A large literature documents persistent impacts of formal historical institutions. However, very little is known about how these institutions interact with ancestral traditions to determine long-term economic and social outcomes. This paper addresses this question by studying the persistent...

We address the problem of finding the optimal lockdown and reopening policy during a pandemic like COVID-19 for a social planner who prioritizes health over the economy. Agents are connected through a fuzzy network of contacts, and the planner's objective is to determine the policy that contains...

We study the effect of strategic and partisan voting on electoral outcomes, and on the relative popularity of the victor. Voters are randomly assigned to be partisan or strategic. When all voters are strategic in a plurality election, any equilibrium manipulation of the outcome elects a popular...

Frequent violations of fair principles in real-life settings raise the fundamental question of whether such principles can guarantee the existence of a self-enforcing equilibrium in a free economy. We show that elementary principles of distributive justice guarantee that a pure-strategy Nash...

How do pandemics affect for-profit and not-for-profit organizations differently? To address this question, we analyze optimal lockdowns in a two-sector continuous-time individual-based mean-field epidemiological model. We uncover a unique solution that depends on network structure, lockdown...

This study develops an economic model for a social planner who prioritizes health over short- term wealth accumulation during a pandemic. Agents are connected through a weighted undirected network of contacts, and the planner's objective is to determine the policy that contains the spread of...

We study the dynamic stability of fidelity networks, which are networks that form in a mating economy of agents of two types (say men and women), where each agent desires direct links with opposite type agents, while engaging in multiple partnerships is considered an act of infidelity....

We propose a simple model of a mating economy in both monogamous and polygynous cultures, and derive implications for how polygyny affects individual and aggregate fertility. We find that an attractive woman is more likely to find a high-status husband. However, when polygyny is allowed,...

We analyze the implications of communitarianism-the tendency of people to organize into separate culturally homogeneous groups-for individual and group inequality in human capital accumulation. We propose a non-cooperative social interactions model where each individual decides how much time to...

We propose a simple model of a mating economy in both monogamous and polygynous cultures, and derive implications for how polygyny affects individual and aggregate fertility. We find that an attractive woman is more likely to find a high-status husband. However, when polygyny is allowed,...