In non-cooperative family models, being good at contributing to family public good like household production may reduce one's utility, since it tends to crowd out contributions from one's spouse. Similar effects also arise in cooperative models with non-cooperative threat point: improved...

In this review, we discuss three major contributions economists have made to our understanding of the relationship between the environment and individual well-being. First, in explicitly recognizing how optimizing behavior, particularly in the form of residential sorting, can lead to non-random...

We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a...

Historically, the American armed forces were disproportionally drawn from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. A transition toward a smaller and more selective military has changed this tendency. Since the armed forces do not gather data on recruits’ family income, previous studies relied on...

Richer countries are safer, healthier places to live. They pollute less and enjoy a higher standard of living. Evaluating the indirect, non-market effects of education requires detailed, microeconomic analyses of education's causal role in people's behavior. Thep purpose of this paper is to...

The question of how technology affects learning has been at the center of recent debates over educational inputs. In 1994, the Israeli State Lottery sponsored the installation of computers in many elementary and middle schools. This program provides an opportunity to estimate the impact of...

We develop a perfect foresight, overlapping generations model with intragenerational inequality and endogenous human and physical capital investment, and we calculate welfare costs for marginal reforms of taxation and public spending. Welfare costs are uniformly lower than in the equivalent...

We analyze the extent to which endogenous cultural amenities affect the spatial equilibrium share of high-human-capital employees. To overcome endogeneity, we draw on a quasi-natural experiment in German history and exploit the exogenous spatial distribution of baroque opera houses built as a...

We provide a reason for the wider economics profession to take social preferences, a concern for the outcomes achieved by other reference agents, seriously. Although we show that student measures of social preference elicited in an experiment have little external validity when compared to...

In the commercial city of Lagos, Nigeria, traffic congestion poses a great challenge to commuters, particularly businessmen and workers that need to keep appointments and report in offices timely. A great amount of productive man-hours is therefore wasted in traffic congestion. This coupled with...