JEL: D24, L33

The production, sale and use of alcohol has proliferated since the first recordings of alcohol use in the middle ages. Today, alcohol is consumed by over 2 billion people, with global sales of alcoholic beverages in excess of $US967 billion (year 2005 value). Alcohol has many positive features, including individual pleasure to the drinker; a lubricant in the context of socializing and celebrati...

twenty eight lactating buffaloes were used in a completely randomized design with 2×2 factorial arrangement of four experimental diets including low protein–low energy (lp-le), low protein–high energy (lp-he), high protein–low energy (hp-le) and high protein–high energy (hp-he). results showed that the hp-he diet recorded the highest digestibility coefficients of cp, ee, nfe, nutritive values, ...

Despite standard economic models that assume stability of preferences, empirical work on insurance choice has documented a surprising lack of stability of risk preferences across domains. We hypothesize that informational differences can partly explain the observed empirical regularities, and test our hypothesis by conducting lab and field experiments with over 4,000 participants. We exogenousl...

This article discusses the interaction between economic growth in the sense of human capital accumulation and the dynamics of inequalities. We use a mean-field game framework in which individuals improve their human capital both to improve their wages and to avoid potential competition with less skilled individuals. Our contribution is twofold. First, we exhibit a mechanism in which competition...

This article draws on recent progress in economics—especially in the economics of information, property rights, transaction costs, induced innovations, household production, and the theory of the state—to analyze the functions and choices of social institutions, and to consider the mechanism of institutional change. My purpose is to show that institutions provide useful services and that instit...

The size distribution of firms in each industry will usually be highly skew, and empirical evidence shows that it is approximated closely by the Pareto distribution. In this paper we make an attempt to explain why the Pareto law applies to the size distribution of firms based on their innovation and investment behavior, and then develop a model of economic growth that take into account this emp...