This article addresses inequities in the apportionment of losses which arise when traditional consumer finance rules are applied to enforce consumer payment obligations which accrue during and after catastrophes. Disasters lead inevitably to job losses, to property destruction, and to inhibited...

The high concentration of gases due to global heating, specifically CO2, have been signaled as the main cause of climatic change. The adoption of agricultural practices that are able to increase the content of carbon on the soil has been proposed as a low-cost strategy and immediately available...

This work develops a model of endogenous criminal activities to study the effects of inequality of opportunities and social mobility on the crime level. In particular, a general equilibrium model derived from the economic theory of conflict is proposed, in which a group of heterogeneous agents...

This brief essay, appearing in a regular column on "Teaching Health Law," describes the author's experience using the Michael Moore film, "Sicko," in the classroom. Students were assigned to watch the film and discuss relevant legal rules and policy issues in health care financing, health care...

This paper studies the microeconomics of child vulnerability to kidnapping in an environment where child protection is produced through a private effort, a public investment and a foreign aid. We first show that in absence of public investment and foreign aid, private investment in child...

The purpose of this study is to investigate the integration of the relative cost of children to adults and of economies of scale in the context of the evaluation of household welfare. Results derived with empirically-estimated scales show that female-headed households are poorer than male-headed...

Modern reflection about the good life and the good society has been dominated by a spirit of liberal optimism, according to which people typically know what's good for them and make prudent choices in pursuit of their interests. As a result, people tend to do best, and pretty well at that, when...

To analyze the opioid epidemic, we construct a model where individuals, with and without pain, choose whether to misuse opioids knowing the probabilities of addiction and dying. These odds are functions of opioid use. Markov chains are estimated from the US data for the college and non–college...

The purpose of the study is to investigate the integration of the relative cost of children to parents and of economies of scales in the context of the evaluation of household welfare. Results derived with empirically-estimated scales show that households headed by women are poorer than those...

This paper offers a micro-founded general definition of poverty set in the context of utility theory. Poverty and non-poverty are described as two structurally different types of local non-satiation: the former entails a strong need for further consumption and social marginalization, the latter...