The paper re-examines the idea that a family can be viewed as a community governed by a self-enforcing constitution, and extends existing results in two directions. First, it identifies circumstances in which a constitution is renegotiation-proof. Second, it introduces parental altruism. The...

Labor market frictions are not the only possible factor responsible for high unemployment. Credit market imperfections, driven by microeconomic frictions and impacted upon by macroeconomic factors such as monetary policy, could also be to blame. This paper shows that labor and credit market...

The paper aims to ascertain whether voluntary money transfers may be explained by the existence of self-enforcing family constitutions. We identify a circumstance in which an agent will behave differently if she is optimizing subject to a family constitution, than if she is moved by either...