Human Capital Externalities and Growth

This paper proposes a methodology to estimate externalities in human capital as a response to the evidence of a worldwide divergent development. We estimate supply and demand for human capital in a five-year panel for 60 countries in the period 1980-2000, and found that there are positive externalities in human capital accumulation close to one, implying increasing returns to scale and increasing marginal returns in human capital which eliminates the channel that enables generating conditional convergence.Economic growth, human capital, externalities. Classification JEL:J24, O11, O40, Y40

Democracy and the curse of natural resources

We propose a theoretical model to explain empirical regularities related to the curse of natural resources. This is an explicitly political model which emphasizes the behavior and incentives of politicians. We extend the standard voting model to give voters political control beyond the elections. This gives rise to a new restriction into our political economy model: policies should not give rise to a revolution. Our model clarifies when resource discoveries might lead to revolutions, namely, in countries with weak institutions. Natural resources may be bad for democracy by harming political turnover. Our model also suggests a non-linear dependence of human capital on natural resources. For low levels of democracy human capital depends negatively on natural resources, while for high levels of democracy the dependence is reversed. This theoretical finding is corroborated in both cross section and panel data regressions

Corporate Downsizing to Rebuild Team Spirit: How Costly Voting Can Foster Cooperation

We propose a new mechanism to achieve coordination through voting, for which we discuss a number of real-life applications. Among them, the mechanism provides for a new theory for downsizing in organizations. A crisis may lead to a decrease in the willingness to cooperate in an organization, and therefore to a bad equilibrium. A consensual downsizing episode may signal credibly that survivors are willing to cooperate, and thus, it may be optimal and efficiency-enhancing (for the individuals remaining in the organization), as the empirical evidence suggests. A variation of the same mechanism leads to “efficient” upsizing.Publicad

The determinants of pricing in pharmaceuticals : are U.S. prices really higher than those of Canada?

This paper studies price determination in pharmaceutical markets using data for 25 countries, six years and a comprehensive list of products from the MIDAS IMS database. We show that market power and the quality of the product has a significantly positive impact of prices. The nationality of the producer appears to have a small and often insignificant impact on prices, which suggests that countries which regulates prices have relatively little power to do it in a way that advances narrow national interest. We produce a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon based on the fact that low negotiated prices in a country would have a knock-on effect in other markets, and is thus strongly resisted by producers. Another key finding is that the U.S. has prices that are not significantly higher than those of countries with similar income levels. This, together with the former observation on the effect of the nationality of producers casts doubt on the ability of countries to pursue “free-riding" regulation

Estimating Learning Models with Experimental Data

We study the statistical properties of three estimation methods for a model of learning that is often tted to experimental data: quadratic deviation measures without unobserved heterogeneity, and maximum likelihood with and without unobserved heterogeneity. After discussing identi cation issues, we show that the estimators are consistent and provide their asymptotic distribution. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that ignoring unobserved heterogeneity can lead to seriously biased estimations in samples which have the typical length of actual experiments. Better small sample properties are obtained if unobserved heterogeneity is introduced. That is, rather than estimating the parameters for each individual, the individual parameters are considered random variables, and the distribution of those random variables is estimated

Interdependent preferences and segregating equilibria

This paper shows that models where preferences of individuals depend not only on their allocations, but also on the well-being of other persons, can produce both large and testable effects. We study the allocation of workers with heterogeneous productivities to firms. We show that even small deviations from purely “selfish” preferences leads to widespread workplace skill segregation. This result holds for a broad class and distribution of social preferences. That is, workers of different abilities tend to work in different firms, as long as they care somewhat more about the utilities of workers who are “close”

Stochastically stable implementation.

Restricting attention to economic environments, we study implementation under perturbed better-response dynamics (BRD). A social choice function (SCF) is implementable in stochastically stable strategies of perturbed BRD whenever the only outcome supported by the stochastically stable strategies of the perturbed process is the outcome prescribed by the SCF. For uniform mistakes, we show that any ε-secure and strongly efficient SCF is implementable when there are at least five agents. Extensions to incomplete information environments are also obtained.Robust implementation; Bounded rationality; Evolutionary dynamics; Mechanisms; Stochastic stability;

Social preferences and skill segregation

This paper shows that models where preferences of individuals depend not only on their allocations, but also on the well-being of other persons, can produce both large and testable effects. We study the allocation of workers with heterogeneous productivities to firms. We show that even small deviations from purely “selfish” preferences leads to widespread workplace skill segregation. That is, workers of different abilities tend to work in di¤erent firms, as long as they care somewhat more about the utilities of workers who are “close”.Contract theory, mechanism design, envy, social preferences, skill segregation