The socio-economic status of Indian Muslims is, on average, considerably lower than that of upper caste Hindus. Muslims have higher fertility and shorter birth spacing and are a minority group that, it has been argued, have poorer access to public goods. They nevertheless exhibit substantially...

Empirical findings that minorities typically attain lower economic status than majorities and that relatively larger minorities perform worse than smaller ones pose a challenge to economics.To explain this scale puzzle, I model an economy where the society is bifurcated into two social groups...

This paper analyses the eeffects of ageing and child support in a model with endogenous fertility and Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) pensions. First, we show that the endogeneity of fertility makes society vulnerable to both pessimistic beliefs and changes in life expectancy. In particular, we show that...

From 1977-2001, 15 US states mandated health insurance providers to offer coverage for infertility treatment. Although the majority of the past literature has studied impacts on older women who are likely to seek treatment, this paper proposes that the mandates may have had a wider impact on the...

Abstract: Analyzing 30 OECD-countries in 1980-2005, this paper documents the effect of an aging electorate on pension expenditure. The first outcome is that an increase in the age of the median voter leads to less generous pension benefits. The second outcome is that an older median voter is not...

Social security systems in most industrialized countries face severe financial problems due to adverse demographic changes. The increase in old{age dependency, however, will be spread over a period of approximately 50 years. The degree of technological progress necessary to offset the negative...

Abstract: Initially, voting rights were limited to wealthy elites providing political support for stock markets. The franchise expansion induces the median voter to provide political support for banking development as this new electorate has lower financial holdings and benefits less from the...

This paper develops extensive new data on the legal independence of new central banks in 26 former socialist economies (FSE).This data is constructed using the codification system for measuring legal independence developed in Cukierman, Webb and Neyapti (1992) and in chapter 19 of Cukierman...

Abstract: This paper estimates the relationship between various sub-indicators of economic freedom and life satisfaction for 122 countries. The estimation results show that life satisfaction is positively related to the quality of the legal system and protection of property rights. For poor...

This paper analyzes the relations between social capital, institutions and trust.These concepts are full of ambiguity and confusion.This paper attempts to dissolve some of the confusion, by distinguishing trust and control, and analyzing institutional and relational conditions of trust.It...