We consider a committee facing a binary decision under uncertainty. Each member holds some private information. Members may have different preferences and initial beliefs, but they all agree which decision should be taken in each of the two states of the world. We characterize the optimal...

This paper surveys the literature on group selection. I describe the early contributions and the group selection controversy. I also describe the main approaches to group selection in the recent literature; fixation, assortative group formation, and reproductive externalities.

We study the long-run behavior of an economy where agents who are heterogeneous with respect to risk attitudes can either earn a certain income or enter a risky rent seeking contest. In contrast with standard evolutionary game theory, we distinguish between utility and material payoffs, and...

Using panel data for a maximum of 109 countries over the years 1976-2000, we empirically analyze the impact of decentralization on the occurrence of transnational terror. Taking account of the potential simultaneity between terror and decentralization, our results show that expenditure...

In some recent papers, such as Elliott & van der Hoek, Hu & Öksendal, a fractional Black-Scholes model have been proposed as an improvement of the classical Black-Scholes model. Common to these fractional Black-Scholes models, is that the driving Brownian motion is replaced by a fractional...

In this note the value of parametric changes in hazard rates is analyzed. Two different kinds of changes, sudden or 'blip' changes and persistent changes, respectively, are considered within a model in which both the marginal rate of time preference and the survival probability are...

The paper explores the implications for explaining the endogenous formation of jurisdictions of modelling the political process as a costly fight to acquire shares of the GNP pie. It is shown, in particular, that a system of federalism is especially significant in ameliorating distributional...

This set of lecture notes constitutes a self contained overview of the martingale based theory of interest rates. The lectures were given by the author at the 1996 CIME Summer School on Mathematical Finance, in Bressanone, Italy. The topics covered include: Bond markets, interest rates,...

This paper examines productivity growth in the Indonesian manufacturing sector. We use a longitudinal data set to calculate the effects on aggregate manufacturing productivity growth from improvements within establishments, from reallocation of market shares, and from the turnover of plants. The...

Swedish census data and tax records reveal an astonishing wage compression; the Swedish skill premium fell by more than 30 percent between 1970 and 1990 while the U.S. skill premium, after an initial decline in the 1970s, rose by 8--10 percent. Since then both skill premia have increased by...