This note considers a general equilibrium model where individuals are potentially consumers, workers, and shareholders. It extends the results obtained previously by Kahloul et al. (2017) with extreme ownership structures on the majority vote between Monopoly and Duopoly, to the case of any proportion of shareholders in the population.We prove that Duopoly is preferred when non-shareholders constitute a majority of the population. Otherwise, the majority vote depends on the proportion of shareholders and the dispersion of the individuals with respect to their intensity of preference for quality relative to their sensitivity to effort.

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In this paper, we theoretically and empirically analyze the impact of competition on poverty. We consider a general equilibrium framework with vertical preferences and compare poverty in a Monopoly setting versus a Duopoly setting considering explicitly the ownership structure. Poverty is measured by the size of the population living below an absolute poverty line. Theoretical results show that the impact of competition on poverty is contingent to the ownership structure, the poverty line and the relative dispersion of the individuals with respect to their intensity of preference for quality and sensitivity to effort: competition can improve or worsen poverty depending on the model's parameters. Empirical findings for the three existing poverty lines ($1.9, $3.2, and $5.5) are consistent to a large extent with our theoretical results.

We consider that an immigrant has a portfolio of human capital consisting of education, work experience and languages and each asset is characterized by a risk and a return. The approach of Mincer (1974) was adopted and the effect of the similarity between Canada and the country of origin on salary was taken into account to determine the returns of these various components of human capital. Then, the methodology of Pereira and Martins (2002) was used to assess the risks associated with human capital, i.e. the risk for an individual to be in the lower part of the income distribution. The results indicate that human capital is not perfectly transferable and show that the relationship between risk and return is similar to that relating to financial assets: it is negative for assets that represent insurance for their owners and positive for the others. In addition, the accumulation of work experience in Canada and similar countries is accompanied by an increase in risk and a decrease in returns. Contrary to our expectations, the results indicate that the risk does not decrease with education level.