Theories of economic growth hypothesize that the transition from pre-industrial stagnation to sustained growth is associated with a post-Malthusian phase in which technological progress raises income and spurs population growth while offsetting diminishing returns to labor. Evidence suggests...

In this study we investigate the causal impact of increasing adult longevity on higher education. We exploit the fourth stage of the epidemiological transition, i.e. the unexpected decline of deaths from heart attack and stroke in the 1970s as a large positive health shock that affected...

Religiosity affects everything from fertility and health to labor force participation and productivity. But why are some societies more religious than others? To answer this question, I rely on the religious coping theory, which states that many individuals draw on their religious beliefs to...

Recently a number of authors have suggested to estimate censored demand systems as a system of Tobit multivariate equations employing a Quasi Maximum Likelihood (QML) estimator based on bivariate Tobit models. In this paper I study the efficiency of this QML estimator relative to the...

We study the effects of reputation and competition in a stylized market for experience goods. If interaction is anonymous, such markets perform poorly: sellers are not trustworthy, and buyers do not trust sellers. If sellers are identifiable and can, hence, build a reputation, efficiency...

Theories from psychology suggest that voters' perceptions of political positions depend on their non-policy related attitudes towards the candidates. A voter who likes (dislikes) a candidate will perceive the candidate's position as closer to (further from) his own than it really is. This is...

This paper studies the role of US political factors in the allocation of World Bank concessional lending, where US political interests are proxied by voting similarity in the United Nations General Assembly on issues identified as important by the US Department of State. In contrast to previous...

This paper gives straightforward answers to complex problems. First it identifies the adverse affects of the high price volatility typical of segmented grain markets during the ancien régime. Extending a result in the modern literature on poverty and famines it is argued that price stability...

We test whether large but purely nominal shocks affect real asset market prices. We subject a laboratory asset market to an exogenous shock, which either inflates or deflates the nominal fundamental value of the asset, while holding the real fundamental value constant. After an inflationary...

This paper analyzes the welfare implications of regulating some but not all monopolistic industries of an economy (i.e., marginal regulation). It is shown that marginal regulation decreases welfare if a large fraction of all industries are monopolistic. Furthermore, the paper shows that the...