The efficiency of educational choices is studied in a search-matching model where individuals face a tradeoff: acquiring formal education or learning while on the job. When their education effort is successful, newcomers directly obtain a high-skill job; otherwise, they begin with a low-skill...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function - one of the...

This paper studies optimal taxation schemes for education in a search-matching model where the labor market is divided between a high-skill and a low-skill sector. Two public policy targets - maximizing the global employment level and optimizing the social surplus - are studied according to...

This paper is an application of a new Shapley income decomposition methodology, in which we isolate two subjective factors in income differences - race and gender - that contribute to income inequality within the population of blacks and whites in the United States over the period 2005-2017. We...

This paper provides an analysis of the social consequences of people seeking to keep up with the Joneses. All individuals attempt to reach a higher rank than the Joneses, including the Joneses themselves. This attitude gives rise to an equilibrium in which all individuals have equal utilities...