We built a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi's epoch and 1879, Einstein's birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

We propose four arguments favoring the idea that medical effectiveness, adult longevity and height started to increase in Europe before the industrial revolution. This may have prompted households to increase their investment in human skills as a response to longer lives and initiated the...

We consider Rubinstein's two-person alternating-offer bargaining model with two-sided incomplete information. We investigate the effects of one party having relative concerns on the bargaining outcome and the delay in reaching an agreement. We find that facing an opponent having stronger...

Behavioral economics has shaken the view that individuals have well-defined, consistent and stable preferences. This raises a challenge for welfare economics, which takes as a key postulate that individual preferences should be respected. We agree with Bernheim (2009) and Bernheim and Rangel...

We consider a model of wage determination with private information in a duopoly. We investigate the effects of unions having relative concerns on the negotiated wage and the strike activity. We show that an increase of unions' relative concerns has an ambiguous effect on the strike activity.

We study a model in which heterogenous agents first form a trading network where link formation is costless. Then, a seller and a buyer are randomly selected among the agents to bargain through a chain of intermediaries. We determine both the trading path and the allocation of the surplus among...

A social state is irreducible if, and only if for any non-trivial partition of individuals with two groups, there exists another feasible social state at which every individual in the first group is equally well-off and someone strictly better-off. Competitive equilibria decentralize irreducible...

At a Nash - Walras equilibrium, individuals exchange commodities competitively, and, simultaneously, they interact strategically. Under standard assumptions, NashWalras equilibria exist, equilibrium profiles of actions are, typically, determinate but Pareto suboptimal, though not constrained...

We provide an extensive and general investigation of the effecst on industry performance - profits, social welfare and price-cost margins - of exogenously changing the number of firms in Cournot markets. This includes an in-depth exploration of the well-known trade-off between competition and...