages are concerned with immigrants. We use the European Community Household Panel Survey (ECHP) to infer returns on non-native languages by non-immigrants in nine countries of the European Union. We differ fromthe few other studies that deal with the same problem...

We analyze the empirical relationship between journal prices, their quality measured by their citation counts, their age, as well as conduct of publishers. The database covers 22 scientific fields and over 2600 among the most highly reputed and cited journals in 2003. We show that (a) for-profit...

Pianists who achieve high scores in the Queen Elizabeth musical competition are rewarded by subsequent success. This is not surprising in itself, but it is not immediately clear whether this is caused by the score or because those who have high scores are better pianists. Data on eleven...

In this paper we consider a model of oligopolistic competition where firms make a two-dimensional product line decision. They choose a location in style space, thus, inducing horizontal differentiation, and produce different qualities (a product line) of a given good (vertical differentiation),...