Serge Kolm's "epistemic counterfactual principle" says that a social choice only needs to be made from the actual feasible set of alternatives given the actual preference profile, but it must be justified by the choices that would have been made in appropriate counterfactual choice situations....

This paper studies the empirical relevance of temptation and self-control using household-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We construct an infinite-horizon consumption-savings model that allows, but does not require, temptation and self-control in preferences. To distinguish...

This article reconsiders the Harsanyi--Sen debate concerning whether Harsanyi is justified in interpreting his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems as providing axiomatizations of utilitarianism. Sen's criticism and its formalization by Weymark are based on the claim that von...

In this paper, we decompose the variance of logarithmic monthly earnings of prime age males into its permanent and transitory components, using a five-wave rotating panel from the Venezuelan "Encuesta de Hogares por Muestreo" from 1995 to 1997. As far as we know, this is the first time a...

This article considers the ranking of profiles of opportunity sets on the basis of their equality. A version of the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle that is appropriate for the measurement of opportunity inequality is introduced and used to axiomatize the class of generalized Gini equality of...

We add congestion/snobbery to the Hotelling model of spatial competition. For any firm locations on opposite sides of the midpoint, a pure strategy price equilibrium exists and is unique if congestion costs are strong enough relative to transportation costs. The maximum distance between firms in...

We build a model consisting of a borrowing firm, a lending institution (bank), and a third party influencing loan decision-making (auditor/government regulator) where a low-type firm can bribe the auditor to file an untruthful report about its true type so as to obtain a loan from the bank to...

This paper describes the characteristics and labor market experiences of new agricultural and natural resource (ANR) economics Ph.D.s, based on surveys of graduates in 1996-97 and 2001-02. An average of 185 new Ph.D.s in ANR economics were awarded in each of these years. Among these, an average...

The problem of monetary policy delegation is formulated as a two-stage non-cooperative game between the government and the central bank. The solution to this policy game determines the optimal combination of central bank conservatism and independence. The results show that the optimal...

This article studies the impact of alternative institutional configurations on economic performance when there is strategic interaction between the government and the central bank. The interaction between the fiscal and monetary authorities is modeled as a non-cooperative two-stage game. The...