We characterize how public insurance schemes are constrained by hidden financial transactions. When non-exclusive private insurance entails increasing unit transaction costs, public transfers are only partly offset by hidden private transactions, and can influence consumption allocation. We show...

Concerns about loneliness and social isolation are growing more than ever. With the COVID-19 pandemic entering its second year, there are fears that the toll on loneliness could have consequences long after the virus recedes. This study offers a comparative overview of the incidence and...

Identifying the determinants of intergenerational mobility is an important aim in the development literature. In this article, intergenerational transmission is examined for 6 neglected Latin American Economies (Brazil, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama and Puerto Rico). We use a multinomial...

This paper disentangles the distributional and welfare impact of price changes since the start of the cost of living crisis for a subset of European countries with different welfare regimes and price changes. It decomposes the impact of inflation and measures welfare changes using the...

This paper investigates the gendered effects of the cost-of-living crisis on households across six European countries using household consumption data linked to price changes between April 2021 and July 2023. It examines how different consumption patterns between male- and female-headed...

Empirical research on the determinants of right and left-wing extremist election successes is still dominated by descriptive statistical methods. The existing literature in political economy and political science mainly relies on interviews and survey results as well as on qualitative analyses...

The perfectly competitive market - a hypothetical situation free of market failure - is the basis for the two fundamental welfare theorems, and an important benchmark for economic theory. The radical abstractions of this idea, however, make its full implications hard to grasp. I address this...

We present a simple framework for analyzing decline in union voice in the Anglo-American world and its replacement by non-union, often direct, forms of worker voice. We argue that it is a decline in the in-flow to unionisation among employers and workers, rather than an increase in the outflow...

We estimate how trade openness affects the relationship between wages, labour productivity and foreign wages using sector-level time series for several EU member states. In some countries wages became less responsive to foreign wages as trade costs declined. We show this counter-intuitive result...

The Coase theorem emphasizes the role transactions costs play in efficient market outcomes. We document inefficient outcomes, in the presence of a transactions cost, in southern California land markets and the corresponding transition to efficient outcomes after the transactions cost is...