We consider a linguistically diversified society that has to select a set of languages to be used for official purposes. We examine the notion of language disenfranchisement that is created when one or more languages fail to be included in the list of the official ones, implying that some...

Books are an important factor of cultural transmission, but need, in most cases, to be translated. According to some authors, this may lead to a form of cultural domination, in particular of English, on other languages. All these papers ignore that thepopulation speaking English as a first...

Most papers on returns to languages are concerned with immigrants. We use the European Community Household Panel Survey (ECHP) to infer returns on non-native languages by non-immigrants in nine countries of the European Union. We differ fromthe few other studies that deal with the same problem...

Pianists who achieve high scores in the Queen Elizabeth musical competition are rewarded by subsequent success. This is not surprising in itself, but it is not immediately clear whether this is caused by the score or because those who have high scores are better pianists. Data on eleven...

In this paper we consider a model of oligopolistic competition where firms make a two-dimensional product line decision. They choose a location in style space, thus, inducing horizontal differentiation, and produce different qualities (a product line) of a given good (vertical differentiation),...

The policy of official multilingualism is one of the most important and fundamental principles of the Union. However, a large number of official languages imposes substantial financial, communication and legal costs. We address the merits of extensive multilingualism and formulate an analytical...

We discuss the welfare effects of bundling two products offered by two symmetric firms. We first show that, in terms of welfare, a monopoly does better than a duopoly in which each firm sell its good and that a monopoly selling the bundle does better than if it sells the bundle and the two goods...

The debate about whether the arts should be supported or not is far from being recent, and most governments support the arts in one way or the other. The literature considers several arguments in favor of such interventions. Education may seem as an action which could, in the long run, lead to...

The anomaly is concerned with the observation that in multiple-item auctions of identical ob- jects, prices tend to decline over time. We show that in the case of wine auctions which have been analyzed frequently, the anomaly is likely to be caused by the the fact that most bids are entered by...

We analyze the voting behavior and ratings of judges in a popular song contest held every year in Europe. The dataset makes it possible to analyze the determinants of success, and gives a rare opportunity to run a direct test of vote trading, or logrolling. Though the votes cast may appear as...