National Time Accounting is a way of measuring society's well-being, based on time use. Its explicit form is the U-index, for quot;unpleasantquot; or quot;undesirablequot;, which measures the proportion of time an individual spends in an unpleasant state. In this paper I review cross-country...

We model visibility bias in the social transmission of consumption behavior. When consumption is more salient than non-consumption, people perceive that others are consuming heavily, and infer that future prospects are favorable. This increases aggregate consumption in a positive feedback loop....

From the theoretical point of view, the justification for aggregating leisure and work at home into one entity, "non-market time" (or "home time") can rest on two assumptions: (a.) the two elements react similarly to changes in the socio-economic environment and, hence, nothing is gained by...

Product diversity pervades every modern marketplace, and economists have devoted substantial attention to firms' decisions about the supply of variety. This study looks at the consumer's side by discussing the demand for variety. Using the framework of the home-production model, we trace...

What are the fundamental driving forces of macroeconomic fluctuations? In particular, why do people spend more time working in booms and less in recessions? These are basic questions of macroeconomics. Recent thinking has emphasized technology shifts, preference shifts, and changes in government...

This paper sets out alternatives to the traditional model of labour supply used to analyse the welfare costs of income and/or sales taxes when preferences are defined over goods and leisure and the market wage yields the slope of the budget constraint. The innovation in our work is to assume...

An important class of investment decisions is characterized by unrecoverable sunk costs, resolution of uncertainty through time, and the ability to invest in the future as an alternative to investing today. The options model provides guidance in such settings, including an investment decision...

We use differences between the attributes of stock issuers and repurchasers to forecast characteristic-related stock returns. For example, we show that large firms underperform following years when issuing firms are large relative to repurchasing firms. Our approach is useful for forecasting...