As indicators of social welfare, the incidence of inequality and poverty is of ongoing concern to policy makers and researchers alike. Of particular interest are the changes in inequality and poverty over time, which are typically assessed through the estimation of income distributions. From...

We consider an environment where the sale can take place so early that both the seller and the potential buyers have the same uncertainty about the quality of the good. We present a simple model that allows the seller to put the good for sale before or after this uncertainty is resolved, ,...

In this paper we examine Australian data on national and regional employment numbers, focusing in particular on whether there have been common national and regional changes in the volatility of employment. A subsidiary objective is to assess whether the results derived from traditional growth...

Parental job loss from layoffs and business failures that occur when youth complete high school completion are found to be negatively correlated with enrolment at university and community college. Estimates from a year-to-year education transition model using longitudinal data on youth and their...

Francis Ysidro Edgeworth was a leading figure in the rapid development of economics during the last quarter of the 19th century and the first quarter of the 20th century, by which time it was firmly established as an academic subject. He held the Drummond Chair at Oxford and was regarded as...

The nature of global and regional income distributions and the extent of inequality are examined using country-level data on income distributions drawn from World Bank studies and the World Institute for Development Economics Research for the period 1993 - 2000. Beta-2 income distributions are...

These notes demonstrate how one can define optimization problems whose solutions can be interpreted as the Delta and the Fieller confidence intervals for a ratio of normally distributed parameter estimates. Also included in these notes are the details of the derivation of the slope of a...

This paper discusses two ways to amend the optimal lending contract under asymmetric information studied in Clementi and Hopenhayn (2006) to change its long-run implications so that firm growth and exit driven by borrowing constraints exist in the long run. One way assumes that the entrepreneur...

When goods are sold through competing auctions, what e¤ect does monetary policy have on the equilibrium allocation? To answer, we extend the competing auctions framework in several ways: buyers choose how much money they bring to an auction, the quantities traded at the auctions are endogenous,...

There is now a large and complex literature on optimal income taxation, within the context of second-best welfare economics. This paper considers the potential role of this analysis in the practical design of direct tax and transfer structures. It is stressed that few results are robust, even in...