We study the joint role of altruism and impatience, and the impact of evolution in the formation of long-term time preferences and in the determination of optimal consumption and optimal bequests. We show how the consumption paths of dynasties relate to altruism and to impatience, and we reason...

In determining the optimal redistribution of a given population's income, we ask which factor is more important: the social planner's aversion to inequality, embedded in an isoelastic social welfare function indexed by a parameter alpha, or the individuals' concern at having a low relative...

We ask which migration policy a developed country will choose when its objective is to attain the optimal skill composition of the country's workforce, and when the policy menu consists of an entry fee and a quota. We compare these two policies under the assumptions that individuals are...

Social comparisons are important in the employment sphere. A "culture of unemployment" may evolve and prevail because it is optimal for an individual to remain unemployed when other unemployed individuals constitute his main reference group. We advance the idea that by making the receipt of...

We compare the performance of maximum likelihood (ML) and simulated method of moments (SMM) estimation for dynamic discrete choice models. We construct and estimate a simplified dynamic structural model of education that captures some basic features of educational choices in the United States in...

The literature on treatment effects focuses on gross benefits from program participation. We extend this literature by developing conditions under which it is possible to identify parameters measuring the cost and net surplus from program participation. Using the generalized Roy model, we...

We compare the performance of maximum likelihood (ML) and simulated method of moments (SMM) estimation for dynamic discrete choice models. We construct and estimate a simplified dynamic structural model of education that captures some basic features of educational choices in the United States in...

Drawing on the premise that the integration of economies revises people's social space and their comparators, we quantify social stress by aggregate relative deprivation, ARD; we calculate the effect of monetary mergers on ARD; and we document the validity of the superadditivity property of ARD...

When individuals' utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the maximization of aggregate utility yields an equal income distribution. This...