The effect of human capital composition on growth and development has been somewhat neglected in economic literature. However, evidence has suggested the importance of engineering and technical skills to economic growth and international organizations had suggested their shortage in developed countries. Using a standard increasing variety endogenous growth model, we propose various measures of ...

T he supposed failure of privatization in Latin America has recently become the source of street riots, protest demonstrations, and adverse news coverage. Riots in Arequipa, Peru, erupted in June 2002 following the announcement of a proposal to privatize power plants, while Cochabamba, Bolivia, witnessed a so-called water war in April 2000. Antiprivatization protests also occurred recently in E...

D ecentralization is a major feature of current institutional innovation throughout the world. In Latin America, most countries have recently implemented decentralization policies following a long tradition of centralized government. Argentina has not been the exception. The decentralization of educational services from the federal to provincial governments was an important component of the str...

T he Argentine experiment with convertibility ended in collapse. There is no shortage of after-the-fact explanations of what went wrong, but the search for lessons presupposes that by studying the experience, analysts can gain some knowledge that was not available beforehand. Any analysis of a case like that of Argentina must address the issue of how and why agents behaved in such a way that pr...

Patrizia Berti is Professor, Dipartimento di Matematica Pura ed Applicata “G. Vitali”, Universita’ di Modena e Reggio-Emilia, via Campi 213/B, 41100 Modena, Italy e-mail: [email protected]. Guido Consonni is Professor, Dipartimento di Economia Politica e Metodi Quantitativi, Universita’ di Pavia, via S. Felice 5, 27100 Pavia, Italy e-mail: [email protected]. Luca Pratelli is Profe...

A growth model with endogenous innovation and accumulation of high-tech and lowtech human capital is developed. The model accounts for a recently established fact about human capital composition, which stated that “the richest countries are investing proportionally less than middle income countries in engineering and technical human capital”, due to the consideration of a negative effect of tec...

The record of successful developmental states in East Asia and the partial successes of developmental states in Latin America suggest several common preconditions for effective state intervention including a weberian bureaucracy, monitoring of implementation, reciprocity (subsidies in exchange for performance), and collaborative relations between government and business. Although Brazil failed ...

We consider the problem of a society whose members choose, with a voting by committees, a subset of new members from a given set of candidates. After knowing the elected candidates, former members may decide to either stay or exit the society. We analyze the voting behavior of members who take into account the e¤ect of their votes not only on the elected candidates, but also on the …nal composi...

We study how personal relations affect performance in organizations. In the experimental game we use a manager has to assign different degrees of decision power to two employees. These two employees then have to make distributive decisions which affect themselves and the manager. Our focus is on the effects on managers’ assignment of decision power and on employees’ distributive decisions of on...

We consider one-to-one matching (roommate) problems in which agents (students) can either be matched as pairs or remain single. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we review a key result for roommate problems (the “lonely wolf” theorem) for which we provide a concise and elementary proof. Second, and related to the title of this paper, we show how the often incompatible concepts of stabili...