This paper explores marriage’s role when markets are incomplete and individuals cannot diversify their idiosyncratic labor income risk. All else being equal, an individual would rather marry a “hedge” (a person whose income is negatively correlated with her own) because doing so raises her...

If economic time series behave asymmetrically, then an interpretation of economic fluctuations based on linear time series models could be misleading. Beaudry and Koop (1993) recently argued that for post war U.S. GDP data there exists a statistically significant difference in persistence...

Guns and Butter examines the causes and consequences of war from a political economy perspective, taking as its premise that a consideration of the incentives and constraints faced by individuals and groups is paramount in understanding conflict decision making. The chapter authors - leading...

Plenty. This paper analyzes two broad questions: Does your first name matter? And how did you get your first name anyway? Using data from the National Opinion Research Centers (NORC s) General Social Survey, including access to respondents first names from the 1994 and 2002 surveys, we extract...

We investigate the empirical impact of violence as compared to other trade impediments on trade flows. Our analysis is based on a panel data set with annual observations on 177 countries from 1968 to 1999, which brings together information from the Rose [2004] dataset, the ITERATE dataset for...