We develop and estimate a model of dynamic interactions in which commitment is limited and contracts are incomplete to explain the patterns of income and consumption growth in village economies of less developed countries. Households can insure each other through both formal contracts and...

We study the effect of a declining labor force on the incentives to engage in labor-saving technical change and ask how this effect is influenced by institutional characteristics of the pension scheme. When labor is scarcer it becomes more expensive and innovation investments that increase labor...

This paper applies the Phillips and Sul (2007) method to test for convergence in stock returns to an extensive dataset including monthly stock price indices for five EU countries (Germany, France, the Netherlands, Ireland and the UK) as well as the US over the period 1973-2008. We carry out the...

This paper explores the implications of gender-based income taxation in a non- cooperative model of a couple's time allocation between market work and providing a household public good. We find that the optimal structure of differential taxation by gender is solely determined by spouses'...

A large fraction of domestically abused women report that their partners interfere with their participation in education and employment. As of yet, mainstream economics has not dealt in any systematic way with this phenomenon and its implications for welfare policy. This paper puts forward a...

We estimate a collective time allocation model, where Dutch, Surinamese/Antillean and Turkish households behave as if both spouses maximize a household utility function. We assume that paid labor and housework are the endogenous choice variables and furthermore consider household production....

This paper considers a simple model of credit risk and derives the limit distribution of losses under different assumptions regarding the structure of systematic and idiosyncratic risks and the nature of firm heterogeneity. The theoretical results obtained indicate that if firm-specific risk...

Banks should evaluate whether a borrower is likely to default. I apply several techniques in the extensive mathematical literature of stochastic optimal control/dynamic programming to derive an optimal debt in an environment where there are risks on both the asset and liabilities sides. The...

A healthy financial system encourages the efficient allocation of capital and risk. The collapse of the house price bubble led to the financial crisis that started in 2007. There is a large empirical literature concerning the relation between asset price bubbles and financial crises. I evaluate...