We study the evolutionary robustness of strategies in innitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games in which players make mistakes with a small probability and are patient. The evolutionary process we consider is given by the replicator dynamics. We show that there are strategies with a uniformly...

The research explores the effect of industrialization on human capital formation. Exploiting exogenous regional variations in the adoption of steam engines across France, the study establishes that in contrast to conventional wisdom that views early industrialization as a predominantly...

Theories of economic growth hypothesize that the transition from pre-industrial stagnation to sustained growth is associated with a post-Malthusian phase in which technological progress raises income and spurs population growth while offsetting diminishing returns to labour. Evidence suggests...

This research examines variations in the di¤usion of agriculture across countries and archaeological sites. The theory suggests that a society?s history of climatic shocks shaped the timing of its adoption of farming. Speci?cally, as long as climatic disturbances did not lead to a collapse of...

“The Impact of Microcredit on the Poor in Bangladesh: Revisiting the Evidence,” by David Roodman and Jonathan Morduch (2014) is the most recent of a sequence of papers and postings that seeks to refute the findings of the Pitt and Khandker (1998) article “The Impact of Group-Based Credit...

Identi?cation in most sample selection models depends on the independence of the regressors and the error terms conditional on the selection probability. All quantile and mean functions are parallel in these models; this implies that quantile estimators cannot reveal any? per assumption...

Both government purchases and transfers figure prominently in the use of fiscal policy for counteracting recessions. However, existing representative agent models including the neoclassical and New Keynesian benchmark rule out transfers by assumption. This paper provides a role for transfers by...

We propose estimators of the memory parameter of a time series that are robust to a wide variety of random level shift processes, deterministic level shifts and deterministic time trends. The estimators are simple trimmed versions of the popular log-periodogram regression estimator that employ...