We introduce the notion of language disenfranchisement which arises if the number of EU working languages is reduced. We use the data on language proficiency in EU and show that, in spite of the widespread knowledge of English, the retention of French and German as working languages in essential...

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 of English. The population speaking English as a first language is, with the exception of Mandarin, the largest in the...

We examine patterns of acquiring non-native languages in a model with two languages and two populations with heterogeneous learning skills, where every individual faces a binary choice of learning the foreign language or refraining from doing so. We show that both interior and corner linguistic...

We analyze the welfare consequences of an increase in the commissions charged by the organizer of an auction. Commissions are similar to taxes imposed on buyers and sellers and the economic problem that results looks similar to the question of tax incidence in consumer economics. We argue,...

In this note we consider a society that partitions itself into disjoint jurisdictions, each choosing a location of its public project and a taxation scheme to finance it. The set of public project is multi-dimensional, and their costs could vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. We impose two...

We consider a model of the “world" with several regions that may create a unified entity or be partitioned into several unions (countries). The regions have distinct preferences over policies chosen in the country to which they belong and equally share the cost of public policies. It is known...

Consider a population of citizens uniformly spread over the entire plane, that faces a problem of locating public facilities to be used by its members. The cost of every facility is financed by its users, who also face an idiosyncratic private access cost to the facility. We assume that the...

In this paper we consider a model with two industrialised countries and immigrants that come from “the rest of the world”. The countries are distinguished on the basis of three parameters: population size, bias towards immigrants, and production complementarity between native population and...