We extend the Benassy (1996) 'taste for variety' model to an open economy setting. With the Benassy effect, the market equilibrium is inefficient, openness reduces the varieties provided in the unconstrained optimum and there are potential gains from international coordination.

In this paper, we construct a model of market structure in the global arms industry linking concentration, military procurement, international trade and regional conflict. We show how concentration depends on the willingness of producers to import for their military needs and on the relative...

We consider conflicts between an incumbent, e.g. government or dominant firm, and potential challengers, e.g. guerilla movement or entrants. It is not uncommon for challengers to win such conflicts despite their lack of resources. They can do this by exploiting a second mover advantage: choosing...

This paper presents a model of parental decision making where parents care about consumption and the human capital of the children. Preferences over these goods can differ within households. Parents will agree to cooperate (stay married) if the utility they get from coordinating time inputs (ie...

Governments often subsidize poorer groups in society to ensure their access to new drugs. We analyze here the optimal income-based price subsidies in a strategic environment. We show that asymmetric health systems can arise even though countries are ex-ante symmetric when international price...

We present a policy game where a Rich country has a higher capacity than a Poor country to commit to certain elements of health policy such as providing income related price subsidies and allowing parallel imports (PI). When allowing PI is not a choice for the Poor country, the Rich country...

In health markets, government policies tend to subsidize poorer groups. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the implications of an income-based subsidy policy on the incentives of countries to implement price arbitrage and of firms to provide market access to poorer groups.

We investigate within a model of cultural transmission the conditions under which increased social diversity within a population - e.g. due to the inflow of immigrants - raise the potential for conflict as opposed to harmonious social diversity. Drawing on evidence from psychological studies, we...

It has often been claimed that it is impossible to measure human capabilities but within the methodological conventions of household survey design, we show that some non-financial capability indicators do already exist and we demonstrate how similar indicators, covering a wide range of life...

We examine the performance of forward-looking inflation-forecast-based rules in open economies. In a New Keynesian two-bloc model, a methodology first employed by Batini and Pearlman (2002) is used to obtain analytically the feedback parameters/horizon pairs associated with unique and stable...