"Optimal Mirrleesian Taxation in Non-competitive Labor Markets"

"Cooperation in Social Dilemmas through Position Uncertainty" Abstract In a social dilemma, individual incentives and collective interests are at odds. We propose a simple mechanism to sustain full cooperation in one-shot social dilemmas among a finite number of agents. Players sequentially decide whether to contribute to a public good. They observe the actions of some…

"Efficiency in Decentralized Markets with Aggregate Uncertainty" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) Abstract We study efficiency in decentralized markets with aggregate uncertainty and one-sided private information. There is a continuum of mass one of uninformed buyers and a continuum of mass one of informed sellers. Buyers and sellers are randomly and anonymously matched in…

"ICT-Based Innovation and the Changing Nature of Competition: Evidence from Information Intensive Industries in Italy" Abstract Despite the increasing interest in Information and Communication Technology’s (ICT) potential to transform industry structure and competition, there is still not comprehensive evidence on how ICT-related innovations affect competitive dynamics due to the low number of industry-level studies. Strategic…

"Rent-seeking contest design" Abstract This paper studies the relationship between information, incentives, and outcomes in rent-seeking contests. A common solution to limiting socially wasteful rent-seeking activities is transparency. I show that information strictly increases efforts in rent-seeking contests. Thus, the socially optimal rent-seeking contest provides as little information as possible about the competition. The model…

"Costly Information acquisition: the role of abstention" Abstract Citizens have little and uneven levels of political knowledge, consistently with the rational ignorance hypothesis. The paper presents a strategic model of common value elections with voluntary voting and endogenous information acquisition accounting for these facts. While, under compulsory voting, majoritarian elections generically fail to completely aggregate…

"Gender Quotas: Challenging the Boards, Performance and the Stock Market" with Valeria Ferraro (Bocconi University) and Paola Profeta (Bocconi University and Dondena)  

"Observational Learning in Large Anonymous Games" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday)

"Nation-Building Through Compulsory Schooling During the Age of Mass Migration" Abstract By the mid-19th century, America was the best educated nation on Earth: significant financial investments in education were being undertaken and the majority of children voluntarily attended public schools. So why did American states start introducing compulsory schooling laws at this point in time?…

"A Symmetric Model of Firms and Workers" Abstract In this paper we develop a model in which unemployed searchers may either encountera firm and be considered as a new employee or may generate a business idea in which case they begin their own firm. This is the first paper in which an equilibrium distribution of…

"Adverse selection in the UK annuity market and the 1956 Finance Act" (Note: the seminar is on Thursday) abstract This paper proposes a new price test for evidence of active adverse selection in the insurance market for longevity risks: the annuity market.  The test is applied to the exogenous change in taxation of annuity payments following…

"Strategic Sovereign Defaults under International Sanctions" abstract Economic sanctions are often used to destabilize hostile political regimes. We present a model where targeted regimes react to sanctions by initiating a public debt crisis to foster internal political support. The strategy is based on two considerations. Fist, sanctions increase the share of external debt on GDP…