Peer group influences on children’s product preferences

In contrast to earlier studies using adult subjects, this experiment with first graders did not f’md a high degree of brand loyalty development in response to a minimally differentiated product. In fact, while some brand preferences did develop, most subjects appeared to seek some degree of variety in their choices. It is interesting to speculate that children have a “greater need for novelty” than adults and are thus less likely to develop brand loyalty. However, extensive research will be required to remove this proposition from the realm of speculation.     

Intermediate Inequality and Welfare: The Case of Spain, 1980–81 to 1990–91

The 1990–91 household expenditures distribution in Spain dominates, in the relative ("rightist") Lorenz sense, the 1980–81 distribution, but the latter dominates the former in the absolute ("leftist") Lorenz sense. This situation constitutes a textbook case for intermediate or "centrist" notions of inequality and social welfare. This paper presents the first empirical application of this sort, using the intermediate inequality concept introduced in Del Río and Ruiz-Castillo (2000). The data reveal that there is a decrease in household expenditures inequality for a relatively small set of centrist attitudes.     

Regulation and rent‐seeking: The role of the distribution of political and economic power

It is shown that the joint distribution of economic and political power plays a key role in determining regulatory and tax policies of national and subnational governments. If both economic and political power are evenly distributed across individuals, then regulatory and tax policies are efficient, but if they are unevenly distributed and positively correlated, then regulatory policy is used by subnational governments to redistribute income in favor of individuals with higher economic and political power at the expense of productivity and output. Consequently, the national government has to raise the tax rate to finance public expenditure. Moreover, if there exists a positive correlation between economic and political power, then the higher the fiscal gap, the larger the gap between equilibrium and efficient policies because subnational governments underestimate more the fall of public revenues caused by inefficient policies.     

The impact of leniency and whistle-blowing programs on cartels

Antitrust authorities have set up leniency programs for cartel members that denounce their collusive agreements. These programs help prosecute participants and can thereby deter collusion. We compare the impact of reduced fines and positive rewards and argue that rewarding individuals, including firm employees, can deter collusion in a more effective way.We discuss possible adverse effects of whistle-blowing programs on firms' behavior, and particularly on turnover, incentives to innovate and cooperation. We also explore explanations for the puzzling fact that managers keep incriminating evidence and argue reward programs actually provide additional incentives for keeping such evidence.     

Job mobility and the gender wage gap in Italy

This paper investigates the contribution of gender differences in job mobility to the emergence of a gender wage gap in the Italian labour market. We show that over the first 10 years of labour market experience job mobility accounts for up to 30% of total log wage growth for men and only 8.3% for women, and that this difference is mainly due to differences in returns to mobility. The gender mobility gap is robust to the inclusion of individual, job and firm characteristics, to different ways of accounting for individual unobserved heterogeneity, and is mainly found for voluntary job moves. Looking at the characteristics of the jobs and the firms' workers move to, we find that moves to larger firms represent by far the main source of gender differences in returns to mobility. We offer two possible explanations for this finding; one which involves differences in bargaining behaviour and one which relates to the theory of compensating differentials.