The paper discusses China's post-reform regional economic growth imbalance relative to input disparity in technology, physical and human capital. Financial sources and types of ownership are used to construct physical capital. Technology is measured by innovation investment, and human capital is constructed from schooling years per capita. The results show that domestic bank loans and foreign-o...

This paper aims to understand some of the mechanisms which dominate the phenomenon of knowledge diffusion in the process that is called ‘social learning’. We examine how knowledge spreads in a network in which agents interact by word of mouth. The social network is structured as a network graph consisting of agents (vertices) and connections (edges) and is situated on a wrapped cellular automat...

We consider envy-free and budget-balanced allocation rules for problems where a number of indivisible objects and a fixed amount of money is allocated among a group of agents. In “small” economies, we identify under classical preferences each agent’s maximal gain from manipulation. Using this result we find the envy-free and budget-balanced allocation rules which are least manipulable for each ...

Skill Uncertainty and Social Inference Research in psychology indicates that individuals often make inferences regarding unknown individual qualities based on potentially irrelevant (but socially observable) information. This paper explores occupational choices when individuals receive imprecise signals regarding ability and use the observable characteristics of previously successful individual...

We propose a new solution concept to address the problem of sharing a surplus among the agents generating it. The problem is formulated in the preferences-endowments space. The solution is defined recursively, incorporating notions of consistency and fairness and relying on properties satisfied by the Shapley value for Transferable Utility (TU) games. We show a solution exists, and call it an O...

Regional Disparities and Inequality of Opportunity: The Case of Italy In this paper we provide a new methodology to measure opportunity inequality and to decompose overall inequality in an ”ethically offensive” and an ”ethically acceptable” part. Moreover, we provide some empirical applications of these new evaluation tools: in the first exercise, we compare the income distributions of South an...

Economic decisions have been shown to depend on actual outcomes as well as perceived intentions. In this paper, we examine whether and how the relative importance of outcomes or intentions for economic decisions develops with age. We report the results of ultimatum games with children, teens and students. We find that children and teens react systematically to perceived intentions, like student...

Why is there such wide-spread opposition to immigration, although attitudes are generally favorable towards trade? Using concepts from population ethics, this paper shows that impartial observers oppose unskilled immigration if they are inequality-averse, base their decisions on national interest, and have an integrative view of immigration. Moreover, unskilled immigration makes redistribution ...

This paper adopts the “Rip Van Winkle” stratagem, of asking what differences would be noticed, in the domain of poverty and distribution, by someone who fell asleep in 1987 (the year I published my paper on poverty in the IMF Staff Papers, and woke up only in 2007 (the year I visited the IMF to work on the present paper). I highlight, somewhat idiosyncratically, ten such differences under three...

We introduce the moonlighting game. Player A can take money from or pass money to player B, who can either return money or punish player A. Thus, our game allows to study both positively and negatively reciprocal behaviour. One-shot experiments were conducted with and without the possibility of making non-binding contracts beforehand. We find that retribution is much more compelling than recipr...