In a simple public good economy, we propose a natural bargaining procedure whose equilibria converge to Lindahl allocations as the cost of bargaining vanishes. The procedure splits the decision over the allocation in a decision about personalized prices and a decision about output levels for the...

In an overlapping generations economy setup we show that, if individuals can improve their life expectancy by exerting some effort, costly in terms of either resources or utility, the competitive equilibrium steady state differs from the first best steady state. This is due to the fact that...

This paper establishes, in the context of the Diamond (1965) overlapping generations economy with production, that the risk that savings in unbacked assets (like fiat money or public debt) become worthless implies that, not only the first-best steady state, but even the best steady state...

If raising and educating children is a private cost to households, while the availability of skilled labor supply resulting from the households' fertility and education choices is a public good, then competitive equilibria typically deliver a suboptimal mix of size and skills of the population....

The impact that output has on future total factor productivity —i.e. the dynamic complementarities shown to be empirically relevant in Cooper and Johri (1997)— is not internalized by competitive agents. As a result, the allocation that a planner would choose cannot be reached as a...