In this paper we document the growing dispersion of external and internal balances between countries in the North and South of the Euro area over the time period 1992 to 2007. We find a persistent divergence process that seems to have started with the introduction of the common currency and has...

Single-plateaued preferences generalize single-peaked preferences by allowing for multiple bestelements. These preferences have played an important role in areas such as voting,strategy-proofness andmatching problems. We examine the notion of single-plateauedness in a choice-theoretic...

To verify whether a transferable utility game is exact, one has to check a linear inequalityfor each exact balanced collection of coalitions. This paper studies the structure andproperties of the class of exact balanced collections. Comparing the definition of exactbalanced collections with the...

We study duopolistic competition in a differentiated market with firms setting prices and quantities, without explicitly imposing market clearing. Unlike the commonly adopted assumption of profit maximizing firms, we assume firm behavior to be shaped by a Darwinian dynamic: the less fitter firm...

Using a Threshold Vector Autoregression framework identified via sign restrictions, we answer three questions: First, are fiscal policy shocks regime-dependent? Second, which variables are governing the regime? Third, what are the effects of fiscal policies on the main macroeconomic variables in...

In this paper we investigate how successful social bonding theory is at predicting juvenile delinquency and school dropout behaviour. We adopt a simple dynamic approach which assumes that past involvement in risky behaviour reduces individual restraints for future participation in risky...

According to standard rational choice theory, as commonly used in political science and economics, an agent''s fundamental preferences are exogenously fixed, and any preference change over decision options is due to Bayesian information learning. Although elegant and parsimonious, this model...

We consider agents whose language can only express probabilistic beliefs that attach a rationalnumber to every event. We call these probability measures rational. We introduce the notion of arational belief hierarchy, where the first order beliefs are described by a rational measure overthe...

This paper studies a traditional monopolistic market of information goods in the presenceof an inherently strong peer-to-peer file-sharing network. Specifically, such a strongnetwork is made possible by a few fanatic users who selflessly contribute to the sharingof files. We find that the most...

This survey focuses on experimental labor markets investigating two aspects that deem us importantfor a better understanding of labor market relations and the consequences for labor marketpolicies. The first part of the survey is dedicated to papers that assess the prevalence ofreciprocal...