The Protestant ethic has been depicted as declining in America between 1870 and 1930, due to new affordable consumer durables and less rewarding industrial work. This article re-examines this period and finds that the Protestant ethic did not so much decline as become transformed. The work ethic...

The most widely embraced explanations of the financial crisis of 2008 have centered upon inadequate regulation stemming from laissez-faire ideology, combined with low interest rates. Although these widely-acknowledged causal factors are true, beneath them lie deeper determining forces that have...

We study the impact of redistributive policies when agents can signal their social status by spending on a conspicuous good. Our focus is on how the shape of the status function – i.e., how social status is computed and evaluated – can affect the equilibrium outcome of the model, and in...

This paper studies the infuence of consumption externalities in the Ramsey model. In contrast to the recent literature, a quite general specification of preferences is used and the concept of the effective intertemporal elasticity of substitution is introduced. We give conditions for the...

In this paper we study the impact of redistributive policies when agents can signal their relative standing by spending on a conspicuous good. In particular, we analyze how the shape of the status function (i.e. how relative standing is computed and evaluated) may affect the equilibrium outcome...

Although healthy societies may require a degree of material inequality, higher levels of inequality have been linked to negative social consequences ranging from poorer health to lessened democracy. However, the greatest contemporary threat of excessive inequality might be its contribution to...

We investigate the effects of introducing a linear labor income tax under the assumptions that individuals have concerns for social status, that they can signal their relative standing by spending on a conspicuous good, and that the tax revenue is redistributed by means of lump sum transfers. We...

ILO pub-WEP pub. Working paper comprising a literature survey of interrelations between women's social role, maternity and fertility - discusses the social theory background, opportunity cost of children, economic, political, psychic and social status, role rewards, conflicts, etc. Bibliography...