In a public procurement setting, we discuss the desirability of completing contracts with state-contingent clauses providing for monetary compensations to the contractor when revenue shocks occur. Realized shocks are private information of the contractor and this creates agency costs of...

We re-consider the impact that regulation of call termination on mobile phones has had on mobile customers’ bills. Using a large panel covering 27 countries, we find that the “waterbed” phenomenon, initially observed until early 2006, has disappeared over the 10-year period, 2002-2011. We...

We propose a measure of life satisfaction, alternative to the standard synthetic cognitive wellbeing question, based on the specific contribution of eleven life satisfaction sub-components (including satisfaction about the past, life opportunities, hope for the future, vitality, control over...

We study Ramsey monetary policy in a New Keynesian (NK) model with endogenous growth and knowledge spillovers external to each firm. We find that in contrast with the standard NK model, the Ramsey dynamics implies deviation from full inflation targeting in response to technology and government...

There may be a nexus between card games and financial markets. Akerlof and Shiller (2010) ask whether the decline in the number of bridge players and the growth in the number of poker players may have led to the current bad financial traders’ practices which are responsible for the global...

We study the relationship between gerontocracy and aggregate economic performance in a simple model where growth is driven by human capital accumulation and productive government spending (investments in ICT). We show that gerontocratic élites display the tendency to underinvest in public...

The need for a proper burial is widely felt. This paper makes use of an original data set to explore the relationship between the prices of cemetery plots and the prices of housing. It considers a simple model where the services from both real estate and funeral homes enter individuals’...

Household financial assets and liabilities display considerable variation across countries and over time. This article investigates empirically the role of some of the key Life Cycle Model variables and other relevant factors behind household financial wealth disparities using data from 40...

This paper addresses the "rate of return" puzzle of monetary theory. Similarly to the legal restrictions theory of the demand for money, we assume that Government bonds are subject to a minimum purchase requirement. Differently from this theory, however, we assume that intermediaries, when...

We examine the problem of setting optimal incentives for a portfolio manager hired by an investor who wants to induce ambiguity-robust portfolio choices with respect to estimation errors in expected returns. We consider a one-period model with a set of risky assets (with multivariate normal...