This paper provides empirical evidence of favoritism by agents, where that favoritism is generated by social pressure. To do so, we explore the behavior of professional soccer referees. Referees have discretion over the addition of extra time at the end of a soccer game (called injury time), to...

In a growth model, rent-grabbing and free riding can give rise to inequality in productivity and firm size. Inequality among firms affects a firm's incentive to free ride or to grab rents, and, hence, the incentive to invest in research and training We follow Lucas and Prescott (1971) and...

This paper shows how predation breaks the links between an economy's aggregate resourceendowment and aggregate consumption and between the interpersonal distribution of endowments and the interpersonal distribution of consumption. We construct a general-equilibrium model in which some people...

Many discrete life choices--where to live, what kind of job to hold, and consumption lifestyle--are stratified by income. Stratification and sorting often manifest state-dependent preferences in which the marginal utility of income (consumption) depends on the outcome of prior choices. For...

This paper studies the relation between inequality and welfare in a general- equilibrium model in which people can choose to be either producers or preda- tors. We assume some people (the privileged) are well endowed with human capital and other people (the unprivileged) are poorly endowed with...

This paper explores the dynamics of income inequality by studying the evolution of human capital investment and neighborhood choice for a population of families. Parents affect the conditional probability distribution of their children's income through the choice of a neighborhood in which to...