Traffic accidents are a major public health concern since they are the leading cause of death for those aged 15–29 years and the ninth cause of death worldwide. In this paper, we estimate the overall effect on traffic fatalities of the introduction of the Penalty Point System (PPS) in Spain in 2006, jointly with those…
Since 2000, Cali has had the highest mean annual homicide rate among the major Colombian cities. The model of Mills (1972) is extended to include the homicide per commune (from 2005 to 2012) as a measure of social distance, and to quantify the effect of this phenomenon on land prices (mean appraisals). Using an annual…
A new voting rule for electing committees is described. Specifically, we use approval balloting and propose a new voting procedure that guarantees that if there is a committee that represents (with a given proportion of representatives) all of the existing voters, then the selected committee has to represent all of voters in at least the…
A minimum cost spanning tree problem analyzes how to efficiently connect a group of individuals to a source. Once the efficient tree is obtained, the addressed question is how to allocate the total cost among the involved agents. One prominent solution in allocating this minimum cost is the so-called Folk solution. Unfortunately, in general, the…
We study minimum cost spanning tree problems for a set of users connected to a source. Prim’s algorithm provides a way of finding the minimum cost tree m. This has led to several definitions in the literature, regarding how to distribute the cost. These rules propose different cost allocations, which can be understood as compensations…
We consider a (standard) reverse auction for dual sourcing and propose to determine both the providers’ shares and the reserve price endogenously, depending on the suppliers’ bids. Our benchmark considers a two-stage game of complete information. After a first round of bidding, the two most competitive suppliers advance to the second stage and compete again…
Sequential mechanisms to solve matching problems are useful to promote (hidden) cooperation between agents. Taking as a starting point the MIRC mechanism, employed in Spain to match medical students and residency programs in privately owned hospitals, we find that: (1) In the current system, where the number of students that each program might enroll is…
We revisit the concept of fairness in the Student Placement framework. We declare an allocation as α-equitable if no agent can propose an alternative allocation that nobody else might argue to be inequitable. It turns out that α-equity is compatible with efficiency. Our analysis fills a gap in the literature by giving normative support to…
Convergence among nations that share the same preferences and technologies is a key result of the closed-economy neoclassical growth framework that has received substantial support in the data. However, Heckscher–Ohlin versions of the two-sector neoclassical growth model predict that nations that differ in their capital–labor ratios may not converge to the same steady state, even…
We advance a novel mechanism that helps to explain the puzzling evidence on the natural resource curse. The new channel arises in a standard dynamic Heckscher–Ohlin model composed of small-open economies that take international output prices as given. Within this framework, a more capital-intensive primary sector implies that natural-resource abundant economies grow more slowly along…
