In a game of imperfect information, the paper analyses whether different types of intervention by third parties can ensure that political (ethnic, religious, social, etc.) groups within a country will pursue a cooperative strategy and how easy it is to predict their effects. We conclude that a...

This paper examines how a traditional village deals with the consequences of population growth. The increase in population demands more intensive use of the land which requires the transformation of commonly-owned land into privately-owned land. Customary law contains clear prescriptions about...

When economists talk about equality, they typically have equality of outcomes, like welfare or income in mind. However such a view of equality is not entirely satisfactory and theories of equality of opportunity have been developed and proposed as an alternative. While there has been some...

This paper examines how the first-best models of compensation based on the agents' talents and responsibilities analyzed in some recent contributions can be extended to a second-best context. A few social criteria are proposed and compared to alternative approaches by Roemer and Van de gaer.

This paper examines the consequences of specification error when transition matrices are used to analyse patterns of intergenerational mobility. We show that classical measurement error in both the child’s and parent’s earnings can lead to biased results, with summary mobility measures...

In this paper we use a semi-parmaetric procedure developed by DiNardo et al(1996),to examine the distribution of the racial wage gap in the U.S and to examine the extent to which forces underlying this wage gap vary throughout the distribution. In carrying out our analyses, we focus on recent...

This paper examines optimal redistribution in a model with high- and low-skilled individuals with heterogeneous tastes for labor. We compare the extent to which optimal policies based on different normative criteria obey the principles of compensation (for differential skills) and responsibility...

We consider an economy in which agents di¤er in terms of productivity (that may be either high or low) as well as in their preferences for labour. Individuals decide whether or not they enter the labour force. In this context and under asymmetric information, the optimal tax schedules derived...