Consider a duopoly market in which consumers have heterogeneous information about the quality differential q of the two goods. When firms are ignorant about q, consumers rationally believe that a firm with high market shares is likely to produce a high-quality good. As a result, firms try to...

Do languages matter beyond their communicative benefits? We explore the potential role of preferences over the language of use, theoretically and empirically. We focus on Catalonia, a bilingual society where everyone is fully proficient in Spanish, to isolate linguistic preferences from...

National budgets typically induce a substantial redistribution of resources across regions. In this paper I propose an economic definition of such implicit fiscal transfers, which, in the absence of gains or losses out of centralizing fiscal policy, is particularly suitable for territorial...

We investigate the pattern of intergenerational transmission of language in a bilingual society. We consider the case of Catalonia, where the two main speech communities, Spanish and Catalan, are of similar sizes, both languages are official, and each one enjoys the protection of a different...