We collect and analyse data on church collections to assess whether the introduction of Euro notes and coins had real effects on giving. Data for Italy suggests that money is not completely neutral while Irish data suggests a lower degree of money illusion. A smaller data set from continental...

Economic and demographic outcomes are determined jointly in a choice-theoretic model of fertility, mortality and capital accumulation. There is an endogenous population of reproductive agents who belong to dynastic families of overlapping generations connected through altruism. In addition to...

This paper studies new mechanisms through which human capital and longevity interact with child labour and endogenous fertility. When children provide old age support in the form of care and companionship, the economy may display multiple development regimes: a development trap with low human...

Do good looks make people more productive? An impact of looks on earnings has been found in the empirical literature: plain people earn less than average-looking people who earn less than the good-looking. However, an important question remains unanswered: is the impact of beauty due to pure...

An endogenous growth model with heterogeneous agents and endogenous rates of fertility is developed to study the relationships between population growth, human capital, migration and economic development. A variety of patterns of migration, from the migration of the unskilled to the brain drain...

We document a large and persistent anomaly in the UK car insurance market over the period 2012-13: insurance companies charged a higher premium for third-party (liability) insurance than comprehensive insurance (which includes third-party). Furthermore, some companies charged higher prices for...

A large literature has studied the effects of PAYG systems on fertility, human capital and growth. We argue that the social security system may also interact with longevity when the latter is endogenously determined. We show that in such an environment, in a dynamically efficient economy PAYG...

We carried out a survey among a large group of undergraduate students of different disciplines to test whether the study of economics influences students' view on profit maximization and the market mechanism. We find that there are significant differences between economics students and the...