We study transactions that require investments before trading in a competitive market, when forward contracts fixing the transaction price are absent. We show that, despite the market being perfectly competitive and subject to arbitrarily little uncertainty, the inability to jointly determine...

We present a finite period general equilibrium model of an exchange economy with asymmetric information. We say that a rational expectations equilibrium exhibits an expected bubble if the price of an asset in one period is higher than any agent's marginal valuation of holding the asset to...

We present a theory of the emergence of laws restricting child labor or imposing mandatory education that is consistent with the fact that poor parents tend to oppose such laws. We find that if altruistic parents are unable to commit to educating their children, child-labor laws can increase the...

The rise in per-capita labor over the last 30 years is difficult to explain in a standard macroeconomic model because rising wages of women should have lead to a large rise in husband’s leisure. This paper argues that home production and bargaining are both essential for understanding these...

According to <link rid="b26">Pareto (1896)</link>, the distribution of income depends on "the nature of the people comprising a society, on the organization of the latter, and, also, in part, on chance." In the model developed here the "nature of the people" is captured by attitudes toward marriage, divorce,...