In an influential article Tornell and Lane (1999) considered an economy populated by multiple powerful groups in which property rights in the formal sector of production are not protected. They obtained conditions under which the groups appropriate output from the formal sector in order to...

This paper theoretically investigates how community approval or disapproval affects school attendance and child labor and how aggregate behavior of the community feeds back towards the formation and persistence of an anti- (or pro-) schooling norm. The proposed community-model continues to take...

In this paper I propose a time-consistent method of discounting hyperbolically that contains the discount rate implied by Gamma discounting as a special case. I apply the discounting method to three canonical environmental problems: (i) optimal renewable resource use, (ii) the tragedy of the...

In this paper, I propose an economic theory that addresses the epidemic character of opioid epidemics. I consider a community in which individuals are heterogenous with respect to the experience of chronic pain and susceptibility to addiction and live through two periods. In the first period...

In this paper I consider how individuals allocate their time between church attendance (and other religious activities) and secular leisure activities. Moreover individuals use a cognitive style, which is either intuitive-believing or reflective-analytical. I assume that the full benefit from...

This paper explores the impact of gender differences in the desire for sex and the distribution of power in the household on the onset of the demographic transition and the take-off to growth. Depending on the price and efficacy of modern contraceptives, the gender wage gap, and female...