This paper examines if taking into account changes in the number of producers, or equivalently changes in the product variety space over the business cycle, helps to understand and replicate international business cycle facts. To this end, we develop a two-country model in which the economy is...

We study experimentally a standard four-player Hotelling game, with a uniform density of consumers and inelastic demand. The pure strategy Nash equilibrium configuration consists of two firms located at one quarter of the ``linear city'', and the other two at three quarters. We do not observe...

The objective of this article is to investigate whether, despite of the goal of utility maximization defended by the neo-classic economic theory, the altruism can prevail inside organizations. Initially, one brief discussion of the altruism will be presented, analyzing this concept from some...

Using the tools of Welfare Economics, the study estimates states' weights in the social welfare function of contemporary Brazil. Based on PNAD 2009 microdata, two methods of calculating the weights were applied: the Equally Distributed Equivalent Income (EDEI) and the average marginal utilities...

This paper aims to describe the ongoing process of regional convergence among Brazilian metropolitan areas and the rest of the country, examining its main reasons and highlighting its importance to the overall decline in income inequality. Our analysis shows that, since the early 1980's, per...

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the origins of a critical process in the North American economy before the subprime crisis, namely, the increasing debt of households. It is argued that causes of this indebtedness are alterations in income distribution (an increased concentration of...