What is the basic economic decision-making unit? Is it the household or the extended family? This question is fundamental to economic analysis and policy design. The answer given by the Life Cycle and Keynesian models is that the economic unit is the household. According to these models, members...

This paper examines the bequest\gift behavior of altruistic parents who do not know their children's abilities and cannot observe their children's work effort. Parents are likely to respond to this information problem by making larger bequests to higher earning children and by using their...

This article demonstrates that Ricardian Equivalence does not necessarily hold in models with altruistic transfers once one takes into account the strategic behavior of recipients as well as donors. To influence the final allocation of consumption in altruistic settings, potential recipients can...