We analyze how the presence of endogenous preferences affects the altruistic bequest motive from parents to children. We will show that the existence of habits raises the threshold value of the intergenerational discount factor above which altruistic bequests are positive, while aspiration...

We study how the introduction of consumption externalities affects the efficiency of the dynamic equilibrium in an economy displaying dynastic altruism. When the bequest motive is inoperative consumption externalities affect the intertemporal margin between young and old consumption and thus...

In this paper, we characterize the relationship between the initial distribution of human capital and physical inheritances among individuals and the long-run distribution of these two variables. In a model with indivisible investment in education, we analyze how the initial distribution of...

Marriage has declined since 1960, with the drop being bigger for non-college educated individuals versus college educated ones. Divorce has increased, more so for the non-college educated. Additionally, positive assortative mating has risen. Income inequality among households has also widened. A...

Alan S. Milward was an economic historian who developed an implicit theory of historical change. His interpretation which was neither liberal nor Marxist posited that social, political, and economic change, for it to be sustainable, had to be a gradual process rather than one resulting from a...

We study competition in experimental markets in which two incumbents face entry by three other firms. Our treatments vary with respect to three factors: sequential vs. block or simultaneous entry, the cost functions of entrants and the amount of time during which incumbents are protected from...

European and the US mobile communication services markets have developed in rather different ways. There are striking differences in termination regulation and retail pricing models and one may wonder why this occurred and whether either of the markets outperforms the other in terms of...

Calculating explicit closed form solutions of Cournot models where firms have private information about their costs is, in general, very cumbersome. Most authors consider therefore linear demands and constant marginal costs. However, within this framework, the nonnegativity constraint on prices...

Many economists and policy analysts seem to believe that loyaltyrewarding pricing schemes, like frequent flyer programs, tend to reinforce firm's market power and hence are detrimental to consumer welfare. The existing academic literature has supported this view to some extent. In contrast, we...

Bertrand competition under decreasing returns involves a wide interval of pure strategy equilibrium prices. We first present results of experiments in which two, three and four identical firms repeatedly interact in this environment. Less collusion with more firms leads to lower average prices....