Emiliya A. Lazarova

Does governance matter for aggregate health capital

The point of departure of our analysis is the seminal work of Rodgers (1979) on the absolute and relative income hypotheses. We find that substituting the governance index for the Gini index is statistically the preferred regression model. Our findings lend support to the argument that governance matters. Further investigation provides evidence for two types of threshold effects: in terms of both absolute income and governance. For those countries below a threshold, absolute income is the most significant determinant of health, while for those above it, governance matters the most. The regression analyses are conducted on a sample of 112 states, which is representative of a wide range of absolute income and governance levels.

Stability, Specialization and Social Recognition

Yangs theory of economic specialization under increasing returns to scale (Yang 2001) is a formal development of the fundamental Smith-Young theorem on the extent of the market and the social division of labor. In this theory specialization and, thus, the social division of labor is firmly embedded within a system of perfectly competitive markets. This leaves unresolved whether and how such development processes are possible in economies based on more primitive, nonmarket organizations. In this paper we introduce a general relational model of economic interaction. Within this non-market environment we discuss the emergence of economic specialization and ultimately of economic trade and a social division of labor. We base our approach on three stages in organizational development: the presence of a stable relational structure; the presence of relational trust and subjective specialization; and, finally, the emergence of objective specialization through the social recognition of subjectively defined economic roles.

Governance in relation to Infant Mortality Rate: Evidence from around the world

Governance is estimated to have a significant negative effect on the infant mortality rate based on a sample of 112 countries. The sample contains both developed and developing nations. The estimated magnitude of the effect is not significantly different between female and male infant mortality rate. Furthermore, we investigate whether governance is the preferred predictor of infant mortality rate compared to relative income. Though the statistical results are not conclusive, there is more evidence in favour of the governance indicator.

Paths to stability in two-sided matching with uncertainty

We consider one-to-one matching problems under two modalities of uncertainty that differ in the way types are assigned to agents. Individuals have preferences over the possible types of the agents from the opposite market side and initially know the “name” but not the ”type” of the other players. Learning occurs via matching and using Bayes’ rule. We introduce the notion of a stable and consistent outcome, and show how the interaction between blocking and learning behavior shapes the existence of paths to stability in each of the uncertainty environments. Existence of stable and consistent outcomes then follows as a side result.

Dynamic multilateral markets

We study dynamic multilateral markets, in which players’ payoffs result from intra-coalitional bargaining. The latter is modeled as the ultimatum game with exogenous (time-invariant) recognition probabilities and unanimity acceptance rule. Players in agreeing coalitions leave the market and are replaced by their replicas, which keeps the pool of market participants constant over time. In this infinite game, we establish payoff uniqueness of stationary equilibria and the emergence of endogenous cooperation structures when traders experience some degree of (heterogeneous) bargaining frictions. When we focus on market games with different player types, we derive, under mild conditions, an explicit formula for each type’s equilibrium payoff as the market frictions vanish.

A Bargaining Set Based on External and Internal Stability and Endogenous Coalition Formation

A new bargaining set based on notions of both internal and external stability is developed in the context of endogenous coalition formation.It allows to make an explicit distinction between within-group and outsidegroup deviation options.This type of distinction is not present in current bargaining sets.For the class of weighted majority games, the outcomes in the bargaining set containing a minimal winning coalition are characterized.Furthermore, it is shown that the bargaining set of any homogeneous weighted majority game contains an outcome for which the underlying coalition structure consists of a minimal winning coalition and its complement.The paper also introduces a new class of games called cooperation externalities games.For a symmetric cooperation externalities game conditions are provided such that every outcome in the bargaining set supports the same coalition structure.This coalition structure consists of one coalition of all players with an externality parameter higher than one and a collection of singleton coalitions, one for every player with a cooperation externality parameter lower than one

Economic Institutions and Stability: A Network Approach

We consider a network economy in which economic agents are connected within a structure of value-generating relationships. Agents are assumed to be able to participate in three types of economic activities: autarkic self-provision; binary matching interactions; and multi-person cooperative collaborations. We introduce two concepts of stability and provide sufficient and necessary conditions on the prevailing network structure for the existence of stable assignments, both in the absence of externalities from cooperation as well as in the presence of size-based externalities. We show that institutional elements such as the emergence of socioeconomic roles and organizations based on hierarchical leadership structures are necessary for establishing stability and as such support and promote stable economic development.

Balanced Weights and Three-Sided Coalition Formation

We consider three-sided coalition formation problems when each agent is concerned about his local status as measured by his relative rank position within the group of his own type and about his global status as measured by the weighted sum of the average rankings of the other types of groups. We show that a core stable coalition structure always exists, provided that the corresponding weights are balanced and each agent perceives the two types of status as being substitutable.

Stable Economic Cooperation : A Relational Approach

We consider a relational economy in which economic agents participate in three types of relational economic activities: autarkic activities; binary matching activities; and plural cooperative activities. We introduce a stability notion and characterize stable interaction structures, both in the absence of externalities from cooperation as well as in the presence of size-based externalities. It is shown that institutional elements such as the emergence of socio-economic roles and organizations based on hierarchical leadership structures support and promote stable economic development.

Contracts and Insurance Group Formation by Myopic Players

This paper employs a cooperative approach to insurance group formation problems.The insurance group formation is analyzed in terms of stability with respect to one-person deviations.Depending on the exact contractual setting, three stability concepts are proposed: individual, contractual and compensation stability.When we apply our general framework to the standard insurance setting of Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976), we find that, in each type of contractual setting, there are stable individually rational pooling outcomes while, on the contrary, individually rational separating outcomes are not stable.