We study the repeal of a regulation that imposed maximum wholesale and retail markups for all but five fresh fruits and vegetables. We compare the prices of products affected by regulation before and after the policy change and use the unregulated products as a control group. We find that...

We develop a theory of endogenous political entrenchment in a simple two-party dy- namic model of income redistribution with probabilistic voting. A partially self-interested left-wing party may implement (entrenchment) policies reducing the income of its own constituency, the lower class, in...

This paper constructs a class of multivariate Gaussian marked Poisson processes to model asset returns. The model proposed accommodates the cross section properties of trades, allows for returns to be correlated conditional on trading activity, and preserves the economic intuition of normality...

Intuition and leading equilibrium models are at odds with the empirical evidence that expected returns are weakly related to volatility at the market level. This paper proposes a closed-form general equilibrium model, which connects the investors’ expectations of fundamentals with those...

This paper documents that GDP, wages and dividends are co-integrated but feature term-structures of risk respectively flat, increasing and decreasing. Income insurance within the firm from shareholders to workers explains those term-structures: distributional risk smooths wages and enhances the...

In post-Unification Italy the cyclical movements of the economy largely reflected those in the production of durable goods. The engineering industry has been seen as one that transformed metal into machines: its metal consumption suggests that investment in machinery followed the Kuznets-cycle...

We consider a model in which educational investments entail productivity gains, signaling power, and social returns. The latter depend on the relative position the agent occupies in one of three di¤erent dimensions: (i) his innate characteristics, (ii) his level of schooling, and (iii) his...

The "Gerschenkron effect" refers to the purported biases of early-weighted and late-weighted indices of production. If production is properly measured in what economists mean by "real" terms, the "Gerschenkron effect" does not exist at all.

Risk-neutral sellers can extract high profits from risk-loving buyers by selling them lotteries. To limit this problem, gambling is heavily regulated in most countries. I show that protecting risk-loving buyers against profit-maximizing sellers is essentially impossible. Even if buyers are...

The CFL programme has been introduced in 1985 to improve the youths occupational chances. It provides the employers some incentive to recruit young workers by reducing both the labour and the firing costs relative to those they would bear by recruiting older workers. Following the literature,...