Is an assumption of bounded rationality needed to explain Social Security and other mandatory pension plans? In this contribution we argue that when rational agents hold inconsistent expectations such programs may be justified. Two of the features that distinguish Social Security and many other...

We introduce a simple equilibrium model of a market for loans, where households lend to firms based on heterogeneous expectations about their loan default probability. Agents select among heterogeneous expectation rules, based upon their relative performance. A small fraction of pessimistic...

This paper investigates the economic consequences of workplace accidents in the British labour market. For the empirical analysis, I use data on employment and earnings from the British Household Panel Survey and exploit fixed effects estimators to control for time-invariant unobserved...

The sciences tell us that fears are physical feelings and mental emotions that play a key role in any society. Not many issues related to fear are explored by economists today. The aim of this paper is to go backwards through the history of economic thought, and examine if and how Adam Smith...

We model the correlations of brothers’ earnings isolating the effect of fathers’ earnings from additional residual influences shared between brothers. We separate the two effects by analysing sibling correlations and intergenerational correlations jointly within a unified framework. Our...

This paper investigates firms' optimal location choices explicitly accounting for the role of inwards and outwards knowledge spillovers in a dynamic Cournot oligopoly with firms that are heterogeneous in their ability to carry out cost-reducing R\&D. Firms can either locate in an industrial...

The recent economic crisis gave proof of the fact that the Taylor rule is no more that good instrument as it was thought to be just ten years ago; this might be due to the fact that agents acting in the economy hold Heterogeneous Expectations (HE). In a recent paper Anufriev et al. (2013)...

Price discrimination by consumer's purchase history is widely used in regulated industries, such as communication or utilities, both by incumbents and entrants. I show that such discrimination can have surprisingly negative welfare eects { even though prices and industry prots fall, so does...

In recent years, the accreditation of private hospitals followed by the decentralisation of the Italian NHS into 21 regional health systems, has furnished a good empirical ground for investigating the "voting with their feet" Tiebout principle. We consider the competition between public and...

Analyzing the topological properties of the network of shareholding relationships among the Euro Area banks we evaluate the relevance of a bank in the ?nancial system respect to ownership and control of other banks. We ?nd that the degree distribution of the European banking network displays...