High employment protection in the public sector results in strategic over-employment if government divisions compete for budgets in a dynamic setting. Bureaucrats who are interested in maximising their divisions' output employ excess labor, since this induces the sponsor to provide complementary...

If countries anticipate Bertrand competition in tax rates, they may expend effort that makes some of their tax payers less mobile or increases the mobility of tax payers elsewhere. I provide piecemeal evidence on what activities countries use. I analyse how such activities interact with Bertrand...

Although the phenomenon of refugee flows is not devoid of economic connotations, it has so far been investigated primarily by political scientists and sociologists. The analytical tools of economic inquiry have not yet been applied to this subject, although it stands to reason that such a study...

It is argued that parents provide help with housing downpayments in order to encourage the production of grandchildren, and that such a subsidization emanates from the ?demonstration effect:? a child?s propensity to furnish parents with attention and care can be conditioned by parental example....

We model group formation as a response to relative deprivation. We employ two measures of relative deprivation. We show that in the case of each of these measures the process of deprivation-induced self-selection into groups reaches a steady state, and that the steady-state distribution differs...

This paper argues that an increase in the inequality of wealth prompts a stronger quest for status that in turn fosters the accumulation of wealth. It proposes a measure for an individual's want of social status. For a given level of a population?s wealth, the corresponding aggregate measure of...

This paper provides a novel explanation of educated unemployment, which is a salient feature of the labor markets in a number of developing countries. In a simple job-search framework we show that educated unemployment is caused by the perspective of international migration, that is, by the...

Quite often, migrants appear to exert little effort to absorb the mainstream culture and to learn the language of their host society, even though the economic returns (increased productivity and enhanced earnings) to assimilation are high. We show that when interpersonal comparisons affect...

A framework that yields different possible patterns of migration as optimal solution to a simple utility maximization problem is presented and explored. It is shown that seasonal migration arises as an optimal endogenous response to a comparison of costs (of living and of separation) and returns...

A new general-equilibrium model that links together rural-to-urban migration, the externality effect of the average level of human capital, and agglomeration economies shows that in developing countries, unrestricted rural-to-urban migration reduces the average income of both rural and urban...