We study the impact on the skill premium of increases in the quality of goods consumed by households (“trading up”). Our empirical work shows that high- quality goods are more intensive in skilled labor than low-quality goods and that household spending on high-quality goods rises with...

Starting from the observation of a conceptual gap regarding the association between consumption and the contexts in which it occurs, the paper has two objectives. The first is to fill this gap by developing a framework that includes: the identification of consumption contexts based on their...

Starting from the observation of a conceptual gap regarding the association between consumption and the contexts in which it occurs, the paper has two objectives. The first is to fill this gap by developing a framework that includes: the identification of consumption contexts based on their...

This paper examines the question whether adjudication can be viewed as a private good, i.e., one whose optimal level will be generated in a free market. Part I focuses on private courts, noting their limitations as institutions for dispute resolution and rule creation but also stressing the...

When a product's product provision entails fixed costs, it will be made available only if a sufficient number of people want it. Some products are produced and consumed locally, so that provision requires not only a large group favoring the product but a large number nearby. Just as one has an...

It is well known in the economic literature that the labor supply curve can bend backwards and, therefore, that leisure can be a Giffen good. It is also known that leisure can be a normal good. This article proves that if leisure is a Giffen good, it has to be a normal good. This result also...

The study of matching theory has gained importance recently with applications in Kidney Exchange, House Allocation, School Choice etc. The general theme of these problems is to allocate goods in a fair manner amongst participating agents. The agents generally have a unit supply/demand of a good...

For the classic problem of fair allocation of indivisible goods, we introduce the notion of minimum social inequality allocations and discuss its connection to other fair allocation rules such as minimum envy. We show that a fair allocation problem can always be cast as the problem of finding an...

Extending Vartia's (1983) framework, the paper presents a simple numerical approach to the measurement of welfare for market and nonmarket goods on the basis of an incomplete (mixed) demand system. The method allows the determination of exact welfare measures. It provides a flexible and...

We propose and validate a simple way to augment the standard Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method that researchers use to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for a good. The augmentation is to measure WTP for another good ("benchmark good"), one unrelated to both the good the researcher is interested in...

We study the impact on the skill premium of increases in the quality of goods consumed by households ("trading up"). Our empirical work shows that high- quality goods are more intensive in skilled labor than low-quality goods and that household spending on high-quality goods rises with income....

This article is a study focusing on an important area of appliances we inevitably use almost daily and which has a tendency of renewal, diversification and quality improvement – that is the television set. There is a discrepancy between the quality of the products on the market and the one...

We study an endowment economy with heterogeneous agents and two complementary consumption goods, one of which is indivisible. Although agents have standard concave preferences, the indivisibility gives rise to Friedman-Savage convexity in indirect utility. Agents care about relative, not just...

In this paper we study the real and financial effects of insider trading in the spirit of Jain and Mirman (1999). Unlike the previous works that address this issue, we suppose that the production of the real good is costly and depends mainly of the price of an intermediate good produced locally...