A partly heuristic attempt at exploring long-run policies aimed at a second-best compromise between ex ante risk-sharing efficiency and ex post productive efficiency. Wage subsidies for low-skilled workers financed by taxes on high wages are advocated, together with improved risk sharing between...

This note presents a modest extension of the very useful "theorem of the deductible" (Arrow, American Economic Review, 1963). The extension concerns ex post moral hazard in medical insurance. Under full insurance above a deductible, the marginal cost of treatment to the insured is zero,...

Can European economics become “the most dynamic and competitive in the world”? Using readily accessible data, the paper documents the following aspects: (i) today, the US outperform Europe by a factor of the order of 3, with no clear trend; the Lisbon goal is not in sight; (ii) Europe is not...

The paper defines a simple tatonnement process of adjustments in prices and quantities, where excess demand results in nominal price increases and excess supply results in quantity rationing of supply at unchanged prices. Under reasonable assumptions, the process converges to a...

The paper studies equilibria for economies with imperfect competition and non-convex technologies. Following Negishi, firms maximise profits under downward-sloping perceived demand functions. Negishi's assumptions, in particular the assumption of a single monopolistic competitor in each market,...

This paper, prepared for an lEA Conference in honour of James Meade on The Economics of Partnership, analyses the rationale and prospects for using cyclical variations in Social Insurance Contributions (SIC) as a means to reconcile wage flexibility with efficient risk-sharing between capital and...

The introduction of banks that issue money and supply balances and pay out their profis as dividends is the natural modification of the model of general competitive equilibrium that encompasses monetary economies with an operative transactions technology. Monetary policy sets nominal rates of...

This paper examines a model of multi-jurisdictional formation considered by Alesina and Spolaore (1997) and Le Breton and Weber (2003), where the distribution of individuals is given by Lebesgue measure over the (finite or infinite) interval. Every jurisdiction chooses a location of a public...