The national terms of trade, defined as the ratio of an export price index to an import price index has been extensively studied empirically. In this paper we construct an alternative measure, which we call the consumption terms of trade. This measure recognizes the fact that consumers and firms...

Formal financial institutions can have far-reaching and long-lasting impacts on informal lending and information networks. We first study 75 villages in Karnataka, 43 of which were exposed to microfinance after we first collected detailed network data. Networks shrink more in exposed villages....

Globalization -- the integration of national economies -- has become one of the most widely used buzzwords of the late 20th century. Yet there are remarkably few statistical measures of product-market integration across time, countries, and goods. In this paper we present some new measures of...

This paper specifies and estimates a four-equation disequilibrium model of the consumption goods market in a centrally planned economy (CPE).The data are from Poland for the period 1955-1980, but the analysis is more general and will be applied to other CPEs as soon as the appropriate data sets...

This paper examines the interaction between consumer durable goods andconsumer non-durable goods in determining the responsiveness of totalexpenditure to the after-tax real interest rate. The introduction ofconsumer durables into the consumer's decision problem can have importanteffects on the...

Economic studies typically underestimate incremental changes in consumer goods and design innovations that enhance allocative efficiency and structural dynamics. This paper assesses over 12,000 innovations by female patentees and participants in industrial fairs and prize-granting institutions...

In this paper I provide a production theory-based framework for measuring markups of price over marginal coat, and the effects of cost and demand characteristics on these markups. Price to marginal coat ratios are measured for various Canadian manufacturing industries, and the impacts of...

The simple permanent income model provides a good description of the medium-long run behavior of aggregate nondurables consumption, while it fails in describing its short run behavior. In this paper I present a non-representative agent model with near-rational microeconomic units that...

We propose a new classification of consumption goods into nondurable goods, durable goods and a new class which we call "memorable" goods. A good is memorable if a consumer can draw current utility from its past consumption experience through memory. We propose a novel consumption-savings model...

This paper develops a multiple-discrete choice model for the analysis of demand of differentiated products. Users maximize profits by choosing the number of units of each brand they purchase. Multiple-unit as well as multiple-brand purchases are allowed. These two features distinguish this model...