We scrutinize Thomas Piketty's (2014) theory concerning the relationship between an economy's long-run growth rate, its capital-income ratio, and its factor income distribution put forth in his recent book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. We find that a smaller long-run growth rate may be...

Behavioral economists have recently put forth a theoretical explanation for the equity premium puzzle based on combining myopia and loss aversion. Complementing the behavioral theory is evidence from laboratory experiments, which provide strong empirical support consistent with myopic loss...

We propose a heuristic switching model of an asset market where the agents' choice of heuristic is consistent with their individual risk aversion. They choose between a fundamentalist and a trend-following rule to form expectations about the price of a risky asset. Given their risk aversion,...

This exercise offers an innovative learning mechanism to model economic agent's decision-making process using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm. In particular, this AI agent is born in an economic environment with no information on the underlying economic structure and its own preference....

We provide survey evidence on how households’ inflation expectations matter for their spending highlighting a behavioral distortion compared to the New Keynesian setup. A large share of households expects prices to remain stable instead of increasing. Such a belief is linked to individual...

The volatility of unanticipated output growth in income per capita is detrimental to long-run development, controlling for initial income per capita, population growth, human capital, investment, openness and natural resource dependence. This effect is significant and robust over a wide range of...

Brunnschweiler and Bulte (2008) provide cross-country evidence that the resource curse is a "red herring" once one corrects for endogeneity of resource exports and allows resource abundance affect growth. Their results show that resource exports are no longer significant while the value of...

Are natural resources a "curse" or a "blessing"? The empirical evidence suggests either outcome is possible. The paper surveys a variety of hypotheses and supporting evidence for why some countries benefit and others lose from the presence of natural resources. These include that a resource...

This paper studies a model of the distribution of income under bounded needs. Utility derived from any given good reaches a bliss point at a finite consumption level of that good. On the other hand, introducing new varieties always increases utility. It is assumed that each variety is owned by a...

In view of rising inequality in fast growing Asian developing countries, it is important to study the relationship between economic growth and income inequity. We develop a simple model to establish that economic growth and inequality can bear a complex and non-linear relationship if policy...