A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under...

This paper studies the dynamics of stock market volatility and retail investor attention measured by internet search queries. We find a strong co-movement of stock market indices' realized volatility and the search queries for their names. Furthermore, Granger causality is bi-directional: high...

We estimate a long-run trend of Brazilian human capital that extends back to the very beginning of the 18th century. With new data on selective immigration during the era of mass migrations at the end of the 19th century, we show that human capital endowment of international migrants can induce...

We develop a general equilibrium two-country model with heterogeneous producers and rent sharing at the firm level due to fairness preferences of workers. We identify two sources of a multinational wage premium. On the one hand, there is a pure composition effect because multinational firms are...

This paper develops a one sector, two-input model with endogenous human capital formation. The two inputs are two types of skilled labor: engineering, which exerts a positive externality on total factor productivity, and law, which does not. The paper shows that a marginal prospect of migration...

I study the integration of regions in the form of a merger of populations, which I interpret as a revision of people's social space and their comparison set; I illustrate the way in which a merger can aggravate social distress; and I consider policy responses. Specifically, I view the merger of...

This paper formulates a structural empirical model of heterogeneous firms whose workers exhibit fair-wage preferences. In the underlying theoretical framework, such preferences lead to a link between a firm's operating profits on the one hand and wages of workers employed by this firm on the...

The aim of this study is to provide a comprehensive description of the dependence pattern of stock returns by studying a range of quantiles of the conditional return distribution using quantile autoregression. This enables us in particular to study the behavior of extreme quantiles associated...

Not only the colonial period, but also the pre-colonial times might have influenced later development patterns. In this study we assess a potential pre-colonial legacy hypothesis for the case of the Andean region. In order to analyze the hypothesis, we study the human capital of Inca Indios,...

This paper traces the human capital development of 14 Asian countries for the period of 1900-60, using the age-heaping method. We place special emphasis on the gender gap in numeracy and its determinants. In particular, we test the validity of a U-hypothesis of gender equality, implying that...