Permanent economic inequality is unknown among mobile hunter-gatherers, but hereditary class distinctions between elites and commoners exist in some sedentary foraging societies. With the spread of agriculture, such stratification tends to become more pronounced. We develop a model to explain...

Until about 13,000 years ago all humans obtained their food through hunting and gathering, but thereafter people in some parts of the world began a transition to agriculture. Recent data strongly implicate climate change as the driving force behind the transition in southwest Asia. We propose a...

Measures of household consumption-­which may be used to investigate average consumption growth, mor consumption poverty and inequality-­must account for the rental flow from owned accommodation. We consider two econometric problems relating to the imputation of rental flows for owned...

Collective household models posit that each household member has access to a fraction of the household budget, called a resource share, which defines the shadow budget faced by a household member. Together with the within-household shadow price vector, the shadow budget determines the material...

We propose a generalization of random coefficients models, in which the regression model is an unknown function of a vector of regressors, each of which is multiplied by an unobserved error. We also investigate a more restrictive model which is additive (or additive with interactions) in unknown...

We investigate whether immigrant and minority workers' poor access to high-wage jobs---that is, glass ceilings---is attributable to poor access to jobs in high-wage firms, a phenomenon we call glass doors. Our analysis uses linked employer-employee data to measure mean- and quantile-wage...

Between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries English peasants faced large income shocks relative to mean incomes.  Innovations in property rights over land induced peasants to respond by trading small parcels of land as part of their risk coping strategy.  The same period witnessed a dramatic...

We study a novel, repeated common pool resource game in which current resource stocks depend on resource extraction in previous periods. Our model shows that for a sufficiently high regrowth rate, there is no commons dilemma: the resource will be preserved indefinitely in equilibrium. Lower...

Calibration results in Rabin (2000) and Safra and Segal (2008; 2009) suggest that both expected and non-expected utility theories cannot produce non-negligible risk aversion over small stakes without producing implausible risk aversion over large stakes. This paper provides calibration results for...