Technological progress comes in waves. The birth of information technology (IT) may herald the start of a Third Industrial Revolution. This paper argues that (a) the market declined in the late 1960s because it felt that the old technologies either had lost their momentum or would give way to...

How does technological progress in financial intermediation affect the economy? To address this question a costly-state verification framework is embedded into a standard growth model. In particular, financial intermediaries can invest resources to monitor the returns earned by firms. The...

Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less...

Bailey and Collins (forth.) argue that Greenwood, Seshadri and Vandenbroucke (2005)'s hypothesis that the baby boom was partly due to a burst of productivity in the household sector is not supported by evidence. This conclusion is based upon regression results showing that appliance ownership is...

The welfare gain to consumers from the introduction of personal computers is estimated here. A simple model of consumer demand is formulated that uses a slightly modi ed version of standard preferences. The modi cation permits marginal utility, and hence total utility, to be nite when the...

The welfare gain to consumers from the introduction of personal computers is estimated here. A simple model of consumer demand is formulated that uses a slightly modified version of standard preferences. The modification permits marginal utility, and hence total utility, to be finite when the...