Atkinson and Stiglitz show that with weakly separability, differential commodity taxes are unnecessary given an optimal nonlinear income tax. Deaton showed that with an optimal linear progressive income tax, commodity taxes are superfluous under weakly separable and linear Engel curves. Using...

Standard media economics models imply that increased platform competition decreases ad levels and that mergers reduce per-viewer ad prices. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed. We attribute the theoretical predictions to the combined assumptions that there is no advertising congestion and...

Political Economy and Public Choice have studied the interactions between the economy and the polity for over 60 years now. The present paper endeavours to provide a critical discussion of this literature and its achievements. In particular, it starts with the different approaches based on...

Water and agriculture are intrinsically linked. Water is essential for crop production and agriculture is the largest consumer of freshwater resources. However, this link is commonly ignored by economic models mainly because water use is not reported in the national economic accounts. Few...

This paper analyzes the role of the period length in a search model of the labor market and argues that it has profound implications for the market equilibrium. In the model, job offers and job destruction shocks arrive according to a Poisson process in continuous time, but institutional factors...

Job displacement insurance typically includes both unemployment benefits and lump-sum severance pay, and each has provoked policy concerns. Unemployment insurance concerns have centered on distorted job search/offer acceptance decisions by the worker, severance-induced firing cost concerns on...

This paper reviews the problems and potential benefits of integrating personality psychology into economics. Economists have much to learn from and contribute to personality psychology.