To evade land taxes, most land in Taiwan during the Ching Dynasty (1662-1895) was not registered. When the Japanese started to colonize Taiwan at the turn of the 20th century, a thorough land survey was made, and all surveyed land became registered. This paper studies how this institutional...

One question development economists are especially interested in, but so far left unanswered, is how the societal income distribution would be affected by introducing a family-planning program to reduce the reproduction rate of the poor, which is usually high in developing countries. The purpose...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between income inequality and bequest division rules, an old but untouched topic addressed by Sir Josiah Stamp nearly seventy years ago. We show that the bequest income transition rule for each child should be linearly combined to form...

We consider trade policy in a setting where home country firms are fully dependent on vertically-integrated foreign firms for supplies of a key input. We find that vertically-integrated firms' strategic considerations play an important role and that, in particular, a tariff on final goods may...

This paper considers assumptions on consumer heterogeneity that can generate bidirectional distortion in a model of quality discrimination. It is shown that the profit-maximizing strategy can involve the simultaneous degradation of quality at the low end of the spectrum, while quality...