Behavioral (e.g. consumption) patterns of boundedly rational agents can lead these agents intolearning dynamics that appear to be “wasteful” in terms of well-being or welfare. Within settingsdisplaying preference endogeneity, it is however still unclear how to conceptualize well-being.This...

Previous research on optimal R&D subsidies has focussed on the long run.This paper characterizes the optimal time path of R&D subsidization in a semi-endogenous growth model, by exploiting a recently developed numerical method.Starting from the steady state under current R&D subsidization in the...

This paper analyzes the theoretical underpinnings of high-frequency repayment, a featurein nearly all microfi…nance contracts that has been largely overlooked by theorists. The pervasive belief among practitioners that frequent repayment is critical in achieving high repaymentrates is puzzling....

This paper analyzes how group lending programs use joint liability to utilize localinformation that borrowers have about each other’s projects through self-selection of groupmembers in the group formation stage. These schemes are shown to lead to positiveassortative matching in group...

An evolutionary perspective on economic behavior has to account for the influences that thehuman genetic endowment has on the choices the agents make. Likely to have been fixed intimes of fierce selection pressure, this endowment is presumably adapted to the livingconditions of early humans. If...

This note investigates the extension of Roberts' price-independent welfare prescriptions toalternatives in which population size and composition can vary. We show that ethicallyunsatisfactory orderings result. Suppose that a single person is to be added to a populationthat is unaected in utility...

In pure population problems, a single resource is to be distributed equally among theagents in a society, and the social planner chooses population size(s) and per-capita consumption(s) for each resource constraint and set of feasible population sizes within thedomain of the solution...

Despite the recent and intense debate on how to define and measure pro-poor growth, there is one important issue which has so far not received sufficient attention: how applications of pro-poor growth measurements can appropriately take into account relative price changes, which, given the...

Human development is about expanding the choices human beings have to lead lives that they value and is captured by its capability sets which consist of various functioning vectors. The standard of living is then reflected in capability sets. This paper proposes some particular ways of measuring...

In this paper we do a couple of things: discussing a way to measure the welfare cost of country risk, and measuring it for Argentina in the period 1875-2006. There are two conclusions: a) the welfare cost of Argentine risk has been huge: for example, in the period 1976-2006 it was around 20% of...