Experimental evidence suggests that agents in social dilemmas have belief-dependent, other-regarding preferences. But in experimental games such preferences cannot be common knowledge, because subjects play with anonymous co-players. We address this issue theoretically and experimentally in the...

This paper presents firm level evidence on the change of non-manual wage premia and employment shares in Italian manufacturing during the nineties. We find that the relative stability of aggregate wage premia and employment shares hides offsetting disaggregate forces. First, while technical...

In a Common Currency Area (CCA) the Common Central Bank sets a uniform rate of inflation across countries, taking into account the area´s economic conditions. Suppose that countries in recession favor a more expansionary policy than countries in expansion, a conflict of interest between members...

Europe is faced with serious problems of slow growth and little employment creation. Are the two problems related at all? Our proposed answer is: yes, they are. Building on Daveri and Tabellini (1997), we developed an infinite-horizon model with endogenous growth due to learning-by-doing and...

We show how to extend the construction of infinite hierachies of beliefs (Mertens and Zamir (1985), Brandenburger and Dekel (1993)) from the case of probability measures to the case of conditional probability systems (CPSs) defined with respect to a fixed collection of relevant hypotheses. The...

In the transitional phase towards full economic integration, European countries have the possibility of re-shaping the continental geography of specialization. We develop a two-sector two-country model that shows formally how fiscal policy can be critical in promoting specialization in a phase...

This paper examines the price and quality choice by a single product risk-neutral monopolist who can delay irreversible investments required for market entry. It is shown that the price and quality she chooses at entry increase with uncertainty about the size of future demand. As opposed to a...

Early retirement represents a persistent policy response to the appearance of a mass of redundant elderly workers, not entitled to a pension transfer. This distortionary policy reduces the incentive to accumulate human capital, and thus decreases economic growth. Why was it adopted? We suggest...