The causes of the USA's exceptional economic performance are investigated by comparing American wages and prices with wages and prices in Great Britain, Egypt, and India.  Habakkuk's views on the causes of American industrial pre-eminence are reassessed.  While the USA had abundant natural...

Analysis of new comparable series on output and employment between 1900 and 2000 for Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela indicates that productivity growth was significantly higher and less volatile during the middle decades of the century than in the opening and closing...

The Malthusian "preventive check" mechanism has been well documented for pre-industrial England through evidence for a negative correlation between the marriage rate and the price of wheat.  Other literature, however, speculates that the correlation was in fact positive from the early...

We investigate the impact of short-term weather and long-term climate on self-reported life satisfaction using panel data. We find robust evidence that day-to-day weather variation impacts life satisfaction by a similar magnitude to acquiring a mild disability. Utilizing two sources of variation...

Personalized Digital Assistants (PDAs) and other forms of hardware needed to collect survey data electronically have become more affordable and powerful in recent years, leading to their use in a number of surveys in developing countries.  Simple use of these devices can offer the prospect of...

There are extensive literatures within economics and economic psychology on the allocation of household income within the household.  These two literatures are largely disjoint but both use a concept of 'income pooling'.  In economics this refers to the independence of household decisions from...

Sharing a common fate with some people but not others may affect how economic agents behave within firms and organizations. Recognizing that many bilateral transactions occur both within and between groups sharing some degree of common fate, we present an experimental test of the effect of...

We develop a bidimensional matching model under transferable utility, where individuals are characterized by a continuous trait (e.g., socioeconomic status) and a binary attribute (e.g., smoking status).  The model is "truly multidimensional", in the sense that the impact of the traits cannot...

Children are increasingly treated as active members in the household.  However, their preferences over consumption and leisure are rarely modelled.  This paper considers heterogeneity in siblings' preferences over leisure and consumption and builds a theoretical and empirical model for...

Economic theories of the household predict that increases in female relative human capital lead to decreases in female housework time. However, longitudinal and cross-sectional evidence seems to contradict this implication. Women`s share of home time fails to decrease despite increases in...