We propose a simple model of a mating economy in both monogamous and polygynous cultures, and derive implications for how polygyny affects individual and aggregate fertility. We find that an attractive woman is more likely to find a high-status husband. However, when polygyny is allowed,...

The paper presents empirical evidence of AIDS epidemic effects on demography variables and accumulable factors. Using a panel of 47 Sub-Saharan African countries, we show that AIDS has negative and significant effect on life expectancy and fertility rate. Thus, a one percent increase in AIDS...

We study political influence in institutions where members choose from among several options their levels of support to a collective goal, these individual choices determining the degree to which the goal is reached. Influence is assessed by newly defined binary relations, each of which compares...

Sex differences in early age mortality have been explained in prior literature by differences in biological make-up and gender discrimination in the allocation of household resources. Studies estimating the effects of these factors have generally assumed that offspring sex ratio is random, which...

The right to hold dual citizenship is an important political institution that is being adopted by an increasing number of countries. We argue that this institution can generate important social and economic benefits beyond its political dimension. Dual citizenship recognition by a country allows...

This paper shows that differences in fertility behavior between African countries can be traced back to colonial institutions. Exploiting the arbitrary division of ancestral ethnic homelands and the resulting discontinuity in institutions across the British-French colonial borders, we find that...

We offer a policy basis for interpreting, justifying, and designing (3,3)-political rules, a large class of collective rules analogous to those governing the selection of papers in peer-reviewed journals, where each referee chooses to accept, reject, or invite a resubmission of a paper, and an...

We study the dynamic stability of networks in a two-sided economy of agents labelled men and women. Each agent desires relationships with the other type, but having multiple partners is costly. This cost-benefit trade-off results in each agent having a single-peaked utility function, the peak...

We analyze the implications of communitarianism-the tendency of people to organize into separate culturally homogeneous groups-for individual and group inequality in human capital accumulation. We propose a non-cooperative social interactions model where each individual decides how much time to...

More than half of the HIV/AIDS-infected population today are women. We study a dynamic model of (in)fidelity, which explains the HIV/AIDS gender gap by the configuration of sexual networks. Each individual desires sexual relationships with opposite sex individuals. Two Markov matching processes...