We explore the consequences of liberalized credit markets for growth and inequality in a lifecycle economy with physical and human capital accumulation, populated by households of different abilities, and calibrated to match the longrun economic performance of a panel of emerging countries. Relatively modest improvements in extending credit to the ablest households appear to have large economic...

We explore the consequences of liberalized credit markets for growth and inequality in a lifecycle economy with physical and human capital accumulation, populated by households of different abilities, and calibrated to match the longrun economic performance of a panel of emerging countries. Relatively modest improvements in extending credit to the ablest households appear to have large economic...

Swiss metropolitan areas are comprised of a system of communities with considerable fiscal autonomy. This study investigates how the income tax differentials across communities in an urban area affect the households` location decisions. Data from the urban agglomeration of Basel for the year 1997 is used. This unique data set contains tax information from all households that moved either within...

1 Microeconomics is the study of how individual firms and households make decisions, and how they interact with one another. Microeconomic models of firms and households are based on principles of optimizationfirms and households do the best they can given the constraints they face. For example, households choose which goods to purchase in order to maximize their utility, whereas firms decide h...

This paper aims to investigate the possibility for monopolistically competitive firms to set the price and the quantity of goods through a reinforcement learning approach. The model incorporates a set of firms that produce and sell differentiated goods in monopolistically competitive markets and households that supply different types of labor, purchase goods for consumption and hold money. The ...

While basic access to clean water is critical, another important issue is the affordability of water access for people around the globe. Prior international work has highlighted that a large proportion of consumers could not afford water if priced at full cost recovery levels. Given growing concern about affordability issues due to rising water rates, and a comparative lack of work on affordabi...

Recent research has shown that ‘rich’ households save at much higher rates than others (see Carroll (2000); Dynan, Skinner, and Zeldes (1996); Gentry and Hubbard (1998); Huggett (1996); Quadrini (1999)). This paper documents another large difference between the rich and the rest of the population: portfolios of the rich are heavily skewed toward risky assets, particularly investments in their o...

Most econometric models of intrahousehold behavior assume that household decisionmaking is efficient, i.e., utility realizations lie on the Pareto frontier. In this paper we investigate this claim by adding a number of participation constraints to the household allocation problem. Short-run constraints ensure that each spouse obtains a utility level at least equal to what they would realize und...

This paper examines the impact of income risk on the level of well-being of rural households in Nigeria. While income risk is defined as the risks associated with variability in income well-being is defined in terms of the level of utility reached by a given individual. This level is a function of goods and services that the individual consumes. The study is based on primary data collected from...