The binary-response maximum score (MS) estimator is a robust estimator, which can accommodate heteroskedasticity of an unknown form; J. Horowitz (1992) defined a smoothed maximum score estimator SMS) and demonstrated that this improves the convergence rate for sufficiently smooth conditional...

Western European income per capita more than tripled in the two and a half decades that followed World War II. The scholarship has identified several potential factors behind this outstanding growth episode, specifically; the large migrations from agriculture to manufacture that took place in...

We present an overlapping generations economy populated by heterogeneous agents who care about their consumption relative to others and the bequest they leave to their offspring. In the presence of positional concerns individual saving and bequest rates vary across the income distribution. This...

We present a simple model of capital accumulation where agents care about their consumption relative to the consumption of other members of society. This concern with "envy" captures the intuition behind the growing body of empirical evidence that places interpersonal comparisons as a key...

The process of economic development is characterized by substantial rural-urban migrations and a decreasing share of agriculture in output and employment. The literature highlights two main engines behind this process of structural change: (i) improvements in agricultural technology combined...

This paper exploits a natural experiment, the large destruction of capital in continental Europe during World War II, to characterize the transitional dynamics of an economy that begins with a capital stock below its steady state level. We use these regularities as a benchmark to discriminate...

Ranking development programs using integrals of discounted utilities can yield drastic consequences that offend our sense of justice. New alternative social welfare criteria should be considered. A reaction to discounted utilitarianism is to moderate its effects by adding to the social welfare...