— The function of international organizations (IOs) as suppliers of international or global public goods (GPGs) has received increasing attention in recent years. But in a world with many claimants and limited resources, GPGs are more likely to have common pool properties than be pure public goods. The paper develops a joint-products model of public goods supply by international organizations, ...

We consider a repeated electoral competition game between two parties, each representing a constituent with a given income level. Parties are unable to commit to a policy before the election; they choose a non-linear income tax schedule once elected. In each period, citizens cast a vote either for the incumbent or for the challenger. We first show that there exist (pure strategy) subgame perfec...

BACKGROUND Life events-like illness, marriage, or unemployment-have important effects on people. But there is no accepted way to measure the different sizes of these events upon human happiness and psychological health. By using happiness regression equations, economists have recently developed a method. METHODS We estimate happiness regressions using large random samples of individuals. The ...

Jane Costello, a mental health researcher, was at work on a long-term study of psychiatric symptoms of children in rural North Carolina, about a quarter of them from a Cherokee reservation. Midway through the study, the Cherokees opened a casino on the reservation, providing profit-sharing payments to reservation families—suddenly lifting them out of poverty. Unexpectedly, Costello and her fell...

In a standard New Keynesian model, a discretionary and myopic central bank concerned with changes in the output gap and inßation will implement a monetary policy that replicates the optimal, timeless perspective, precommitment policy. By stabilizing output gap changes, the central bank imparts inertia into output and inßation that is absent under pure discretion. It is shown that even a fully o...

Associations between contaminated land and socio demographics are well documented in high-income countries. In low- and middle-income countries, however, little is known about the extent of contaminated land and possible demographic correlations. This is an important yet sparsely researched topic with potentially significant public health implications as exposure to pollution remains a leading ...

In the postwar era, developed economies have experienced two substantial trends in the net capital share of aggregate income: a rise during the last several decades, which is well-known, and a fall of comparable magnitude that continued until the 1970s, which is less well-known. Overall, the net capital share has increased since 1948, but when disaggregated this increase comes entirely from the...