Most private giving between living generations takes the form of "tied" transfers, such as help with housing downpayments. We argue that parents provide help with downpayments in order to encourage the production of grandchildren, and that such a subsidization emanates from the "demonstration...

The intersection of the standard altruism hypothesis with the quite strong evidence that bequests tend to be equal suggests that inter-vivos transfers should be strongly compensatory. Yet the available evidence is not in congruence with this implication. It has therefore been inferred that the...

When productivity is fostered by an individual's own human capital as well as by the economy-wide average level of human capital, individuals under-invest in human capital. The provision of subsidies for the formation of human capital, conditional on the subsidy being self-financed by tax...

We demonstrate how altruism can surge in a population of nonaltruists. We assume that each individual plays a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game with his or her sibling, or with a stranger, and that the probability that an individual survives to reproduce is proportional to his or her payoff in...

Drawing on the literature of occupational status and social distance, a theory is developed of labor migration that is prompted by a desire to avoid “social humiliation.” A closed-economy general equilibrium model that incorporates occupational status and examines the interaction between the...

We calculate the equilibrium fraction of cooperators in a population in which payoffs accrue from playing a single-shot prisoner's dilemma game. Individuals who are hardwired as cooperators or defectors are randomly matched into pairs, and cooperators are able to perfectly find out the type of a...

A new general-equilibrium model that links together rural-to-urban migration, the externality effect of the average level of human capital, and agglomeration economies shows that in developing countries, unrestricted rural-to-urban migration reduces the average income of both rural and urban...

When productivity is fostered by both the individual's human capital and by the average level of human capital in the economy, individuals under-invest in human capital. A strictly positive probability of migration to a richer country, by raising both the level of human capital formed by...

We explore the evolutionary dynamics of a population that consists of cooperators and defectors, wherein each member of the many pairs of players of a one-shot prisoner's dilemma game is drawn at random, and the number of descendents positively depends on the payoffs in the game. We demonstrate...