This paper suggests that people can learn to behave in a way which makes them persistently unlucky or lucky. Learning from one's own experience, as it reinforces a few lucky or unlucky outcomes in early periods, will lead them to repeatedly make choices that lead to lucky or unlucky outcomes. In...

Structural changes in an economy or in financial markets can arise as a result of agents adopting rules that appear to be the norm around them. Such rules are adopted by implicit consensus as they turn out to be profitable for individuals. However, as rules develop and spread they may have...

Does land lease tenure insecurity cause decreased productivity and investment in the sugar industry? To answer this question, the present study examined the impact of weak formal tenure lease arrangements on tenantsEinvestment and the productivity of sugarcane in Ba province, Fiji. After...

This paper develops a simple model that provides a unified explanation of the increased skewness of wage income distribution based on differences in flexibility of skills--modeled as differences in the setup costs required to combine/perform a given number of tasks. Our numerical experiments in...

We construct a dynamic Ricardian model with a nominal exchange rate and trade costs. The model predicts that the nominal wages of the trading countries exhibit stronger positive comovements when the countries fix their bilateral exchange rates, while comovements of real wages are not affected by...

This paper develops a simple, general equilibrium model in which competition policies--both entry and antitrust policies--can change the skill premium for wages. The model shows that under variety-skill complementarity, entry deregulation that reduces the fixed costs of entry increases the skill...

Households have many economic roles in society. One of such roles is to share household-level public goods that are jointly consumed by members of the household. Several theoretical models have been proposed in the literature: the unitary model, the non-cooperative game theoretical model and the...

The effect of accepting more immigrants on welfare in the presence of a pay-as-you-go social security system is analyzed theoretically and quantitatively. First, it is shown that if initially there exist intergenerational government transfers from the young to the old, the government can lead an...