We examine why heterogenous communities may fail to provide public goods. Current work characterizes sanctioning free-riders as an under-supplied public good. We argue that often free-riders can be punished by the coordinated action of a group. This punishment can be profitable, and need not be...

We study contestability in non-profit markets where non-commercial providers supply a homogeneous collective good or service through increasing-returns-to-scale technologies. Unlike in the case of for-profit markets, in the non-profit case the absence of price-based sales contracts between...

Because energy subsidies affect incentives to invest in energy-saving equipment and technologies, they entail a classic investment hold-up problem: once investment has taken place, policymakers will tend to overuse them, which will in turn depress investment by forward-looking agents. Reforming...

We investigate the theoretical relationship between wage concentration and international market integration. Access to imported varieties lowers the cost of intermediate inputs (“machines”) used to carry out production tasks, causing workers with different comparative abilities to be sorted...

Household migration can affect labor market opportunities differently for the two spouses, both because of gender-specific differences between the skills of migrants and the skills that are in demand in the host country, and because of differences in the extent of gender-based labor market...

We describe a model of dynamic pollution abatement choices with heterogeneous agents, where, due to the presence of a distributional objective and to the absence of incentive-compatible compensation mechanisms, the choice of a second-best level of emission taxation is time-inconsistent. In this...

Bargaining theory predicts that married women who experience a relative improvement in their labor market position should experience a comparative gain within their marriage. However, if renegotiation possibilities are limited by institutional mechanisms that achieve long-term commitment, the...

This paper examines the implications of environmental externalities for income tax design in a growing economy. We describe a model with endogenously generated knowledge, in which technical progress reduces the emissions generated by production activities. In this setting, the lack of...

This paper examines whether policy commitment mechanisms, when available, will be used by the elected policymaker in a political-economy equilibrium. We describe a two period repeated voting model where second-period outcomes depend on commitment choices made by an elected policymaker in the...

We examine gender differences in intergenerational patterns of social mobility for second-generation migrants. Empirical studies of social mobility have found that women are generally more mobile than men. Matching theory suggests that this may be because the importance of market characteristics...