I develop a dynamic theory of luxury consumption, particularly emphasizing the causal effect that pursuit of luxury goods has on wealth accumulation. A quasi-luxury is defined as a good whose marginal rate of substitution is increasing in a utility index. Under certain conditions, it is indeed a...

We examine stability of competitive equilibrium in an N-country world economy with capital accumulation, where each country can have either increasing marginal impatience (IMI) or decreasing marginal impatience (DMI). The necessary and sufficient condition for stability is shown as positive...

In view of the finding that debtors are likely to be more obese than nondebtors, we investigate whether interpersonal differences in body mass are, as in the case of debt behavior, related to those in time discounting and time discounting anomalies. The effects of time discounting on body...

The delay effect, that people discount the near future more than the distant future, has not been verified rigorously. An experiment conducted by us in China confirms that, by separating the delay from the interval, the delay effect exists only within a short delay. The results are reliable,...

In a two-country world economy, consumption-habit dynamics in one country are affected, due to endogenous interest rate adjustments, by the other country's habits and preferences. External indebtedness depends crucially on international differences in habit-adjusted net output less habitual...

Unlike the standard assumption that the degree of impatience, measured by the rate of time preference, is increasing in wealth, empirical studies support that impatience ismarginally decreasing. By introducing decreasing marginal impatience into the neoclassical monetary growth model _ la...