The objective of this essay is to study to what extent parents divide their estates unequally between their children and the determinants of this decision. We use a new dataset based on the estate reports for almost 70,000 Swedish widows, widowers, divorcees and unmarried individuals who died...

A model is developed for peasant households in land abundant areas who choose between two technologies for land preparation: a manual one and one using draught animals. For draught a minimum number of animals is required so that a technological non convexity exists. It follows that certain...

This paper provides the tools and procedures for empirically implementing several dominance criteria for social welfare comparisons and broad income inequality comparisons. Dominance criteria are expressed in terms of vectors of quantile ordinates based on income shares or quantile means....

This paper applies the tool box measures of disaggregative income inequality characterization and the statistical methodology of Beach (2021) to percentile-based distribution statistics such as quintile income shares and decile means typically published by official statistical agencies. It...

This paper offers a tool box of disaggregative measures of distributional change, including population shares, income shares, quantile mean incomes and relative mean incomes of different income groups. It highlights median-based measures along with quintiles and deciles. It also offers formulas...

The empirical evidence suggests that parents use inter vivos gifts (i.e., transfers of tangible and financial property) to compensate less well off children whereas post mortem bequests are divided equally among siblings. We study a theoretical model assuming, first, that the amounts given is...

With panel data important issues can be resolved that can not beaddressed with cross--sectional data. A major drawback is that paneldata suffer from more severe missing data problems. Adding a sampleconsisting of new units randomly drawn from the original populationas replacements for units who...

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lotteryand deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion.This allows direct testing of common hypotheses on risk attitudes inthree datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed fallswith income and wealth. Entrepreneurs are less...

We analyze the empirical violation of the Hillman condition, a necessary and sufficient condition for the correspondence between comparative advantage and pre-trade relative prices. Our comprehensive data set allows us to investigate the Hillman condition for virtually all countries of the...

This paper surveys the last decade of micro-economic research using time-use data. Focusing on the household production model, time-use as an investment activity, and the distribution of extended income, issues of data collection, measurement errors, model specification and estimation as well as...