We model a two-alternative election in which voters may acquire information about which is the best alternative for all voters. Voters differ in their cost of acquiring information. We show that as the number of voters increases, the fraction of voters who acquire information declines to zero....

In this paper I measure the contribution of knowing Catalan to finding a job in Catalonia. In the early eighties a drastic language policy change (normalització) promoted the learning and use of Catalan in Catalonia and managed to reverse the falling trend of its relative use versus Castilian...

When does idiosyncratic earnings uncertainty increase aggregate saving? We address this question in the context of a general equilibrium model where infinitely-lived agents receive idiosyncratic labor endowment shocks, hold a risk-free asset to smooth consumption and face a liquidity constraint....

The central banks of small open economies have to procure the proper operation of the payments system for transactions with the rest of the world. They do so facing the constraint of a limited stock of international reserves. To make ends meet, they usually rely on three instruments: the choice...

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...