This paper aims to explain the rise and fall of communism by exploring the interplay between economic incentives and social preferences transmitted by ideology. We introduce inequality-averse and inefficiency-averse agents and analyze their conflict through the interaction between leaders with...

This paper studies how comparative advantage and the political elites' endowments shape long-run performance in an economy with imperfect political institutions. In a capital-scarce economy, an autocrat catering to the needs of landowners favours openness to trade at an early stage of...

In this paper we study theoretically and empirically the role of the interaction between skilled migration and intellectual property rights (IPRs) protection in determining innovation in developing countries (South). We show that although emigration from the South may directly result in the...

This paper analyzes a two-sided market for news where advertisers may pay a media outlet to conceal negative information about the quality of their own product (paying positive to avoid negative) and/or to disclose negative information about the quality of their competitors' products (paying...

When subjects interact in continuous time, their ability to cooperate may dramatically increase. In an experiment, we study the impact of different time horizons on cooperation in (quasi) continuous time prisoner's dilemmas. We find that cooperation levels are similar or higher when the horizon...

Having unique data we investigate the link between job separations (displacement and quits) and informal employment, which we define in several ways posing the general question whether the burden of informality falls disproportionately on job separators in the Russian labor market. After we have...

Public pension systems based on the Notional Defined Contribution (NDC) principle were introduced during the ‘90s in Italy, Sweden and Poland, among other countries. They mimic private savings, in that individuals get back, as pensioners, what they contributed to social security during working...

We consider the optimal trade execution strategies for a large portfolio of single stocks proposed by Almgren (2003). This framework accounts for a nonlinear impact of trades on average market prices. The execution strategy of Almgren (2003) is based on the assumption that no shares per unit of...

We adopt a stepwise approach to the analysis of a dynamic oligopoly game in which production makes use of a natural resource and pollutes the environment, starting with simple models where firms' output is not a function of the natural resource to end up with a full-fledged model in which (i)...

This paper studies the pattern of job opportunities over the last two decades in European countries. We find that the share of high-skilled jobs have been expanding over time, while the share of medium- skilled jobs have been declining. These changes are in line with the US patterns and,...