This paper estimates the e¤ect of having a job covered by social security, on the wages of female salaried workers. I overcome the heterogeneity bias that typically contaminates estimates by using the exogenous availability of free health care and prescription drugs implemented in 2001 in the...

We develop a spatial model of competition between two policy-motivated parties. Parties know a state of the world which determines which policies are desirable for voters, while voters do not. The announced positions of the parties serve as signals to the voters concerning the parties' private...

This paper provides a fairly systematic study of general economic conditions under which rational asset pricing bubbles may arise in an intertemporal competitive equilibrium framework. Our main results are concerned with nonexistence of asset pricing bubbles in those economies. These results...

We consider the question of how to "best" maintain price level stability in the open economy and evaluate three possible policy choices: (a) a constant money growth rate rule; (b) a fixed rate: and (c) a policy of explicit commitment to a price lavel target. In each case we assume that policy is...

In an environment of anonymous random matching, Kandori [1992] showed that with a sufficiently rich class of simple information systems the folk theorem holds. We specialize to the Prisoner's Dilemma and examine the stochastic stability of a process of learning and evolution in this setting. If...

In a social choice model with an infinite number of agents, there may occur "equal size" coalitions that a preference aggregation rule should treat in the same manner. We introduce an axiom of equal treatment with respect to a measure of coalition size and explore its interaction with common...

We investigate the hypothesis that conditioning transfers to poor families on school attendance leads to a reallocation of household resources enhancing the human capital of the next generation, via the effect of the conditionality on the shadow price of human capital. We estimate the price...

A widely used sealed-bid auction is the first-price auction. In this auction, the highest bidder wins the item and pays the price submitted; the other bidders get and pay nothing. The all-pay auction is similar to the first-price auction, except that losers must also pay their submitted bids. The...

We study the consequences of a central bank providing an elastic currency through the use of discount window lending. In particular, we compare the set of equilibria generated when the interest rate is fixed in nominal terms with that generated when it is fixed in real terms. The two policies...

All sovereign governments face a commitment problem: how can they promise to honor their own agreements? The standard solutions involve reputation or political institutions capable of tying the hands of the government. Mexico's government in the 1880s used neither solution. It compensated its...