This paper considers the problem faced by a political authority that has to design a legislative mechanism that guarantees the selection of policies that are stable, efficient, and inclusive in the sense of strategically protecting minority interests. Experimental studies suggest that some of...

The rules that are employed to pass policies in legislative bodies vary widely. It is generally argued that policies that differ in complexity or importance level should be decided under different kinds of voting rules. While this question has been examined for static legislative mechanisms, an...

This paper shows that historical missionary activity has had a persistent effect on schooling outcomes, and contributed to a reversal of fortunes wherein historically richer ethnic groups are poorer today. Combining contemporary individual-level data with a newly constructed dataset on mission...

We study the Shapley wage function, a wage scheme in which a worker's pay depends both on the number of hours worked and on the output of the firm. We then provide a way to measure the distance of an arbitrary wage scheme to this function in limited datasets. In particular, for a fixed...

Public policy addressing the harmful practice of adolescent marriage tends to leave out men, as prospective grooms. Using micro-level data from Nigeria in combination with plausible instrumental variables, we find that a male's education significantly decreases the likelihood that he marries an...

An important number of twins are missing because of their substantially greater mortality risk in early ages relative to singletons. This paper has a twofold goal. First, it investigates whether, as children age, the twin-singleton inequality in mortality rates vanishes, and if yes, when....

This study develops an economic model for a social planner who prioritizes health over short- term wealth accumulation during a pandemic. Agents are connected through a weighted undirected network of contacts, and the planner's objective is to determine the policy that contains the spread of...