The paper proposes two axioms that capture the idea of sustainable development and derives the welfare criterion that they imply. The axioms require that neither the present nor the future should play a dictatorial role. Theorem 1 shows there exist sustainable preferences, which satisfy these...

We analyze monopoly power in a market for a complementary fossil resource like oil in a two country/two period model with international trade in general equilibrium. Focusing on the complex interplay of capital and resource market, we elaborate how these effects feed back into the resource...

Demichelis and Polemarchalis (2007) highlighted the role played by the frequency of trade on the degree of indeterminacy of equilibrium in economies of overlapping generations. Assuming that time has a finite starting point and extends into the infinite future, they prove that the degree of...

We show that the problem of evaluating infinite sequences (or streams) of utilities by a unique utility (or social welfare function) can be stated in terms of fuzzy subsets of the set of infinite utility sequences. For each stream, its evaluation can be viewed as its degree of membership to the...

In this paper we present a model of economic growth where agents are characterized by social status concern behaviour. With respect to the literature, we show that social status seeking is not always desirable for economic growth. Specially, we prove that the impact of status seeking on growth...

Why is good good and bad bad? Kant's categorical imperative (KCI) and instrumental rationality are analyzed under the game-theoretical framework of the folk theorem. Prescribing different courses of action under the one-shot game, Kant's categorical imperative emerges as instrumentally rational...

This paper develops a theory of sequential lending in groups in micro-finance that centers on the notion of dynamic incentives, in particular the simple idea that default incentives should be relatively uniformly distributed across time. In a framework that allows project returns to accrue over...

Chicago rule is shown to be the unique optimal monetary policy rule from the viewpoint of an intergenerational welfare-maximizing social planner. But, in the absence of commercial banking, it really mandates the elimination of the public sector, because it involves the elimination of central...

In this paper we deal with the global distribution of capital and output across time. We supply empirical support to model it as a partial differential equation, if the support of the distribution is related to an initial ranking of the economies. If we consider a distributional extension of the...

We estimate the relationship between international youth and professional tennis rankings. We find no difference between the predictiveness of rankings from age 14 & Under versus age 16 & Under competitions. The most persistent predictor of professional success is beating older top ranked...