We built a unique dataset of 300,000 famous people born between Hammurabi's epoch and 1879, Einstein's birth year. It includes, among other variables, the vital dates, occupations, and locations of celebrities from the Index Bio-bibliographicus Notorum Hominum (IBN), a very comprehensive...

We propose a new theory of the demographic transition based on the evidence that body development during childhood is an important predictor of adult life expectancy. Fertility, childhood development, longevity, education and income growth all result from individual decisions. Parents face a...

We propose four arguments favoring the idea that medical effectiveness, adult longevity and height started to increase in Europe before the industrial revolution. This may have prompted households to increase their investment in human skills as a response to longer lives and initiated the...

Human actions are often guided both by individual rationality and by social norms. In this paper we explore how duopoly market competition values the variants of a product, when these variants embody at different levels the requirements derived from some social norm. In a model where preferences...

Considering a consumer with standard preferences, I trace out the consequences for risk aversion and prudence of quantity constraints on markets. I first show how the effect can be decomposed into a price risk effect and an endogenously changing risk aversion/prudence effect. Next, I calibrate...

It has long been recognized that the pleasure of consuming a good may be affected by the consumption choice of other consumers. At least two types of motivations may explain such a behavior. In some cases social pressures may lead to conformity; while in some other cases individuals may feel the...

We investigate how international trade and trade policy possibly affect the regional distribution of economic activities within a country involved in a process of economic integration. Our analysis reveals that the impact of decreasing international trade costs on the spatial distribution of...

We consider a family of infinitely long lived representative agent economy where, each period, agents can only decide consumption plan of finite dimension n. It is shown that myopia generates indeterminacy and monetary equilibrium in infinetely lived representative economy. Any invertible...

Williamson (1979) claims that in a buyer-seller relationship with observable but unverifiable investments and state of nature, the hold up of future benefits leads to underinvestment. Aghion, Dewatripont and Rey (1994) resolve it provided that the initial contract can specify a default option...

Properties of the demand of a large population introduced by the aggregation process are studied. The idea is to consider assumptions on the distribution of household characteristics rather than focusing on the modelling of individual behavior. By opposite to the existing literature where the...