We develop a positive theory of pricing car access (by parking fees or cordon tolls) to downtown commercial districts. The model accounts for the special interests of downtown retailers and competing superstores at the edge of the city, and studies how lobbying by both groups shapes the...

Interbank claims are a concern to regulators as they might facilitate the dissemination of defaults and generate spill-over effects. Building on a simple model, this paper introduces a measure of the spill-over effects that a bank generates when it defaults. The measure is based on an explicit...

Using the New Immigrant Survey, we investigate the impact of immigrant women’s own labor supply prior to migrating and female labor supply in their source country on their labor supply and wages in the US. Women migrating from higher female labor supply countries work more in the US. Most of...

Employer-provided health insurance may restrict job mobility, resulting in “job lock.” Previous research on job lock finds mixed results using several methodologies. We take a new approach to examine job-lock by exploiting the discontinuity created at age 65 through the qualification for...

This paper analyzes the impact of college enrollment expansion on student academic achievements and labor market outcomes in the context of competition among colleges. When public policies promote “access” to college education, colleges adjust their curricula: Less selective public colleges...

Immigrants are widely perceived as being highly entrepreneurial and important for economic growth and innovation. This is reflected in immigration policies and many developed countries have created special visas and entry requirements in an attempt to attract immigrant entrepreneurs. Not...

In several OECD countries age-targeted wage subsidies have been introduced to increase the employment of older workers, but evidence on their effectiveness is scarce. This paper examines the effects of a permanent wage cost subsidy in Belgium on the employment rate, working time and hourly wage....

This paper analyzes long run outcomes resulting from adopting a binding minimum wage in a neoclassical model with perfectly competitive labour markets and capital accumulation. The model distinguishes between workers of heterogeneous ability and capitalists who do all the saving, and it entails...

This paper, conducted as part of the research activities of SOSE S.p.A., develops a simple and innovative model to evaluate the performance of local government in the provision of local public services. The model employs a reduced set of information and fewer assumptions than traditional...

We study nonlinear income taxation in a Roy model in which agents’ productivity is sectorspecific. We show that when income taxes can be sector-specific, the Diamond-Mirrlees theorem (according to which the second-best displays production efficiency) fails: social welfare (be it Rawlsian or...