As is amply documented, there appears to be a large discrepancy between the marginal propensity to purchace food ou of cash income and that out of food stamps. In this paper, we have examined both the formal and empirical bases of the claim that marginal welfare stigma explains this puzzling...

There exist large variations in juvenile sex ratios across districts and social groups in India. Economic and cultural factors have been advanced as contending explanations for these variations. We propose a household optimization model that integrates cultural explanations with economic ones....

As is amply documented, there appears to be a large discrepancy between the marginal propensity to purchase food out of cash income and that out of food stamps. In this paper, we have examined both the formal and empirical bases of the claim that marginal welfare stigma explains this puzzling...

There exist large variations in juvenile sex ratios across districts and social groups in India. Economic and cultural factors have been advanced as contending explanations for these variations. We propose a household optimization model that integrates cultural explanations with economic ones....

Wealthy individuals often voluntarily provide public goods that the poor also consume. Such philanthropy is perceived as legitimizing one’s wealth. Governments routinely exempt the rich from taxation on grounds of their charitable expenditure. We examine the normative logic of this exemption....

This paper analyzes the problem of deriving predictions, regarding supply behavior of a competitive firm, from prior consistency postulates about input-output choices made by such a firm. It extends the literature by introducing a consistency postulate for firm choice, which is weaker than...

We consider a two-person Cournot game of voluntary contributions to a public good with identical individual preferences, and examine equilibrium aggregate welfare under a separable, symmetric and concave social welfare function. Assuming the public good is pure, Itaya, de Meza and Myles (Econ....

We model a general choice environment via probabilistic choice correspondences, with (possibly) incomplete domain and infinite universal set of alternatives. We offer a consistency restriction regarding choice when the feasible set contracts. This condition, ‘contraction consistency’,...

Under pressure from a progressive social movement, the British government in Bengal passed the (Hindu) Widow Remarriage Act in 1856. Yet few such remarriages subsequently occurred. Standard explanations for this failure rest on demand side arguments – few contemporary men were enlightened...