I analyze a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1997. Controlling for the incumbent President's activity across issues, I find that during the presidential campaign the New York Times gives more emphasis to topics that are owned by the Democratic party (civil rights, health...

Sampling poses an interesting problem in markets with experience goods. Free samples reveal product quality and help consumers to make informed purchase decisions (promotional effect). However, sampling may also induce consumers to substitute purchases with free consumption (displacement...

It has been suggested in the literature that taxes and subsidies play an important role in explaining the differences in working hours across countries. In this paper I test whether public programmes for family support play a role in explaining this variation. I analyse two types of policies:...

This paper studies the role of quality competition in endogenous growth and institutional factors which can affect growth through affecting quality competition. The R&D-based growth literature as it stands attributes the incentives for innovations to monopolist market structure, and regards the...

This paper investigates the relationship between growth and inequality from a demographic point of view. In an extended model of the accidental bequest with endogenous fertility, we analyze the effects of a decrease in the old-age mortality rate on the equilibrium growth rate as well as on the...

We analyse in detail the factors that lead to intergenerational persistence among sons, where this is measured as the association between childhood family income and later adult earnings. We seek to account for the level of income persistence in the 1970 BCS cohort and also to explore the...

There is theoretical evidence that economic and family policies have an important impact on mother''s employment. The aim of this article is to study empirically the women''s transitions from employment to non-employment after they have their first birth in Belgium, West-Germany, Italy, Spain...

This paper investigates why children work by studying the wage elasticity of child labour supply. Incorporating subsistence constraints in to a model of labour supply, we show that a negative wage elasticity favours the hypothesis that poverty compels work whereas a positive wage elasticity...

This paper investigates whether young people whose fathers are union members are themselves more likely to join a union. We find that young people with unionized fathers are twice as likely to be unionized as those with non-union fathers and that this rises to three times higher for those whose...

We look for evidence of habituation in twenty waves of German panel data: do individuals, after life and labour market events, tend to return to some baseline level of well-being? Although the strongest life satisfaction effect is often at the time of the event, we find significant lag and lead...