This paper suggests that if parental nurturing is a dominating force in human capital formation then income redistribution may not promote economic growth. In particular, if, consistently with empirical evidence, parental human capital complements investment in a child’s education and yields...

In this paper, a dynamic general equilibrium (DGE) model of growth–inequality relationships, with missing credit markets, knowledge spillover and self-employed agents, is calibrated to New Zealand data. The model explains how two distinct policy shocks involving redistribution and immigration...

This paper examines the role of parental transfers on family size. We introduce a simple theoretical model of fertility decision where preferences towards children may differ between female and male spouses. Parental transfers increase both the household income and the bargaining power of the...

It is widely believed that empowering women via various material means increases women’s outside options and, thereby, makes them less vulnerable to intimate partner violence. However, the effect of such empowerment on domestic violence could be subtle particularly in countries with...

Recursive least squares learning is a central concept employed in selecting amongst competing outcomes of dynamic stochastic economic models. In employing least squares estimators, such learning relies on the assumption of a symmetric loss function defined over estimation errors. Within a...

The first chapter of my thesis (co-authored with David N. DeJong, Jean-Francois Richard and Roman Liesenfeld) develops a numerical procedure that facilitates efficient likelihood evaluation and filtering in applications involving non-linear and non-Gaussian state-space models. These tasks...

Term structure models have attracted tremendous amount of attention in the last two decades. My first paper specifies the dynamic and cross-sectional behavior of bonds in the framework of the Linear or general affine term structure model (ATSM). After revisiting the basic theory of ATSM under...

This thesis deals with macroeconomic dynamics. In chapter 1, I study a one-sector growth model withendogenous discount rate of the sort proposed by citet{1}. I extendthe model into a heterogeneous agents model with respect to initialwealth, and investigate whether the wealthdistribution may...

This thesis is organized in three chapters. In the first two chapters, an econometric model selection procedure and a method to improve some existing estimators are proposed. In the third chapter, a theoretical microeconomic analysis of herd behavior is performed under a fairly new set of...

Adaptive learning is important in dynamic models since it is a process that shows the improvement in the understanding of the agents of the model. Whenever there is a dynamic environment, there is a room for improvement through learning. In this thesis I analyze the adaptive learning of the...