In this paper we attempt to ascertain the impact on parents' desired fertility of a number of changes likely to increase the returns to the rural-to-urban migration of children. We assume that the demand for children as assets depends upon the extent to which they raise the mean per capita...

In this paper we examine the effect of migratory opportunities for children on fertility when the decision by the child whether and how much to remit is endogenous to the analysis. We differentiate between two classes of motivations to remit and four changes that are likely to increase the...

D.P. 37. Migrants and Markets: In recent research, the question "Why do migrants fare as they do?" has largely been answered through an inspection of the vector of migrants' characteristics. The main theme of the current paper is that special features characterize the interaction (the nature of...

In view of proposed immigration reform pertaining to the employment of illegal aliens we model a competitive, risk-averse firm employing legal as well as illegal workers whose wage is effectively a random variable. Inter alia we find that this wage does not affect the scale of the firm's...

Courts typically base compensation for loss of income in personal injury cases on either mean or median work income. Yet, quantatively, mean and median incomes are typically very different. For example, in the US median income is 65 percent of mean income. In this paper we use economic theory to...

Courts typically base compensation for loss of income in personal injury cases on either mean or median work income. Yet, quantatively, mean and median incomes are typically very different. For example, in the US median income is 65 percent of mean income. In this paper we use economic theory to...

What is the appropriate lump-sum compensation for loss of work income in personal injury cases? Since generally future work income is not known with certainty, compensation for its loss must be based on statistical considerations. Typically, courts have based awards on mean or median work...

We explore the relation between variability in the rate of return to human capital and investment in education in the context of migration. Specifically, we show that if migration is a possibility, such variability in the rate of return to human capital can induce residents of developing...

In this paper we show that costs associated with infractions of property rights, such as theft, can be reduced by imposing lower penal-ties on individuals who admit to such infractions and make restitution. We find that the socially optimal penalty on a confessed thief may be zero (complete...

We study a policy response to an increase in post-merger social stress. If a merger of groups of people is viewed as a revision of their social space, then the merger alters people's comparators and increases social stress: the social stress of a merged population is greater than the sum of the...