Cigarette smoking leads to large healthcare and morbidity costs, and mortality losses, and smoking cessation plays a key role in reducing health risk and economic costs. While medical evidence suggests that some smokers are more likely to respond to medication treatment than others depending on...

This paper explores the contribution of the structural transformation and urbanization process to China's housing-market boom. Rural to urban migration together with regulated land supplies and developer entry restrictions can raise housing prices. This issue is examined using a multi-sector...

Income disparity across countries has been large and widening over time. We develop a tractable model where factor requirements in production technology do not necessarily match a country's factor input profile. Appropriate assimilation of frontier technologies balances such multi-dimensional...

Alcohol abuse has important implications for the productivity of the US workforce. The lost earnings of workers suffering from alcohol problems have been estimated at $36.6 billion in 1990. After completing schooling, young workers face critical labor market choices with long-ranging...

Science parks play a growing in knowledge-based economies by accommodating high-tech firms and providing an environment that fosters location-dependent knowledge spillovers and promote R&D investments by firms. Yet, not much is known about the economic conditions under which such entities may...

We develop a tractable framework with a fully specified dynamic process of demographic and labor decisions over an individual female's life span to determine the timing of childbearing. Fertility affects women's behavior through three channels: its tradeoff with leisure, its interactions with...

Why have some poor countries been able to take off while others are still stuck in the poverty trap? To address this old question, we observe that (i) with similar or higher levels of educational attainment, trapped countries tend to have much poorer health conditions compared to the initially...

Allowing migration activity as an integral part of demographic transition and economic development, we establish a locational quantity-quality trade-off of children and explore its macroeconomic consequences. We construct a dynamic competitive migration equilibrium framework with rural agents...

The main purpose of this research is to understand the patterns of consumption of addictive goods, their economic and welfare consequences for society and the long-run effect of tax policy in a dynamic general equilibrium model of rational addiction. In contrast to prior research, we allow...

Part of the debate over the control of drug activity in cities is concerned with the effectiveness of implementing demand- versus supply-side drug policies. This paper is motivated by the relative lack of research providing formal economic underpinning for the implementation of either policy. We...