Mertens and Parthasarathy (1987) proved the existence of sub-game perfect equilibria in discounted stochastic games.  Their method involved new techniques in dynamic programming, which were presented in a very general framework, with no expense spared in highlighting versatility and scope. ...

Trust in political institutions has declined across developed democracies.  One of the main reasons cited for this lack of trust in public opinion polls has been the role of money in politics.  The Supreme Court decisions in Citizens United and McCutcheon, amongst others, have increased the...

The global response to a catastrophic shock to productivity which becomes more imminent with global warming is to have carbon taxes to curb the risk of a calamity and to accumulate precautionary capital to facilitate smoothing of consumption.  Our multi-region model of growth and climate change...

We provide a model of coalitional bargaining with claims in order to solve games with non-transferable utilities and externalities.  We show that, for each such game, payoff configurations exist which will not be renegoiated.  In the original game derived from these payoff configurations, we...

Individual behaviors such as smoking, fashion, and the adoption of new products is influenced by taking account of others' actions in one's decisions.  We study social influence in a heterogeneous population and analyze the long-run behavior of the dynamics.  We distinguish between cases in...

While the impact of globalization on income inequality has received a lot of attention, little is known about its effect on the gender wage gap (GWG).  This study argues that there is a systematic difference in the GWG between exporting firms and non-exporters.  By the virtue of being exposed...

A government delegates a build-operate-transfer project to a private firm. In the contracting stage, the operating cost is unknown. The firm can increase the likelihood of facing a low cost, rather than a high cost, by exerting costly effort when building the infrastructure. Once this is in...

A long-lasting scientific and policy debate queries the impact of growth on distribution. A specific branch of the micro-oriented literature, known as 'pro-poor growth', seeks in particular to understand the impact of growth on poverty. Much of that literature supposes that the distributional...

In this paper we propose different criteria to rank income distributions according to equality of opportunity. Different from existing ones, our criteria explicitly recognize the interplay between circumstances and effort. We characterize them axiomatically and we compare them with existing...

The paper discusses some issues concerning the local property tax in the light of the Italian experience. The main developments concerning the municipal property tax in Italy, since its introduction and until the most recent events, are briefly described. Then three main issues regarding the...