This paper provides a quantitative assessment of the effects of inflation through changes in the value of nominal assets. We document nominal positions in the US across sectors as well as different groups of households, and estimate the redistribution brought about by a moderate inflation...

The nineteenth century witnessed dramatic improvements in the legal rights of married women. Given that these changes took place long before women gained the right to vote, they amounted to a voluntary renouncement of power by men. In this paper, we investigate men's incentives for sharing power...

Child labor is a persistent phenomenon in many developing countries. In recent years, support has been growing among rich-country governments and consumer groups for the use of trade policies, such as product boycotts and the imposition of international labor standards, to reduce child labor in...

The governments of nearly all countries are major providers of primary and secondary education to their citizens. In some countries, however, public schools coexist with private schools, while in others the government is the sole provider of education. In this study, we ask why different...

We argue that one major cause of the U.S. postwar baby boom was the increased demand for female labour during World War II. We develop a quantitative dynamic general equilibrium model with endogenous fertility and female labour-force participation decisions. We use the model to assess the...

We develop a positive theory of the adoption of child-labour regulation, based on two key mechanisms. First, parental decisions on family size interact with their preferences for child-labour regulation. Second, the supply of child labour affects skilled and unskilled wages. If policies are...

The British Industrial Revolution triggered a reversal in the social order whereby the landed elite was replaced by industrial capitalists rising from the middle classes as the economically dominant group. Many observers have linked this transformation to the contrast in values between a...

This paper shows that a zero-sum redistribution of wealth within a country can have persistent aggregate effects. Motivated by the case of an unanticipated inflation episode, we consider redistribution shocks that shift resources from old to young households. Aggregate effects arise because...

We develop general recursive methods to solve for optimal contracts in dynamic principal-agent environments with hidden states and hidden actions. In our baseline model, the principal observes nothing other than transfers. Nevertheless, optimal incentive-constrained insurance can be attained. We...

In this paper we investigate the positive and normative consequences of child-labour restrictions for economic aggregates and welfare. We argue that even though the laissez-faire equilibrium may be inefficient, there are usually better policies to cure these inefficiencies than the imposition of...