Agricultural reform in a rural economy, comprising two separable landholding classes is analyzed in an over-lapping generations framework. "The poor" work the land and have children to provide for family labor and old age support. "Landlords" only use hired labor and maximize profits. It is...

In an overlapping generations framework, the effects of exogenous changes in child mortality on fertility and parental welfare in the short run and on fertility, population density and parental welfare in the long run is analyzed in a primitive, land-constrained economy. In a first step a...

A short review of different types of motives in fertility decisions is given, followed by a discussion on the characteristics of societies where the insurance and producer goods motives are important. Three models investigating the effects of different types of policy interventions in such...

In this paper two simple tests to distinguish between unit root processes and stationary nonlinear processes are proposed. New limit distribution results are provided, together with two F type test statistics for the joint unit root and linearity hypothesis against a specific nonlinear...

This paper reviews the argument that high long-term unemployment in Europe is caused by generous social safety nets in times of economic turbulence. We report on the empirical evidence of a more turbulent economic environment and present the theoretical arguments that establish a link between...

In this note, we analyze the behavior of a firm that has a (stochastic) market power due to a patent. For example, we show how to handle the stock aspects of R&D activities (the accumulation of human capital in a firm). In fact, when the R&D stock enters the survival probability of the firm's...

In this paper we propose a general method for testing the Granger noncausality hypothesis in stationary nonlinear models of unknown functional form. These tests are based on a Taylor expansion of the nonlinear model around a given point in a sample space. We study the performance of our tests by...

Within most organizations, agents may spend time on a variety of tasks, productive and redistributive. In this paper, I derive an optimal multi-task incentive scheme under the realistic assumption that agents have limited liability. The wage level is shown to increase with an agent's discretion...

This paper examines aggregate savings in a general equilibrium model where infinitely lived households face volatile (and possibly uncertain) income paths, hold a risk-free asset, and face a liquidity constraint. I first show that the equilibrium capital stock in an economy without uncertainty,...

Estimating a density function over a bounded domain can be very complicated and resulting in an unsatisfactory or unrealistic density estimate. In many cases a one-to-one transformation can be applied to the considered data set, but there are also situations where such a unique transformation...