We study the dynamics of the distribution of overlapping generation economy with finitely lived agents and inter-generational transmission of wealth. Financial markets are incomplete, exposing agents to both labor income and capital income risk. We show that the stationary wealth distribution is...

The relationship between history and economics as academic disciplines is methodologically subtle and sociologically contested. If the Cliometric revolution can be characterized as an acquisition of economics by history, the most recent trends in Historical Economics appear to turn this...

Explanations of economic growth and prosperity commonly identify a unique causal effect, e.g., institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a theoretical modeling of the interaction between culture and institutions and their effects on economic activity. We...

Invariably across a cross-section of countries and time periods, wealth distributions are skewed to the right displaying thick upper tails, that is, large and slowly declining top wealth shares. In this survey we categorize the theoretical studies on the distribution of wealth in terms of the...

This paper attempts to quantitatively identify the factors that drive wealth dynamics in the U.S. and are consistent with its observed skewed cross-sectional distribution and social mobility. We concentrate on three critical factors: a skewed and persistent distribution of earnings, differential...

Furthermore, equilibria may display specialization on the part of identical firms and, when equilibria are constrained inefficient, may exhibit excessive aggregate risk. Financial decisions of the corporate sector are determined at equilibrium and depend not only on the nature of financial...

We study the wealth distribution in Bewley economies with idiosyncratic capital income risk. We show analytically that under rather general conditions on the stochastic structure of the economy, a unique ergodic distribution of wealth displays a fat tail; more precisely, a Pareto distribution in...

We study procrastination in the context of a field experiment involving students who must exert costly effort to complete certain tasks by a fixed deadline. Descriptively, we document a strong demand for commitment, in the form of self-imposed deadlines, which appear to be associated with...

We model the opacity of over-the-counter (OTC) markets in a setup where agents share risks, but have incentives to default and their financial positions are not mutually observable. We show that this setup results in excess "leverage" in that parties take on short OTC positions that lead to...

In this paper we survey recent advances in the economic theory of cultural transmission. We highlight three main themes on which the literature has made great progress in the last ten years: the domain of traits subject to cultural transmission, the micro-foundations for the technology of...