Contributions published at Microeconomics and Game Theory (Maria Saez Marti)

Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process, which depends on parents' investment in the trait and the social environment where children live. If a suffciently high proportion of employers have taste-based prejudices against minority workers, we show that their prejudices are always selffulfilled in steady state and minority workers end up having, on average, worse work habits than majority workers. This leads to a ghetto culture. Affirmative Action can improve the welfare of minorities whereas integration can be beneficial to minority workers but detrimental to workers from the majority group.

Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process, which depends on parents' investment in the trait and the social environment where children live. We show that if a sufficiently high proportion of employers have taste-based prejudices against minority workers, their prejudices are always self-fulfilled in steady state and minority workers end up having, on average, worse work habits than majority workers. This leads to a ghetto culture. Affirmative Action can improve the welfare of minorities whereas integration can be beneficial to minority workers but detrimental to workers from the majority group.

Workers can have good or bad work habits. These traits are transmitted from one generation to the next through a learning and imitation process, which depends on parents' investment in the trait and the social environment where children live. If a suciently high proportion of employers have taste-based prejudices against minority workers, we show that their prejudices are always selffulfilled in steady state and minority workers end up having, on average, worse work habits than majority workers. This leads to a ghetto culture. Armative Action can improve the welfare of minorities whereas integration can be benecial to minority workers but detrimental to workers from the majority group.

I study the effect of fatigue and innate ability on performance in a model with incomplete contracts, lumpy tasks requiring multiple periods of work and stochastic productivity shocks. I find that increasing ability or reducing fatigue does not lead necessarily to more productive efficiency, since it may exacerbate the incentive for agents take "too much" on-the-job leisure. In a world with heterogenous agents, the problem may be ameliorated by the introduction of a dual labour market with free-lancers (who can take breaks at their discretion) and regular workers (who work on a fixed schedule).

We analyze the evolution of cultural traits when parents purposefully invest resources in order to socialize their children to the cultural variants that maximize child lifetime utility. We assume that children are not passive in their adoption of traits from peers. Instead they are guided by an evaluation of the merit of variants. We show that such evaluation is likely to render this process of "oblique transmission" biased. We then show that when transmission of traits from society is biased or frequency dependent, cultural diversity is sustainable even when all parents strive to transmit the same trait. We also show that demand for cultural pluralism on the part of parent does not guarantee cultural diversity.

We discuss the theoretical and empirical foundations of modern economic theories of cultural transmission. The importance of cultural factors in shaping economic and social transformations has been the focus of a long-standing debate in social sciences since the XIXth Century. Neoclassical economics has remained at the marging of this debate. However, there has been a recent surge of interest among economists for cultural factors. The economic models of cultural transmission borrow the main ideas from the anthropological literature, but endogeneize the efforts parents exert to transmit specific cultural variants or preference parameters. We distinguish between paternalistic models where parents use their own values to evaluate their children’s utility, and non-paternalistic or utilitarian models in which parents choose their children’s preferences to maximize the children’s well-being. We discuss recent examples, focusing in particular on corruption, patience, and work ethic.

We analyze the evolution of culture when parents socialize children to the culturalnvariants that maximize child lifetime utility. Parents invest in cultural transmissionntaking into account that children are also influenced by peers. We model the influence of peers by assuming that children observe different cultural variants in their peer group, assign merit to them and adopt one variant, following a probabilistic adoption rule. We show that cultural diversity is sustainable even if all parents strive to transmit the same variant. We also show that a parental demand for cultural pluralism does not guarantee cultural diversity.

"We consider a principal-agent model in which a task, demanding a sequence of effortsnby the agent, must be completed by a certain date. Effort is not contractible. Agents arensubject to shocks affecting their opportunity cost of time such that they are distractednfrom work when the opportunity cost of time is high. We show that the probability that a task is completed by the deadline is a non-monotonic function of the agent’snprobability of being distracted. The anticipation of future distractions induces rational agents to get started earlier for precautionary reasons. As a result, agents who are more often distracted may outperform agents who are distracted less often. Principals can increase the probability that the task is completed, and thus achieve higher profits, by strategically setting ""tight"" deadlines, provided that these can later be extended with anpositive probability."

This paper investigates the outcome of ageing on taxes and hospitalisation of the elderly using panel data on 23 Swedish county councils 1980–1999. We test two hypotheses; whether a larger share of elderly has no negative effect on bed days per elderly person and no positive effect on tax rates. We reject the first hypothesis but fail to reject the second hypothesis. Further we cannot reject the hypothesis of a unitary elasticity of the share of elderly on bed days per elderly person. These results imply that the old bear the entire cost of adjustment when the population grows older.

Is discounting of future decision-makers’ consumption utilities consistent with "pure" altruism toward those decision-makers, that is, a concern that they are better off according to their own, likewise forward-looking, preferences? It turns out that the answer is positive for many but not all discount functions used in the economics literature. In particular, "hyperbolic" discounting of the form used by Phelps and Pollak (1968) and Laibson (1997) is consistent with exponential altruism towards all future generations. More generally, we establish a one-to-one relationship between discount functions and altruism weight systems, and provide sufficient, as well as necessary, conditions for discount functions to be consistent with pure altruism.

We provide a cultural explanation to the phenomenon of corruption in the framework of an overlapping generations model with intergenerational transmission of values. We show that the economy has two steady states with different levels of corruption. The driving force in the equilibrium selection process is the education effort exerted by parents which depends on the distribution of ethics in the population and on expectations about future policies. We propose some policy interventions which via parents' efforts have long-lasting effects on corruption and show the success of intensive education campaigns. Educating the young is a key element in reducing corruption successfully. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D10, J13.