In pursuit of its transition from a command to a market economy, post-Soviet Russia has witnessed enormous regional differences in economic growth rates. Moreover, the economic reforms implemented under this transition, while initiated at the federal level, have also differed markedly across...

The evidence strongly suggests a robust negative relationship between income and fertility, anda positive relationship between income and longevity. This is puzzling for standard dynamicmodels. For instance, altruistic models that use the most standard preferences in macro-timeseparable CRRA...

Theoretical studies have shown that under unorthodox assumptions on preference and production technologies, collateral constraints can act as a powerful amplification and propagation mechanism of exogenous shocks. We investigate whether or not this result holds under more standard assumptions....

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of collateral constraints as a transmission mechanism of monetary shocks. We do this by introducing money in the heterogeneous-agent real economy of Kiyotaki and Moore (1997). Money enters in a cash-in-advance constraint and is injected via...

Life expectancy around the world has increased substantially since 1970. In contrast, consump-tion per capita has fallen in some countries, remained stagnant, or sharply increased in others.What are the welfare gains of the systematic increase in life expectancy around the world? Howdoes a "full...