We propose four arguments favoring the idea that medical effectiveness, adult longevity and height started to increase in Europe before the industrial revolution. This may have prompted households to increase their investment in human skills as a response to longer lives and initiated the...

In 1997, the Christie's sale of 20f/l century art works from the estate Victor and Sally Ganz netted more than $207 million, a record sum for a single-owner sale of art at auction. The paper presents estimates of the Ganzes' financial returns from investing in art using records the Ganzes' kept...

This paper provides a brief overview of policy intervention mechanisms affecting the preservation of the historic environment in Britain. This covers half a million "listed buildings" in England alone. Within this policy framework, the paper then discusses stated preference valuation exercises...

Even in countries where there is a male-biased sex ratio, it is still possible for the marriage market to be balanced if men marry younger women and population is growing. We define a missing Brides Index to reflect the intensity of the possible imbalance at steady state, taking into account the...

Consider an economy populated by males and females, both rich and poor. The society has to choose one of the following marriage institutions: polygyny, strict monogamy, and serial monogamy (divorce and remarriage). After having identified the conditions under which each of these equilibria...

Virtue is modelled as an asset that women can use in the marriage market: since men value virginity in prospective mates, preserving her virtue increases a woman’s chances of marrying a high-status husband, and therefore allows for upward social mobility. Consistent with some historical and...

This paper examines how domestic violence may be used as an instrument to extract large transfers from a spouse's family. It is based on a case-study of three villages in Southern India, conducted by the authors, that combines qualitative and survey data. Based on the ethnographic evidence, we...

In this paper, the unilateral divorce law is modelled trough the combination of exclusive rights on the marriage dissolution and alternative compensation rules benefiting to the parent having custody of the children. Their influence are studied both in the short run (probability and efficiency...

The Easter Island tragedy has become an allegory for ecological catastrophe and a warning for the future. In the economic literature the collapse is usually attributed to irrational or myopic behaviors in the context of a fragile ecosystem. In this paper we propose an alternative story involving...

Nous présentons un modèle « prospectif » avec deux économies. Le Nord a stabilisé son stock de gaz à effet de serre, alors que le Sud continue d'émettre des polluants sans moyen de lutter contre. Ces externalités ont un impact sur la production du Sud et sont source de désutilité au...