At political boundaries, local leaders often have weak incentives to reduce polluting activity because the social costs are borne by downstream neighbors. This paper exploits a natural experiment set in China in which the central government changed the local political promotion criteria and...

This paper is an attempt to assess the existence and magnitude of local research spillovers in France. We rely on the model of an extended production function (Cobb-Douglas and Translog) with both local and neighborhood Ramp;D capital stocks. We estimate this model on 312 employment areas as of...

We investigate how the number and size of local political jurisdictions in an area is determined. Our model focuses on the tradeoff between the benefits of economies of scale and the costs of a heterogeneous population. We consider heterogeneity in income, race, ethnicity, and religion, and we...

This paper examines whether the Solow growth model is consistent with the international variation in the standard of living. It shows that an augmented Solow model that includes accumulation of human as well as physical capital provides an excellent description of the cross-country data. The...

We define and estimate measures of economic preparation for retirement based on a complete inventory of economic resources while taking into account the risk of living to advanced old age and the risk of high out-of-pocket spending for health care services. We ask whether, in a sample of 66-69...

We study the effect of a recent expansion in India's National Old Age Pension Scheme on elderly well-being. Estimates suggest that public pension has a modestly negative effect on the employment of elderly/near elderly men with a primary or lower education but no effect of the employment of...

Many scholars have argued that once "basic needs" have been met, higher income is no longer associated with higher in subjective well-being. We assess the validity of this claim in comparisons of both rich and poor countries, and also of rich and poor people within a country. Analyzing multiple...

Status concerns can drive risk-taking behavior by affecting the payoff to a marginal dollar of wealth. If status concerns arise endogenously due to competition in the marriage market, then unmarried individuals should take greater risks. We test this hypothesis by studying corporate CEOs. We...

This paper examines variations in stature and the Body Mass Index (BMI) across space for the United States in 1917/18, using published data on the measurement of approximately 890,000 recruits for the American Army for World War I. It also connects those anthropometric measurements with an index...

We analyze the externalities that arise when social and economic interactions transmit infectious diseases such as COVID-19. Individually rational agents do not internalize that they impose infection externalities upon others when the disease is transmitted. In an SIR model calibrated to capture...