This entry describes housing wealth and the role it plays in household finance.

An account is given of the principal concepts and results of general equilibrium with incomplete financial markets over a finite horizon, focusing on the generic existence, suboptimality and determinacy of equilibrium. Many results depend on the nature of the financial securities, whether they...

Marital institutions are rules governing marriages and divorces. Most work to date has focused on unilateral and no-fault divorce reforms. Theoretical discussions generally hinge on the applicability of the Coase theorem. Empirical evidence is mixed, but generally indicates that those reforms...

A central objective of studies of peer effects in education production is to determine whether certain groupings of students can improve academic achievement. This article describes the challenges associated with identifying peer effects in education production and some solutions offered by the...

Covered Interest Parity describes an idealised situation in foreign exchange markets in which the interest rates on assets differing only in the currency of denomination will be equal. This article describes the theoretical assumptions under which CIP holds and the evidence for CIP in practice.

Misclassification of binary variables is the first case of non-classical measurement error considered. Similar to the classical errors-in-variables result, misclassification of a binary regressor leads to attenuation of slope coefficient estimates in linear regression. Classical instrumental...

Cost–benefit analysis (CBA) gives rise to a whole range of philosophical issues. The most discussed among these is the status of economic values that are assigned to assets conceived as incommensurable with money, such as a human life or the continued existence of an animal species. CBA...

The American economist, sociologist and pacifist Emily Greene Balch shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 for the same anti-war activism for which she was not reappointed as a full professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley College in 1918. She was also notable as a defender of the...

The term multi-valued treatment effects refers to a collection of population parameters capturing the impact of a treatment variable on an outcome variable when the treatment takes multiple values. For example, in labour training programmes participants receive different hours of training or in...

Oliver E. Williamson is the 2009 co-recipient (with Elinor Ostrom) of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, awarded ‘for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm’.