An evolutionary model of the product life cycle is applied to derive the experience curve and the market size of (expensive) durable goods. The experience (learning) curve suggests that the real costs per unit decrease with an increasing cumulative output (Henderson's law). Based on the idea...

This paper measures how households smooth changes in consumption when incomes are shifted by permanent or transitory shocks at country and regional level. I compute insurance capacity using the Spanish Continuous Family Expenditure Survey skipping the imputation methods used by the previous...

Gasoline taxes can be employed to correct externalities from automobile use and to raise government revenue. Our understanding of the optimal gasoline tax and the efficacy of existing taxes is largely based on empirical analysis of consumer responses to gasoline price changes. In this paper, we...

The recent availability of trade data at a firm-product-country level calls for a new generation of models able to exploit the large variability detected across observations. By developing a model of monopolistic competition in which varieties enter preferences non-symmetrically, we show how...

We estimate the importance of preference interdependence from consumption choices. Our strategy follows the literature that tests the constraints imposed by optimality in the evolution of individual consumption. We derive a Euler equation from a preference specification that allows for...

Problem statement: Diminishing partnership or musharakah mutanaqisah contract in home financing is recently introduced by the Islamic banking industry as an alternative of the bay bi'thaman ajil contract which has received many criticism from shariah scholars as mimicking conventional loan. This...

We present an analysis of user conversations in on-line social media and their evolution over time. We propose a dynamic model that accurately predicts the growth dynamics and structural properties of conversation threads. The model successfully reconciles the differing observations that have...

The paper addresses efficiency and inequality issues under the conditions of increasing competition in the health care sector in Russia. Co-existence of state-funded mandatory and market-based voluntary medical insurance as well as high proportion of direct out-of-pocket payments create the...

This paper uses the interwar period in the United States as a laboratory for investigating the incentive effects of changes in marginal income tax rates. Marginal rates changed frequently and drastically in the 1920s and 1930s, and the changes varied greatly across income groups at the top of...