A panel study reveals that an increase in pretax income equality leads to sudstantially lower retail prices. Prices also fall if the income tax on high income families is raised. One explanation is that equality makes consumer demand more elastic. This would imply that progressive taxation helps...

A decision maker faces a decision problem, or a game against nature. For each probability distribution over the state of the world (nature`s strategies), she has a weak order over her acts (pure strategies). We formulate conditions on these weak orders guaranteeing that they can be jointly...

In Razin, Sadka and Yuen (1998, 1999a), we explored the policy implications of the home-bias in international portfolio investment as a result of asymmetric information problems in which domestic savers, being "close" to the domestic market, have an informational advantage over foreign portfolio...

This paper proposes an explicit test for determining the significance and timing of slowdowns in economic growth during the post-war period.

This note provides an axiomatic derivation of a case-based decision rule. It shows that, if preferences orders over available acts in various contexts satisfy certain consistency requirements, then these orders can be numerically represented by maximizationof a similarity-weighted utility function.

The stability of the growth process, whether growth rates are rising, falling or constant, is one of the central questions of economic growth theory. We use recently developed techniques for identifying structural change in economic time series and find evidence of multiple breaks in per capita...

This paper discusses three aspects of urbanization: the effect of urbanization (that is, aggregate urban population growth) on agglomeration, the discontinuity of urban population partition among urban areas, and the failure of laissez-faire to induce the emergence of new urban areas...