We find that a discount rate of 3.8% allows us to derive the schedule of "value of life years" in Murphy and Topel [2006] from their schedule of "value of remaining years of life", this latter presumably being based on a "value of statistical life" of $6.3 million. We draw on the Makeham...

Standard economic theories of household formation predict the rise of institutionalized polygyny in response to increased resource inequality among men. We propose a theory, within the framework of a matching model of marriage, in which, in some cases, institutionalized monogamy prevails, even...

We use the Canadian Community Health Survey (CCHS) to explore the effects of marriage and cohabitation on gay, lesbian, bisexual and heterosexual individuals’ hours worked and full-time earnings. The CCHS is one of the largest national-level data sets containing both income and sexual...

Humans exhibit much more sharing of food harvested by prime-age hunter-gatherers with dependents relative to such sharing by lower-order primates. We investigate this behavior in a model in which a father provides generously to his dependent child-son in period t in the hope that this gesture...

Using unique, representative data on domestic violence, we document several stylized facts on abuse: the average characteristics of abused wives and abusive husbands are markedly different than the characteristics of individuals in non-violent marriages, the vast majority of violent marriages...

The extent to which marriage market conditions explain differences in marriage and employment decisions across blacks and whites and across men and women is considered in a dynamic, two-sided model of marriage. The quantity and quality of men and women in the marriage market evolve endogenously...

The current literature on consumption inequality treats all adults within the household equally, making the implicit assumption that all consumption inequality is between, not within, households. However, increased marital sorting on earnings and the subsequent rise in the share of women's...

An investment project usually lasts for many years, hence its appraisal requires a comparison of the costs and benefits over its entire life. For acceptance, the present value of the project's expected benefits should exceed the present value of its expected costs. Among a set of mutually...

This chapter discusses the alternative investment criteria commonly used in the appraisal of investment projects. The net present value (NPV) of a project criterion is widely accepted by accountants, financial analysts, and economists as the one that yields the correct project choices in all...