The recent theorical literature on the political economy of growth displays contrasting findings on the nature of the political link between income inequality and growth. In this paper, we explain this contrast and argue that in a democracy, when redistribution is in the form of government...

Economists have long advised pricing electricity at marginal cost. In the case of public utilities producing from hydraulic sources, this would ordinarily generate a rent that could be used to finance public projects or to lower taxes. But marginal cost pricing by public utilities is rarely...

We argue from an empirical analysis of Latin-American household surveys that per capita income in the country of residence has a negative effect on child labor supply, even after controlling for other household characteristics. We then develop a theory of the emergence of mandatory-education...

We propose a consumption-based capital asset pricing model in which the representative agent's preferences display state-dependent risk aversion. Since a common factor - the state of the world - influences both stock prices and preferences, we obtain a valuation equation in which the vector of...

The rule used by the United States Figure Skating Association and the International Skating Union, hereafter the ISU Rule, to aggregate individual rankings of the skaters by the judges into a final ranking, is an interesting example of a social welfare function. This rule is examined thoroughly...

Open economy extensions of otherwise typical DGE models have met with some difficulties. It is hard for example to replicate the correlation between output and the trade balance, as well as the variance of the latter variable. The correlation between the trade balance and the terms of trade is...

We propose graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are "socially efficient", in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. We also derive estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency...