This research suggests that a Darwinian evolution of entrepreneurial spirit played a significant role in the process of economic development and the evolution of inequality within and across societies. The study argues that entrepreneurial spirit evolved nonmonotonically in the course of human...

Samuelson (1947) stated that a regular equilibrium exhibits the transfer paradox if and only if it is unstable. Gale (1974) and many in the early 1980’s debunked this equivalence by adding extra countries, reaching an anti consensus. We reinterpret Samuelson’s result as identifying the...

We show the robustness of the Walrasian result obtained in models of bargaining in pairwise meetings. Restricting trade to take place only in pairs, most of the assumptions made in the literature are dispensed with. These include assumptions on preferences (differentiability, monotonicity,...

We examine the dynamic interaction of the population age structure, economic dependency, and fertility, paying particular attention to the role of intergenerational transfers. In the short run, a reduction in fertility produces a “demographic dividend” that allows for higher consumption. In...

When the asset market is incomplete, competitive equilibria are constrained suboptimal, and there is scope for Pareto improving interventions. Price regulation, which operates anonymously, on market variables, can be such a Pareto improving policy, even when the welfare effects of rationing are...

Recent work by Schennach(2005) has opened the way to a Bayesian treatment of quantile regression. Her method, called Bayesian exponentially tilted empirical likelihood (BETEL), provides a likelihood for data y subject only to a set of m moment conditions of the form Eg(y, θ) = 0 where θ is a k...

In this paper we provide a simple new version of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, in a world with only one preference profile. This theorem relies on a new assumption of preference diversity, and we explore alternative notions of preference diversity at length.

We consider a cash-in-advance economy under uncertainty in which monetary policy sets either short-term nominal interest rates or money supplies. We show that both the initial price level and the distribution of the inflation rate up to its expectation are indeterminate, regardless of the degree...