This paper provides a theoretical and empirical investigation of the positive complementarities between disease-specific policies introduced by competing risks of mortality. The incentive to invest in prevention against one cause of death depends positively on the level of survival from other...

Is corruption systematically related to electoral rules? A number of studies have tried to uncover economic and social determinants of corruption but, as far as we know, nobody has yet empirically investigated how electoral systems influence corruption. We try to address this lacuna in the...

Limited consumer attention limits product market competition: prices are stochastically lower the more attention is paid. Ads compete to be the lowest price with other ads from the same sector and they compete for attention with ads from other sectors: equilibrium sector ad shares under free...

We study the intergenerational transmission of cognitive and non-cognitive abilities between parents and sons, using population-wide enlistment data. Conscripts are evaluated at the same age and with comparable methods across cohorts, and we correct for measurement error bias in fathers’...

It has been suggested in the literature that a source of incompleteness in the agency relationship between the doctor and the patient is that the provider may respond to an incomplete or biased perception of the patient’s interests. However, this has not been shown empirically. This paper is...

This paper investigates the robustness of recent findings on the effect of parental background on child health. We are particularly concerned with the extent to which their finding that income effects on child health are the result of spurious correlation rather than some causal mechanism. A...

Does the pattern of social connections between individuals matter for macroeconomic outcomes? If so, how does this effect operate and how big is it? Using network analysis tools, we explore how different social structures affect technology diffusion and thereby a country’s rate of...

Job reallocation is considered to be a key characteristic of well-functioning labor markets, as more productive firms grow and less productive ones contract or close. However, despite its potential benefits for the economy, there are significant costs that are borne by displaced workers. We...

Research increasingly shows that differences in endowments at birth need not be genetic but instead are influenced by environmental factors while the fetus is in the womb. In addition, these differences may persist well beyond childhood. In this paper, we study one such environmental factor –...

Eleven percent of the Malawian population is HIV infected. Eighteen percent of sexual encounters are casual. A condom is used one quarter of the time. A choice-theoretic general equilibrium search model is constructed to analyze the Malawian epidemic. In the developed framework, people select...