This paper analyzes the connection between time preference heterogeneity and economic inequality. To achieve this, we extend the standard neoclassical growth model by introducing three additional features, namely (i) heterogeneity in consumers’ discount rates, (ii) direct preferences for...

This paper estimates the effects of friends’ health behaviors, smoking and drinking, on own health behaviors for adolescents while controlling for the effects of correlated unobservables between those friends. Specifically, the effect of friends’ health behaviors is identified by comparing...

Estimations of nonlinear panel models that include individual specific fixed effects are complicated by the incidental parameters problem, that is, the asymptotic bias in the estimation of typical fixed effects panel models generally results in inconsistent estimates. In this paper, I...

This essay offers some observations, from the perspective of an economist, on the usefulness of economics for understanding law. Economic analysis provides a coherent theoretical framework for unifying different areas of law based on the pursuit of efficiency. It does this by recognizing common...

This article offers a quantitative analysis of wealth inequality in the Ottoman Empire, employing data from probate inventories (terekes) of eighteenth-century Kastamonu, a town located in northern Anatolia. Extracting information on the wealth levels and personal characteristics of individuals,...

This paper empirically explores the New Keynesian Phillips Curve (NKPC)in multiple quantiles and examines the risk structure of the inflation process focusing on the asymmetric monetary policy. The estimation results support the canonical NKPC in upper quantiles while the hybrid version fits...

Although dominated by public sector banks, India already had a significant presence of private domestic banks and foreign banks. What the banking reforms have done is to create a more level playing field where banks of different ownership types compete within a new set of broad (and far more...

The Grossman-Hart-Moore (GHM) property rights model predicts the assignment of residual claims to the party with the largest effect on an asset’s value. While plausible, the model has proven relatively hard to test. In this paper, we develop a formal model based on GHM, and use it to analyze...

A fundamental question of economic and technological history is why some civilizations adopted new and important technologies and others did not. In this paper, we construct a simple political economy model which suggests that rulers may not accept a productivity-enhancing technology when it...

We analyze the stochastic properties of three measures of profitability, return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), and return on investment (ROI), using a balanced panel of US firms during the period 2001-2010. We employ a panel unit-root approach, which assists in identifying competitive...