Sutton (1998) has recently proposed a theoretical lower bound to firm size inequality when a market is made of several independent submarkets. His results are valid asymptotically, as the number of submarkets becomes arbitrarily large. We show that, in small samples, his results can be interpreted as a positive relationship between an index of firm size inequality and the number of submarkets. ...

Besley (1988) uses a scaling approach to model merit good arguments in commodity tax policy. In this paper, I question this approach on the grounds that it produces ’wrong’ recommendations—taxation (subsidisation) of merit (demerit) goods—whenever the demand for the (de)merit good is inelastic. I propose an alternative approach that does not suffer from this deficiency, and derive the ensuing f...

We show that the quantile regression estimator is consistent and asymptotically normal when the error terms are correlated within clusters but independent across clusters. A consistent estimator of the covariance matrix of the asymptotic distribution is provided and we propose a specification test capable of detecting the presence of intra-cluster correlation. A small simulation study illustrat...

Various extensions of the leximin order to the infinite dimensional setting have been suggested. They relax completeness and strong anonymity. Instead, by removing sensitivity to generations at infinite rank this paper defines a complete and strongly anonymous leximin relation on infinite streams. The order is axiomatized, and it is shown to be the limit of extended rank-discounted utilitariani...

Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation, workplace safety is costly for firms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A laissez-faire approach in which firms set safety standards is suboptimal as workers are not fully info...

We examine behavioral gender differences and gender pairing effects in a laboratory experiment with face-to-face alternating-offers wage bargaining. Our results suggest that male players are able to obtain better bargaining outcomes than female players. Male employees get higher wages than female employees. Male employers pay lower wages to female employees than female employers pay to male emp...

This paper deals with bankruptcy situations in which in addition to the claims, an exogenously given reference point for the allocation of the estate is present. We introduce and analyse two types of compromise solutions and show that they coincide with the τ value of two corresponding TU games. We apply our solutions to a real-life case of allocating university money to degree courses. JEL-cod...

We employ bootstrap methods (Efron (1979)) to test the effect of an important electoral reform implemented in Italy from 1993 to 2001, that moved the system for electing the Parliament from purely proportional to plurality rule (for 75% of the seats). We do not find any effect on either the number of parties or the stability of governments (the two main objectives of the reform) that remained u...

Although economics has long been considered as a non-experimental science, the development of experimental economics and behavioral economics is amazingly rapid and affects most fields of research. This paper first attempts at defining the main contributions of experiments to economics. It also identifies four main trends in the development of experimental research in economics. The third contr...