Durable goods ownership is commonly seen as a ‘defining gauge’ for the stage of development of a country. Its unprecedented economic growth and the rise of a strong and steadily growing class of consumers make China a formidable case study for the investigation of durable goods diffusion....

This paper develops a multi-sector model to: (i) quantify the feedback from women entering the labor force on the service sector size, and (ii) compute differences in hours worked by gender from taxes, structural change and female employment. Increases in female employment, due to rising wages...

This paper examines the evolution of women in the labor market, specifically their post-World War II employment, wages and education, by assessing the role of technology changing labor demand requirements, as a driving force. The empirical results in the United Sates data show that job...

Temporary fluctuations of the U.S. consumption-wealth ratio, cay, predict excess returns on international stock markets at the business cycle frequency. This finding is the reflection of a common, temporary component in national stock markets. Exposure to this common component explains up to 60...

In spite of two decades of financial globalization, consumption-based indicators do not seem to signal more international risk sharing. We argue that consumption risk sharing among industrialised countries has actually increased - in particular since the 1990s - but that standard...

Idiosyncratic consumption risk explains more than 60 percent of the cross-sectional variation in quarterly exchange rate changes and currency returns. Our results are obtained from data of 13 industrialized countries and are based on an international version of the consumption capital asset...

This paper provides a critical review of the recent literature on inequality and growth. After discussing historical and more recent distributional trends as well as empirical evidence on the relationship between inequality and growth, I focus on recent explanations of the inequality-growth...