Recent studies of credit access among low-income households find that payday loans can exacerbate, rather than alleviate, financial distress. I find that households with payday loan access are also more likely to use food assistance benefits and less likely to make child support payments required of non-resident parents. These findings suggest that borrowers in distress turn to transfer program...

Intra-Household Allocation of Resources: Inferences from Non-Resident Fathers’ Child Support Payments A large proportion of divorced and separated fathers form new partnerships. The new partner’s preferences are not likely to put much weight on expenditures on the man’s children from his previous union. Thus, his own and his partner’s income would have different impacts on his child support pay...

This paper outlines a model of the first true central bank, the Bank of Amsterdam, founded in 1609. Employing a variant of the Freeman (1996) model of money and payments, we first analyze the problematic monetary situation in the Netherlands prior to the founding of the Bank. We then use the model to describe how the Bank could remedy this situation by creating a stable medium for the settlemen...

Cooperation can increase the efficiency of commonly–owned renewable resource use. However, received knowledge is that, absent side payments, cooperative solutions are more difficult to achieve the less homogenous the agents involved. We revisit this claim by analyzing how differences in the opportunity costs of resource harvesting affect the scope for Pareto–improving contracts, where contracti...

Transition Patterns for the Welfare Reliance of Low Income Mothers in Australia This paper analyzes the mobility of low income mothers in Australia between two groups of governmental transfer payments: Income support payments (IS) and Family Payments (FP, non-income support payments) only. While IS payments are to provide a subsistence of living for her, FP payments are to help low-medium incom...