Fiscal federalism is often hailed as an innovation procedure: successful policy experiments in one jurisdiction will, via imitation, spread through the entire system, leading to overall better policy performance. We show that such hopes set in laboratory federalism may be ill-founded. For a...

This article shows that entry of a more input-effcient, but lower quality downstream producer, compared to a high-quality downstream incumbent, might be detrimental to social welfare. In particular, if the entrant is extremely ecient, a monopolist upstream supplier reacts by charging an...

This paper considers a setting in which the acquisition of human capital entails a change of location in social space that causes individuals to revise their comparison groups. Skill levels are viewed as occupational groups, and moving up the skill ladder by acquiring additional human capital,...

We develop a general equilibrium model of technological change and migration to examine the eects of a change in skill endowments on wages, employment rates and emigration rates of skilled and unskilled workers. We nd that, depending on the elasticity of substitution between skilled and...

This paper proposes a dynamic politico-economic theory of intergenerational contracts, whose driving force is the intergenerational confict over government spending. Embedding a repeated probabilistic voting setup in a standard OLG model with human capital accumulation, we find that the...

We consider a model where exporting requires finding a local partner in each market. Contracts are incomplete and exporters must learn the reliability of their partners through experience. In the model, export behavior is state-dependent due to matching frictions, although there are no sunk...

This paper investigates the eectiveness of immigration control policies when the duration of stay of illegal immigrants is endogenous because they may return home voluntarily. It shows that return intentions matter. First, we nd that spending on border enforcement can potentially increase the...

Incentivized methods for eliciting subjective probabilities in economic experiments present the subject with risky choices or bets that encourage truthful reporting. We discuss the most prominent elicitation methods and their underlying assumptions, provide theoretical comparisons, and propose...

The unraveling argument says that when a rm may produce dierent qualities and quality is unknown to consumers, the rm has an incentive to disclose the private information as in any pool of rms there is a best quality rm and this rm has an incentive to disclose. Recent literature has established...

Studying a one-sector economy populated by finitely many heterogeneous households that are subject to no-borrowing constraints, we confirm a conjecture by Frank P. Ramsey according to which, in the long run, society would be divided into the set of patient households who own the entire capital...