This paper reviews the literature on culture and economics, focusing primarily on the epidemiological approach. The epidemiological approach studies the variation in outcomes across different immigrant groups residing in the same country. Immigrants presumably differ in their cultures but share...

Why has the expansion of women's economic and political rights coincided with economic development? This paper investigates this question, focusing on a key economic right for women: property rights. The basic hypothesis is that the process of development (i.e., capital accumulation and...

I analyze two extensions to the standard model of life cycle labor supply that feature operative choices along both the intensive and extensive margin. The first assumes that individuals face different continuous wage-hours schedules. The second assumes that all work must be coordinated across...

This paper uses a simple model of labor supply extended to allow for home production to understand the extent to which differences in taxes can account for differences in time allocations between the US and Europe. Once home production is included, the elasticity of substitution between...

This paper argues that it is essential to explicitly consider how the government spends tax revenues when assessing the effects of tax rates on aggregate hours of market work. Different forms of government spending imply different elasticities of hours of work with regard to tax rates. I...

This paper examines the evolution of hours worked in France, Germany, Italy and the US from 1956-2003 and assesses the role of taxes and technology to account for the differences. The empirical work establishes three results. First, hours worked in Europe decline by almost 45% compared to the US...

We present a simple model of sovereign debt crises in which a country chooses its optimal mix of short and long-term bonds subject to standard contracting frictions: the country cannot commit to repay its debts nor to a specific path of future debt issues, and contracts cannot be made state...

During the 1970s the US underwent an important change in its divorce laws, switching from mutual consent to a unilateral divorce regime. Who benefitted and who lost from this change? To answer this question we develop a dynamic life-cycle model in which agents make consumption, saving, labor...

This paper develops a quantitative life-cycle model to study the increase in married women's labor force participation (LFP). We calibrate the model to match key life-cycle statistics for the 1935 cohort and use it to assess the changed environment faced by the 1955 cohort. We find that a higher...

Women born in 1935 went to college significantly less than their male counterparts and married women's labor force participation (LFP) averaged 40% between the ages of thirty and forty. The cohort born twenty years later behaved very differently. The education gender gap was eliminated and...