We study the role of the most primitive institution in society: the family. Its organization and relationship between generations shape values formation, economic outcomes, and influences national institutions. We use a measure of family ties, constructed from the World Values Survey, to review...

This paper presents a survey of the theoretical and empirical literature on cultural transmission and socialization. It has been prepared for the Handbook of Social Economics , edited by Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Matt Jackson, to be published by Elsevier Science in 2010.

Under what conditions does intergroup contact lead to conflict? We provide a novel answer to this question by highlighting the role of reputation mechanisms in sustaining cooperation. Reputational concerns can deter defection in one-time interactions within a group, but the informational content...

Moral universalism, the extent to which individuals exhibit similar altruism and trust towards in-group and out-group members, varies widely across societies. We test the hypothesis from anthropology that the requirements of transhumant pastoralism - a livelihood in which populations seasonally...

We investigate deterministic stochastic choice in the standard consumer framework. We present a model of statistical consumer theory where the individual maximizes their utility with respect to a distribution of bundles that is constrained by a statistic of the distribution (e.g. mean...

This document tries to quantify the possible impacts, on the natural gas consumption, of changes in the flat sale price, to the final consumer, for the natural gas distribution system in Bolivia, in particular, it was analyzed the progressivity of this policy on households from eight urban...

This chapter covers recent solutions to aggregation problems in three application areas: consumer demand analysis, consumption growth and wealth, and labor participation and wages. Each area involves treatment of heterogeneity and nonlinearity at the individual level. Three types of...

The 2011 Human Development Report argues that the urgent global challenges of sustainability and equity must be addressed together – and identifies policies on the national and global level that could spur mutually reinforcing progress towards these interlinked goals. Bold action is needed on...