We examine how low and high skilled internal emigration causally affect investments in human capital at origin. We provide theoretical and empirical evidence of a disincentive mechanism through which individuals refrain from education should low skilled emigration prove a viable alternative. Our...

We develop a formula for the optimal size of a joint savings association between individuals who share the same financial goal and who can save towards that goal at the same rate. Our motivating example and the core of our analysis is a Rotating Savings and Credit Association (ROSCA). We measure...

We study a parent's demand for gratitude from his child. We view this demand as an intervening variable between the parent's earnings and the incidence of child labor. The demand for gratitude arises from the desire of a parent to receive care and support from his child late in life, while the...

The Gini coefficient features prominently in Amartya Sen's 1973 and 1997 seminal work on income inequality and social welfare. We construct the Gini coefficient from socialpsychological building blocks, reformulating it as a ratio between a measure of social stress and aggregate income. We...

The inclination of individuals to improve their performance when it lags behind that of others with whom they naturally compare themselves can be harnessed to optimize the individuals' effort in work and study. In a given set of individuals, we characterize each individual by his relative...

Social stress can cause physical and mental harm. It is therefore not surprising that public health policy makers have sought to identify and implement policies aimed at tackling this social ill. A frequently prescribed remedy is to reduce social stress by reducing income inequality, which is...

Wildman (2021), who identifies "a clear association between income inequality [measured by the Gini coefficient] and COVID-19 cases and deaths," concludes that "a goal of government should be to reduce [income] inequalities and [thereby] improve [the COVID-19 outcomes /] underlying health of...

In a recent article, "Reexamining the influence of conditional cash transfers on migration from a gendered lens," Hughes (2019) claimed that conditional cash transfers, CCT, limit the likelihood of migration by women, compensating them for giving up an attractive migration option. I question the...

This chapter investigates the impact of the imposition of sanctions for employing illegal migrants on the welfare of native laborers. In response to such sanctions, managers in a firm may be reassigned from the supervision of production to the verification of the legality of the firm's labor...

We offer an explanation for the inconclusive results of empirical studies into the relationship between the magnitude of the Gini coefficient of income distribution at origin and the intensity of migration. Bearing in mind the substantial literature that identifies relative deprivation as an...