This paper provides a county-level investigation of the root causes of gun violence in the U.S. To guide our empirical analysis, we develop a simple theoretical model which suggests that firearm-related offenses in a given county increase with the number of illegal guns and decrease with social...

This paper explores the following chain of conjectures: rising use of the internet, the widespread access to global information, and intensified communication between regions and countries brought about, for example, by intensified trade links bring about expansion of people's social space and...

In determining the optimal redistribution of a given population's income, we ask which factor is more important: the social planner's aversion to inequality, embedded in an isoelastic social welfare function indexed by a parameter alpha, or the individuals' concern at having a low relative...

A transfer from a richer individual to a poorer one seems to be the most intuitive and straightforward way of reducing income inequality in a society. However, can such a transfer reduce the welfare of the society? We show that a rich-to-poor transfer can induce a response in the individuals'...

This paper adds three dimensions to the received literature: it models migration when the individuals' preferences regarding their relative income are ordinal, it works out the resulting spatial steady-state distribution of the individuals, and it shows that the aggregate of the individuals'...

Let there be two individuals: "rich," and "poor." Due to inefficiency of the income redistribution policy, if a social planner were to tax the rich in order to transfer to the poor, only a fraction of the taxed income would be given to the poor. Under such inefficiency and a standard utility...

We study a policy response to an increase in post-merger social stress. If a merger of groups of people is viewed as a revision of their social space, then the merger alters people's comparators and increases social stress: the social stress of a merged population is greater than the sum of the...

This study sheds light on the effect of restrictive policies, such as screening mechanisms, on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) flows into EU Member States in the period 2011-2018, by implementing an augmented gravity model. The results show that different restrictive measures affect cross-border...

Exports from China have surged substantially since its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001. We investigate how this expansion affected income inequality within European regions by separating the trade pressure experienced in external and domestic markets, as well as exploring the...

The first Global Climate Strike on March 15, 2019 has represented a historical turn in climate activism. We investigate the cross-section of European stock price reactions to this event. Looking at a large sample of European firms, we find that the unanticipated success of this event caused a...