In order to credibly "sell" legitimate children to their spouse, women must forego more attractive mating opportunities. This paper derives the implications of this observation for the pattern of matching in marriage markets, the dynamics of human capital accumulation, and the evolution of the...

Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less...

We model the bargaining process of parents over custody at the time of divorce. First we assume an institutional setting where only sole custody is available. In a second step we reform this institutional setting and introduce the possibility of joint custody. We show that some parents, who...

Anti-poverty policies often aim to reach poor individuals by targeting poor households. However, intra-household inequality may mean many poor individuals reside in non-poor households. Using Bangladeshi data, we first show that undernourished individuals are spread across the household...

In order to credibly "sell" legitimate children to their spouse, women must forego more attractive mating opportunities. This paper derives the implications of this observation for the pattern of matching in marriage markets, the dynamics of human capital accumulation, and the evolution of the...

Societies socialize children about many things, including sex. Socialization is costly. It uses scarce resources, such as time and effort. Parents weigh the marginal gains from socialization against its costs. Those at the lower end of the socioeconomic scale indoctrinate their daughters less...

In the linear coinsurance problem, examined first by Mossin (1968), a higher absolute risk aversion with respect to wealth in the sense of Arrow–Pratt implies a higher optimal coinsurance rate. We show that this property does not hold for health insurance under ex post moral hazard; i.e., when...

Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this 'crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for data sets composed of state-contingent prices and consumption to be consistent with two prominent models of decision making under uncertainty: variational preferences and smooth ambiguity. The revealed preference conditions for subjective...

This paper shows that the framework proposed by Barberis and Huang (2009) to incorporate narrow framing and loss aversion into dynamic models of portfolio choice and asset pricing can be extended to also account for probability weighting and for a value function that is convex on losses and...