This article analyzes the effect of speculation on the economic welfare from various criteria, using a simple Edgeworth box within a three-period Walrasian competition framework. Here ldquo;speculationrdquo; is defined as a series of transition processes of each agent's spontaneous production of...

We analyze the impact of a Web-based trading channel on the trading activity in two corporate 401(k) plans. Using detailed data on about 100,000 participants, we compare trading growth in these firms to growth for a sample of firms without a Web channel. After 18 months of access, the inferred...

We empirically investigate the effect of tolerance for gays on the spread of HIV in the United States. Using a state-level panel dataset spanning the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, we find that tolerance is negatively associated with the HIV rate. We then investigate the causal mechanisms...

Affective habituation is well-documented in social sciences: people seem to adapt to many life events, ranging from lottery windfalls to terminal illnesses. A group of studies have tried to measure habituation by seeing how lagged values of life events affect present happiness. We propose an...

This paper examines how contextual and institutional factors are associated with individual subjective well-being, which is measured by individuals' happiness, during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data collected in the People's Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of Korea,...

To the uninitiated, transaction costs are often mysterious at best and dubious at worst. Even among economists who use the term often, there are misunderstandings as to what transaction costs actually are. I argue that much of the transaction cost "image" is caused by the lack of a workable...

This paper proposes a measure of multidimensional inequality of opportunity - the Kullback Leibler divergence index, based on the opportunity equality definition of Roemer (1993, 1998, 2016). We prove theoretically and numerically that this measure satisfies a larger set of properties mainly the...

This paper develops an industrial-organizational framework for understanding how violence shapes wealth and institutions. In the modeled Hobbesian society, parties acquire wealth via violence or the threat of it. Under certain conditions they can Pareto improve their welfare by creating a...

Cryptocurrencies come with benefits, such as anonymity of payments and positive network effects of user adoption, and transaction risks, such as unconfirmed transfers, hacks, and frauds. They compete with central-bank-regulated currencies as a means of payment but this competition is not...