To overcome the problem of insufficient research and development (R&D) on vaccines for diseases concentrated in low-income countries, sponsors could commit to purchase viable vaccines if and when they are developed. One or more sponsors would commit to a minimum price that would be paid per...

In this paper we analyze the interaction of income and preference heterogeneity in a political economy framework. We ask whether the presence of preference heterogeneity (arising, for example, from different ethnic groups or geographic locations) affects the ability of the poor to extract...

In this paper we examine the main challenges in promoting an effective market economy. While the paper ranges widely across the spectrum of economic institutions and policies, the central theme is the importance of macroeconomic stability for economic growth in the medium and long run....

This article explores the formation of public organizations''domain perception', that is, their internal interpretation and external articulation of their role and its boundaries. The analysis is based on non-participant observation research of the UK Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS), and...

In Conflict Resolution situations where two parties with opposed preferences need to make a number of decisions simultaneously, we propose a simple mechanism that endows agents with a certain number of votes that can be distributed freely across issues. This mechanism allows parties to trade off...

The economic impact of climate change is usually measured as the extent to which the climate of a given period affects social welfare in that period. This static approach ignores the dynamic effects through which climate change may affect economic growth and hence future welfare. In this paper...

This paper discusses some of the elements that may characterise an efficient strategy to adapt to a changing climate. Such a strategy will have to reflect the long time horizon of, and the prevailing uncertainties about, climate change. An intuitively appealing approach therefore seems to be to...

We study the agenda-setting political behavior of a large sample of U.S. newspapers during the 1996-2005 period. Our purpose is to examine the intensity of coverage of economic issues as a function of the underlying economic conditions and the political affiliation of the incumbent president,...

We construct a simple model incorporating both citizen-candidates and proportional representation and investigate its properties in a basic case with auniform distribution of citizen ideal points and pure policy motivations, and in further cases which allowof office rents and other distributions...

Public investments in innovation and research assets have been recently perceived by policy makers as an effective tool for the development of less developed regions. This has been particularly true in the case of the European cohesion policies and the structural funds expenditures. However, the...