Maurizio Caserta

Accidental politicians: How randomly selected legislators can improve parliament efficiency

We study a prototypical model of a Parliament with two Parties or two Political Coalitions and we show how the introduction of a variable percentage of randomly selected independent legislators can increase the global efficiency of a Legislature, in terms of both the number of laws passed and the average social welfare obtained. We also analytically find an “efficiency golden rule” which allows to fix the optimal number of legislators to be selected at random after that regular elections have established the relative proportion of the two Parties or Coalitions. These results are in line with both the ancient Greek democratic system and the recent discovery that the adoption of random strategies can improve the efficiency of hierarchical organizations.

The Supply of Arts Labour : Towards a Dynamic Approach

Earlier work on the supply of labour of artists has shown that, whenever workers derive satisfaction from the process of work, which is usually the case for artists, some traditional results are reversed. As their proponents make clear this analysis is essentially static, as it does not take into account the intertemporal dimension of the supply of labour. The paper argues that to provide such a dynamic analysis three routes are available: the human capital approach, the household production approach and the evolutionary approach. The paper, therefore, is aimed at discussing the adequacy of various theoretical approaches to the treatment of a specific question.

Are Bad Firms Beneficial to Growth

In this paper we analyse a case of adverse selection in the credit market to show that, in the presence of a monopolistic bank, bad firms can be beneficial to accumulation and growth. Two main implications are drawn: first, even if classical diminishing returns on technology are ruled out, growth declines over time. Second, any attempt to make banks more capable of discriminating between bad and good firms will resolve itself into a restraint to growth.