We present a game theoretic model to explain why people form life long monogamous families. Three components are essential in our framework, paternal investment, fatherhood uncertainty, and, perhaps the most distinctive feature of all, the overlap of children of different ages. When all three...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

This paper presents an overlapping generations model to explain why humans live in families rather than in other pair groupings. Since most non-human species are not familial, something special must be behind the family. It is shown that the two necessary features that explain the origin of the...

We introduce relative concerns in the form of conspicuous consumption in a standard economic geography model a la Krugman. The keeping up with the Joneses effect brings a negative externality to some agents and gives them incentives to escape. The primary intuition is then that conspicuous...

In this paper we investigate the effects of government budget deficit restrictions in a finite horizon model with imperfect consumer credit market. When financial markets are perfect anonymous lump-sum taxes are sufficient to achieve irrelevance of government budget deficit restrictions in the...

In a patent race, social incentives and private incentives may sometimes coincide and at other times diverge - too many researchers remain in the race. If the social planner cannot determine what stage the researchers have achieved, this informational constraint can result in a socially...