Since Olson's (1965) The Logic of Collective Action, the exploitation hypothesis, in which the rich shoulders the provision burden of public goods for the poor, has held sway despite empirical exceptions. To address such exceptions, we establish two alternative exploitation hypotheses based on...

This paper develops a model with multiple market locations in which the quality of intangible assets of firms, provided by management, determines the firms. performance. Despite an ex ante symmetry of potential entrants, the equilibrium assignment of heterogeneous managerial skills to firms...

In a public good economy the distribution of initial income is an important determinant of how many individuals contribute to the public good. For the case when all individuals have identical preferences in this paper a simple formula is derived that describes the proportion of all income...

This paper develops a quality-ladder model of endogenous growth to study the interplay between in-house R&D and marketing expenditure. Although promotional activity is modelled as purely wasteful competition among firms for attention, it unambiguously fosters innovation activity of firms, and...

A positive relationship between firm size and product diversification is a long-standing stylized fact. However, so far there is no appropriate theoretical model to explain the underlying forces of this observation. This paper analyzes an oligopoly model with asymmetric multiproduct frms, which...

We consider the Hartwick rule for capital accumulation and resource depletion, provide semantic clarifications and investigate whether this rule indicates sustainability and requires substitutability between manmade and natural capital. In addition to shedding light on the meaning of the...

Empirical evidence suggests that positive externalities from R&D exceed negative ones. According to conventional wisdom, this calls for R&D subsidies. This paper develops a quality-ladder growth model with overlapping generations which evaluates the positive and normative implications of R&D...

We develop a dynamic two-party political economy framework, in which parties seek to maximize vote share and face the trade-off between catering to their respective core constituencies on the one hand and "middle of the road" voters with no partisan affiliation on the other hand. In contrast to...

This paper argues that openness to goods trade in combination with an unequal distribution of political power has been a major determinant of the comparatively slow development of resource- or land-abundant regions like South America and the Caribbean in the nineteenth century. We develop a...

Two trends have marked the politico-economic discussion in many industrialized countries in recent years. On the one hand, international production, workplace decentralization, shareholder orientation and generous manager remuneration have changed the face of firms in the primary economy. On the...