This paper develops a framework which analyzes how a population's culture affects the decisions of rational profit maximizing firms, while simultaneously exploring how the actions of these firms in turn affect the population's culture.By endogenizing culture as well as the more usual economic...

We look at the contribution of various income components on income inequality and the changes in this in Belgium.Starting from the Shorrocks decomposition, we apply bootstrapping to construct confidence intervals for both the annual decomposition and the changes over time.It appears that the...

A positive relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and health, the so-called \health-wealth gradient", is repeatedly found in most industrialized countries with similar levels of health care technology and economic welfare. This study analyzes causality from health to wealth (health...

This paper investigates how initial inequality can causally affect economic growth when moral hazard problems exist in credit markets.Two regimes of the credit markets aiming at overcoming the moral hazard problems are analyzed.The formal one such as bank relies on intermediary between borrowers...

Empirical findings that minorities typically attain lower economic status than majorities and that relatively larger minorities perform worse than smaller ones pose a challenge to economics.To explain this scale puzzle, I model an economy where the society is bifurcated into two social groups...

The constrained egalitarian solution of Dutta and Ray (1989) for TU-games is extended to asymmetric cases, using the notion of weight systems as in Kalai and Samet (1987,1988). This weighted constrained egalitarian solution is based on the weighted Lorenz-criterion as an inequality measure. It...

A new line of theoretical and empirical literature emphasizes the pivotal role of fair institutions for growth.We present a model, a laboratory experiment, and a simple cross-country regression supporting this view.We model an economy with an unequal distribution of property rights, in which...

We investigate a new method for pricing high-dimensional American options. The method is of finite difference type but is also related to Monte Carlo techniques in that it involves a representative sampling of the underlying variables.An approximating Markov chain is built using this sampling...

In the preceding paper we have seen that the top types of labor are relatively scarce in China and this raises the issue of income inequality under competition.Our main finding is that inequality would multiply indeed. Subsidiary, the nature of inequality would shift from the rural-urban divide...