The last decade has witnessed a world trend of fiscal decentralization in the developing countries as an escape from inadequate growth and inefficient governance. With respect to China, fiscal decentralization has been a fundamental aspect of its transition to a market economy; and the country...

This paper studies charity contributions and wealth accumulation by extending the capitalist-spirit model to consider the social-status implications of charity and wealth in Becker (1974a, 1974b, 1976), Cole, Mailath and Postlewaite (1992), and Fershtman and Weiss (1993). In this new model, a...

This paper investigates the effciency of monetary and fiscal policy in a two-country general equilibrium model with monopolistic competition and wage stickiness. When monopoly distortions are completely eliminated, we find that stochastic government spending can affect the efficiency of global...

In a recent paper [Luo, Smith, and Zou (2009)] we showed that the spirit of capitalism could in theory resolve the two fundamental anomalies of modern consumption theory, excess sensitivity and excess smoothness. However, that basic model could not plausibly explain the empirical magnitude of...

Although theoretical models make distinct predictions about the relation between finance and income inequality, little empirical research has been conducted to compare their relative explanatory power. We examine the relation between financial intermediary development and income inequality in a...

This paper investigates an intertemporal general equilibrium theory of capital asset pricing with the spirit of capitalism. It is an attempt to put together ideas from the modern finance literature and the literature on stochastic growth models. Using methods adopted in Brock (1982), an...