What should researchers do when confronted with surprising results? Financial access innovations usually leave "temptation" spending unaffected or reduced. However, we found that promotion of savings lockboxes in a largely autarkic society increased alcohol consumption and blood pressure,...

This paper studies the infinite horizon optimal consumption with a path-dependent reference under the exponential utility. The performance is measured by the difference between the non-negative consumption rate and a fraction of the historical consumption maximum. The consumption running maximum...

The objective of this paper is to examine the factors that influence Guinea's overall import demand using annual data covering the period 1980-2015. Through the Error Correction Model (ECM), we estimated the short- and long-term relationships to measure the effect of real investment expenditure,...

Recent studies have used import data to assess the impact of foreign varieties on prices and welfare for a home country. The reliance on import data has a number of limitations. First, these papers rely on goods categories defined by the Harmonized System. Second, they define varieties using the...

We propose a new optimal consumption model in which the degree of addictiveness of habit formation is directly controlled through a constraint on admissible consumption. In particular, we assume that the individual is unwilling to consume at a rate below a certain proportion 0α≤1 of her...

In this paper we reconsider a key empirical prediction generated by an important class of political-economy models of trade policy, namely that trade protection should be higher in sectors characterized by lower import penetration (we call this the little support for this prediction. In this...

The issue of market efficiency attracted the attention of academics since the existence of financial markets. Over time, two schools of thoughts were established: the efficient markets school and the behavioral finance school. Proponents of the former believed in the Efficient Markets Hypothesis...

The Alchian-Allen substitution theorem states that an increase of the prices of two similar goods by the same amount leads to a relative increase in the compensated demand of the more expensive good. In this paper we generalize this theorem to ordinary demand functions and show under which...