This paper presents an evolutionary model to explain the widespread diffusion of lifelong monogamous families. The essential condition, unique to humans, is the overlap of children of different ages. Under this condition, together with the salience of paternal investment and fatherhood uncertainty, monogamy attains a greater survivorship than serial monogamy and polygyny. This result is robust ...

There exists no consensus regarding the definition and the measure of persistence. We aim to spark research interests to address the lack of a standard definition. This paper reviews this issue and proposes an informal definition to unemployment persistence. JEL CLASSIFICATION: B41, E24. ∗Department of Economics, College of Business Administration, University of Central Florida. E-mail: omikhai...

Professional norms are supposed to have a central role in the allocation of resources when consumers have inferior information about the characteristics of products. We argue that economic motives are nevertheless important to resource allocation when professional opinions differ. The argument is illustrated with an example from medical care. We find that physicians who experience a shortage of...

This paper studies differences in social mobility between rich and poor families. The paper shows that borrowing constraints retard social mobility among the poor by preventing poor parents from investing optimally in the their children’s human capital. This evidence contradicts several recent studies that argue that innate ability is the overriding determinant of socioeconomic performance in t...

Exploiting a unique data set containing transactions data from a panel of 769 Chinese stateowned enterprises between 1980 and 1989, this paper tests microeconomic implications of a pervasive form of corruption—official diversion of under-priced, in-plan goods to the market. Corruption has the predicted effects on resource allocation. Official under-pricing of in-plan goods, which lowers the mar...

We survey the literature devoted to the study of the problem of allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among agents whose preferences are single-peaked. We formulate a number of normative and strategic requirements on rules, and study their implications when imposed in various combinations. A unique rule emerges as being the best-behaved from a variety of viewpoints: the uniform rule. Key...

Motivated by psychological evidence that attention is a scarce cognitive resource, we model investors’ attention allocation in learning and study the effects of this on asset-price dynamics. We show that limited investor attention leads to category-learning behavior, i.e., investors tend to process more market and sector-wide information than firm-specific information. This endogenous structure...

This paper estimates a dynamic model of the world oil market and tests whether OPEC countries colluded and whether non-OPEC countries behaved oligopolistically over the period 1970-2004. The model generates estimates of the shadow price of the resource with minimal functional form assumptions. Results support oligopolistic behavior among non-OPEC producers and collusion among OPEC producers exc...

We propose a dynamic model for studying the time evolution of fish stocks in an environment divided into two adjacent zones with different fishing policies. We analyze two particular harvesting methods: constant fishing effort and profit maximization. In this case, some agents engage in competition based on maximization of individual profit whereas others cooperate. The asymptotic behavior of t...

I adopt the distribution dynamics framework to study labor productivity convergence, in the period 1980-1995, among 28 developed and developing countries, in different manufacturing sub-sectors, identified, as according their technological content into Resource Based, Low Technology, Medium Technology and High Technology. I find that, exception made for High Technology and Manufacturing as a wh...