This paper investigates how families make decisions about the education of juveniles. The decision problem is analyzed in three variations: a 'decentralized' scheme, in which the parents control the purse-strings, but the children dispose of their time as they see fit; a 'hierarchical' scheme,...

We examine the incentives to self-select into politics and how they depend on the transparency of the entry process. To this end, we set up a two-stage political competition model and test its key mechanisms in the lab. At the entry stage, potential candidates compete in a contest to become...

Many decisions taken in legislatures or committees are subject to lobbying efforts. A seminal contribution to the literature on vote-buying is the legislative lobbying model pioneered by Groseclose and Snyder (1996), which predicts that lobbies will optimally form supermajorities in many cases....

What is the right balance among policy interventions in order to ensure economic growth over the long run when an epidemic causes heavy mortality among young adults? We argue that, in general, policies to combat the disease and promote education must be concentrated, in certain ways, on some...

We consider a three-stage game to examine how market integration affects firms' incentives to provide general worker training. In stage 1, firms invest in productivity-enhancing training. In stage 2, they can make wage offers for each others' workers. Finally, Cournot competition takes place....

In a two-sector-economy with real wage rigidity, we examine how technical progress in one sector affects aggregate unemployment. We show that aggregate unemployment decreases for uneven technical change in the case of Cobb-Douglas production functions. For every type of technical progress there...

This paper analyzes the effects of sociological changes in the form of a shift of influence within two-member households participating in labor and product markets. The most striking effects occur when household members differ in individual preferences and enjoy positive leisure-dependent...

We examine whether democratic societies can escape poverty traps. Unrestricted agenda setting with simple majority rules fail to educate a society, because education-enhancing redistribution will not occur. We show that a combination of suitable constitutional rules overcomes this impossibility...