The Austrian theory of the "marginal use" is restated and extended. It is found that the Austrian concept of marginal utility (as derived from the marginal use) is not dependent on cardinal utility, and indeed is consistent with "intrinsically ordinal" utility. In this system, diminishing...

Leisure activities such as local recreation trips usually take place in discrete blocks of time that are surrounded by time devoted to other commitments. It can be costly to transfer time between blocks to allow for longer outings. These observations affect the value of time within those blocks...

We estimate how the marginal utility of consumption varies with health. To do so, we develop a simple model in which the impact of health on the marginal utility of consumption can be estimated from data on permanent income, health, and utility proxies. We estimate the model using the Health and...

The theory of intertemporal choice predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component. Using general preference specifications and some assumptions about the nature of the random component, we provide...

How quickly does marginal utility fall with increasing consumption? It depends on the dimension along which we consider concavity of the utility function. This paper estimates the distribution of heterogeneous curvature parameters in individuals' utility functions from hypothetical choice data,...

This paper investigates whether the parameters of labor demand functions are sensitive to alternative methods of estimation. The assumption that the production technology is of the Generalized Leontief type implies that the demand system can be estimated by analyzing cross-section differences in...

Over the last three decades there has been a dramatic increase in the length of time necessary to publish a paper in a top economics journal. This paper documents the slowdown and notes that a substantial part is due to an increasing tendency of journals to require that papers be extensively...

This paper estimates the nature and magnitude of the local externalities from own industry scale, as envisioned by Marshall. Census panel data on individual plants in high-tech and machinery industries across up to 487 countries are utilized, to quantify the direct effects of local external...

In a standard two-sector neoclassical model with distortions, capital mobility can render the steady state indeterminate, in the sense that there exist infinitely many convergent paths. In the closed economy with no international capital mobility, the utility function must be linear or close to...

This paper develops a rent-protection theory of corporate ownership structure - and in particular, of the choice between concentrated and dispersed ownership of corporate shares and votes. The paper analyzes the decision of a company's initial owner whether to maintain a lock on control when the...