This paper studies allocation correspondences in the house allocation problems with collective initial endowments. We examine the implications of two axioms, namely “consistency” and “unanimity.” Consistency requires the allocation correspondence be invariant under reductions of...

Prescott (2004) argues that Europeans work much less than Americans because of higher taxes and that they would gain significantly by charging US taxes and working as much as Americans. I argue that the opposite may be true and that Americans work more than Europeans due to a coordination...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means ofdirect coordination or the enforcement of re-commitment devices suchas contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In alocal interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with sufficient...

This paper examines the research area identified by Frey and Gallus (Aggregate Effects of Behavioral Anomalies: A New Research Area, 2014) and the relationship between it and the choices that economists make. It supports the Frey and Gallus view that, as a consequence of individuals employing...

This paper examines the research area identified by Frey and Gallus (Aggregate Effects of Behavioral Anomalies: A New Research Area, 2014) and the relationship between it and the choices that economists make. It supports the Frey and Gallus view that, as a consequence of individuals employing...

We revisit the classical result that financing a pure public good through taxation of private consumption is inefficient. To this standard setup we add a consumption contest in which consumers can win a prize. We show that an appropriately chosen contest - which we call a 'tax lottery' - can...

The measurement of Inequality of Opportunity has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, despite of the fact that it is very limited by the scarce availability of data on family background. In this paper we propose a method to overcome this limitation, which consists of using another...

We present evidence that more ethnically fragmented communities spend, all else equal, more on police services than less fragmented communities. We introduce a model of spending on police services which we use to interpret the data. In this model, we assume that the decision to commit a crime is...

We study the consequences of franchise extension and ballot reform for the size of government in Western Europe between 1820 and 1913. We find that franchise extension exhibits a U-shaped association with revenue per capita and a positive association with spending per capita. Instrumental...

The "ratchet effect" refers to a phenomenon where workers whose compensation is based on productivity strategically restrict their output, relative to their capability, because they rationally anticipate that high levels of output will be met with increased or "ratcheted-up" expectations in the...