This paper asks whether population growth is conducive to the sustainability of cooperation. A simple model is developed in which farmers who live around a circular lake engage in trade with their adjacent neighbors. The ...

Let a society’s unhappiness be measured by the aggregate of the levels of relative deprivation of its members. When two societies of equal size, F and M, merge, unhappiness in the merged society is shown to be higher than ......

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling ...

A migration network is modeled as a mutually beneficial cooperative agreement between financially-constrained individuals who seek to finance and expedite their migration. The cooperation agreement creates a network: ...

Under a deadweight loss of tax and transfer, there is tension between the optimal policy choices of a Rawlsian social planner and a utilitarian social planner. However, when with a weight greater than a certain critical ...

We draw a distinction between the social integration and economic assimilation of migrants, and study an interaction between the two. We define social integration as blending into the host country’s society, and economic ...

When individuals’ utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the ...

Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A “culture of unemployment” may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his ...

We present a theory that systematically and causally links the well-being of native inhabitants with variation in the extent of the assimilation of migrants. Recent empirical findings are yielded as predictions of the theory.

Let there be two individuals: “rich,” and “poor.” Due to inefficiency of the income redistribution policy, if a social planner were to tax the rich in order to transfer to the poor, only a fraction of the taxed income would ...