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...

This paper provides an introduction to the concept of social capital, and carries out a critical review of the empirical literature on social capital and economic development. The survey points out six main weaknesses affecting the empirics of social capital. Identified weaknesses are then used...

This paper examines the link between pollution and income. It shows how income inequality affects environmental policies and therefore pollution. The Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) hypothesis proposes that there is an inverted U-shape relation between environmental degradation and income per...

This paper deals with some variables that are not generally included as economic or market variables in order to show how these affect the question of population growth, which is after all the core of resource allocation. It shows that population growth may also depend on better medical...

The paper proposes an approach for evaluating the effect of flow fixed costs on the evaluation of environmental benefits with travel cost method. On a full annual perspective when recreational users incur relevant annual direct fixed expenses, their behaviour could be influenced by them. The...

We investigate the relationship between individual trust and individual economic performance. We find that individual income is hump-shaped in a measure of intensity of trust beliefs. Heterogeneity of trust beliefs in the population, coupled with the tendency of individuals to extrapolate...

We use British panel data to explore the exogenous impact of income on a number of individual health outcomes: general health status, mental health, physical health problems, and health behaviours (drinking and smoking). Lottery winnings allow us to make causal statements regarding the effect of...

I estimate how intra-household bargaining affects gay and lesbian couples' labor supplies, investigating their similarity to heterosexual decision-making, in a collective household framework. Data from the 2000 US Census show that couples of all types exhibit a significant response to bargaining...

We empirically analyze the labor supply choices of married men and women according to their body size (BMI), using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on anthropometric characteristics of both spouses, and unmarried men and women as comparison group. Heavier husbands are found to work...

We analyze how attractiveness rated at the start of the interview is related to weight (controlling for height), and BMI, separately by gender and also accounting for interviewer fixed effects, in a nationally representative sample. We are the first to show that height, weight, and BMI all...