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This article studies how a government should distribute funds among research institutions and how it should allocate them to basic and applied research. Institutions differ in reputation and efficiency and have an information advantage. The government should award funding for basic research to induce the most productive institutions to carry out more applied research than they would like. Institutions with better reputation a do more research than otherwise identical ones, and applied research is inefficiently concentrated in the most efficient high‐reputation institutions. The article provides theoretical support for a dual‐channel funding mechanism but not for full economic costing.

This article studies how a government should distribute funds among research institutions and how it should allocate them to basic and applied research. Institutions differ in reputation and efficiency, and have an information advantage. The government should award funding for basic research to induce the most productive institutions to carry out more applied research than they would like. Institutions with better reputation do more research than otherwise identical ones, and applied research is inefficiently concentrated in the most efficient high reputation institutions. The article provides theoretical support for a dual channel funding mechanism, but not for full economic costing.

This paper proposes an explanation for the universal human desire for increasing consumption and the associated propensity to trade survival opportunity off conspicuous consumption. I argue that this desire was moulded in evolutionary times by a mechanism known to biologists as sexual selection, whereby an observable trait — conspicuous consumption in this case — is used by members of one sex to signal their unobservable characteristics valuable to members of the opposite sex. It then shows that the standard economics problem of utility maximisation is formally equivalent to the standard biology problem of the maximisation of individual fitness, the ability to pass genes to future generations, and thus establishes a rigorous theoretical foundation for including conspicuous consumption in the utility function.

The effects of minimum wage legislation are analysed with the assumptions that firms are able to alter the working conditions of their employees, and that workers have different preferences about the characteristics of their job. The main findings tally with Card and Krueger's (1995) recent somewhat puzzling empirical evidence about the effects of changes in minimum wage. I find that the effects of changes in the minimum wage on employment are limited, that there is a positive spillover on high‐wage workers, and that there is bunching of workers at the minimum wage.

Abstract This paper studies the role of the corporate governance system in cooperatives and in investor‐owned enterprises. We abstract from all possible differences between the two systems except the type of majority needed to take decisions: this is one‐head‐one‐vote for cooperatives and proportional to capital invested in investor‐owned firms. We show that the institutional form chosen matters for the initial investment decision of the agents: in particular we find that members of a cooperative invest less than they would in an investor‐owned enterprise.

We consider an environment where two education institutions compete by selecting the proportion of their funding devoted to teaching and research and the criteria for admission for their students, and where students choose whether and where to attend university. We study the relationship between the cost incurred by students for attending a university located away from their home town and the equilibrium configuration that emerges in the game played by the universities. Symmetric equilibria, where universities choose the same admission standard, only exist when the mobility cost is high; when the mobility cost is very low, there is no pure strategy equilibrium. For intermediate values of the mobility cost, only asymmetric equilibria may exist; the final section of the paper provides an example where asymmetric equilibria do indeed exist for a plausible and robust set of parameters.