We document the presence of a trade-off between unemployment benefits (UB) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the provision of insurance against labour market risk. The mix of quantity restrictions and price regulations adopted by the various countries would seem to correspond to a...

This paper models the tradeoffs between education in secular subjects, formal and informal, and the formation of religion-specific human capital. It explores some implications of negative externalities between religious and secular education. Applications include the tension between science and...

Evidence from a sample of countries show that people roughly spend as much time watching television as earning their living. Moreover, television viewing and work hours are positively correlated across countries. A simple model based on complementarities in the organization of free time is...

This paper explores how the specification of the earnings function impacts the optimal tax treatment of human capital. If education is complementary to labor effort, education should be subsidized to offset tax distortions on labor supply. However, if most of the education is enjoyed by high...

We investigate the dynamics of prices, information and expectations in a competitive, noisy, dynamic asset pricing equilibrium model. We show that prices are farther away from (closer to) fundamentals compared with average expectations if and only if traders over- (under-) rely on public...

Expanding on the concept of ethnic human capital, the paper distinguishes between cultural assimilation compatible with persistent ethnic groups and assimilation through intermarriage and other mechanisms that blur distinctions and lead to the disappearance of ethnic identities. Economic...

Channeling human resources into the right occupations has historically been a key to economic prosperity. Occupational choices are not only driven by the material rewards associated with the various occupations, but also by the esteem that they confer. We propose a model of endogenous growth in...

This paper examines stability of international climate agreements for carbon abatement under an optimal transfer rule and renegotiations. The optimal transfer rule suggested to stabilise international environmental agreements (Weikard 2005, Carraro, Eyckmans and Finus 2006) is no longer optimal...

Recent literature on the workhorse model of intra-industry trade has explored heterogeneous cost structures at the firm level. These approaches have proven to add realism and predictive power. This note shows, however, that this added realism also implies that there may exist a positive...

The weak rationality principle is not an empirical statement but a heuristic rule of how to proceed in social sciences. It is a necessary ingredient of any ?understanding? social science in the Weberian sense. In this paper, first this principle and its role in economic theorizing is discussed....