This paper considers a pure exchange stochastic overlapping generations model in which agents live for two periods. At each date, either a young or an old agent has larger endowments than the other, which is stochastically determined. In addition to the uncertainty, commitment cannot be externally enforced in this economy. In this environment, I suggest a transfer rule from a young agent to an ...

We study the problem of allocating heterogeneous indivisible tasks in a multi-object-demand model (i.e., each agent can be assigned multiple objects) where monetary transfers are allowed. Agents’ costs for performing tasks are their private information and depend on what other tasks they are obtained with. First, we show that when costs are unrestricted or superadditive, then there is no envy-f...

We study environments where a production process is jointly shared by a finite group of agents. The social decision involves the determination of input contribution and output distribution. We define a competitive solution when there is decreasing-returns-to-scale which leads to a Pareto optimal outcome. Since there is a finite number of agents, the competitive solution is prone to manipulation...

We propose an extended PAYG social security system that conditions pension benefits on the aggregate wage sum and on the wage of one’s children. The latter increases parents’ incentives to provide their children with good within-family education. However, since wages depend stochastically on parents’ unobservable investment in their children’s human capital, some insurance against the productiv...

Conventional benefit-cost analysis incorporates the normally reasonable assumption that the policy or project under examination is marginal. In particular, it is assumed that the policy or project does not change the underlying growth rate of the economy. However, this assumption may be inappropriate in some important circumstances, notably responding to climate change. One example is the benef...

This paper characterizes the optimal linear financial transaction tax in an equilibrium model of competitive financial markets. As long as investors hold heterogeneous beliefs about the returns of assets in fixed supply and the planner calculates welfare using any single belief, we expect the optimal tax to be positive, even when a fraction of trading is fundamental. Strikingly, the optimal tax...

In enhanced annuities, the annuity payment depends on one’s state of health at some contracted date while in ”standard annuities”, it does not. The focus of this paper is on an annuity market where ”standard” and enhanced annuities are offered simultaneously. When all insured know equally well on their future health status either enhanced annuities drive standard annuities out of the market or ...

Project-financing and public-private partnership schemes are joint projects of investment that are generally submitted to investment valuation criteria based on compound discounting. However, the theoretical basis of these criteria is at issue nowadays. According to recent studies on relational contracting economics and behavioral finance, joint projects of investment can be considered as speci...

This paper provides a critique of the global crusade recently launched by the World Bank and World Health Organization against tobacco, by providing some welfare estimates of the net costs associated from the rise in taxes that is proposed for India, S.Africa, S.Korea, Japan and the European Union. It critically examines conventional studies of the costs-benefits of smoking which besides ignori...

This paper reports findings from an AHRC-funded project into the use of more than one language in research projects. Using 35 seminar presentations and 25 researcher profiles, we investigated how researchers from differing disciplines became aware of the possibilities, complexities, and emerging practices of researching where more than one language is used: for example, in initial research desi...