This essay criticizes the commonplace definition of corruption as the misuse of public office for private gain. Both elements in this definition are wrong: corruption is also found in the private sector and in some exceptional cases it may not simply be for private gain. Another problem with...

This paper considers an economy with a public good where a decision must be made both about the level of the public good and the taxation imposed on each citizen (multidimensional policy space). In this context, we derive two interesting results: i) we show that a Nash equilibrium exists under...

This paper investigates a government's choice of strategic trade policy when the domestic firm observes a private noisy signal about the stochastic market demand while in competition with a rival firm. The government chooses between quantity controls and subsidies to maximize profits of the...

We show how collusive outcomes may occur in equilibrium in a one-period competitive insurance market characterized by adverse selection. We build on the Inderst and Wambach (2001) model and assume that insurees must pay a minimum premium, which is a common feature in many health systems. In this...

Most economic models assume the existence of a representative consumer with mean preferences, which is an obvious simplification. Consumers unveil their heterogeneous preferences through continual choices over goods and their characteristics. However, there is a limit to product segmentation:...

This paper builds a multi-sector, three country (centre and two peripheries), New Economic Geography model, where industrial sectors differ in the degree of scale economies and skill-intensity. The model incorporates, for the first time in this class of models, payments to the unemployed in each...

This paper reports on the results of an experiment testing whether the agents selfselect between a competitive payment scheme and a revenue-sharing scheme depending on their inequity aversion. Average efficiency should be increased when these payment schemes are endogenously chosen by agents. We...

The contingent valuation (CV) method is an attractive approach for comparing home care to hospital care in which the only difference is patients' well-being during the treatment process and not health outcomes. We considered the empirical situation of blood transfusion (BT) in cancer patients...

This paper examines the effect of urban income uncertainty on urban-to-rural and rural-to-urban remittances, as well as on the decision to migrate. It also explores whether remittances can be sustained in a non-cooperative setting, and whether cooperative behavior might emerge from individuals...