Human capital accumulation has long been recognized as critical to economic growth and development. In recent years focus on the intra-household distribution of human capital has intensified both theoretically and empirically. However, connecting the theoretical and empirical literature has been...

This paper investigates (i) what has determined the land investment behavior of Japanese firms since the latter half of the 1980s; and (ii) how the current market prices of their land assets diverge from their shadow prices (marginal values of land investment). To do so, we estimate nonlinear...

In principal-agent settings with moral hazard, the fact that agents are altruistic vis-a-vis third parties (e.g. their family) modifies incentive costs. We derive sufficient conditions for the principal to benefit from altruism. They bear on how altruism affects the agent's marginal rate of...

Consumption is partly a social activity, yet most studies of consumer behavior treat households in isolation. We investigate familial relationships in consumption patterns using a sample of parents and their children from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We find a positive and statistically...

Human capital plays an important role in the theory of economic growth, but it has been difficult to measure this abstract concept. We survey the psychological literature on cross-cultural IQ tests, and conclude that modern intelligence tests are well-suited for measuring an important form of a...

In this paper, we formalize the idea of human capital as the ability to follow and enforce the rules necessary for orderly conduct of economic transactions. People in the US and other developed countries stand in lines while waiting for the bus, etc., while in many developing countries lines...

We develop an economic growth model in which both the R&D resources to develop new product applications and the market structure of consumption goods manufacturing are determined endogenously. There exists uncertainty with respect to the development date of an inaugural product, although higher...

Available evidence suggests high intergenerational correlation of economic status, and persistent disparities in health status between the rich and the poor. This paper proposes a novel mechanism linking the two. We introduce health human capital into a two-period overlapping generations model....