Why do people have kids in developed societies? We propose an empirical test of two alternative theories — children as “consumption” vs. “investment” good. We use as a natural experiment the Italian pension reforms of the 90s that introduced a clear discontinuity in the treatment...

A familiar result in the theory of private intergenerational transfers is that competitive equilibria with gifts from children to their parents are dynamically inefficient whereas they are dynamically efficient with bequests from parents to their children. This note demonstrates that if growth...

Natural disasters have been shown to produce effects on social capital, risk and time preferences of victims. We run experiments on altruistic preferences on a sample of Sri Lankan microfinance borrowers affected/unaffected by the tsunami shock in 2004 at a 7-year distance from the event (a...