(with Joan Esteban), American Economic Review 101, 1345–1374, 2011.
Summary. In this paper we study a behavioral model of conflict that provides a basis for choosing certain indices of dispersion as indicators for conflict. We show that a suitable monotone transform of the equilibrium level of conflict can be proxied by a linear function of the Gini coefficient, the Herfindahl-Hirschman fractionalization index, and a specific measure of polarization due to Esteban and Ray.
(with Carlo Andreatta), October 2026.
Summary. We study the welfare consequences of social planning for citizens who display hedonistic altruism towards the next generation. A social planner must effectively be more patient than its citizens, even if every citizen has the same discount factor, but the planner also exhibits time inconsistency and has systematic future bias. We presume that successive generations of planners cannot bind one another to a course of action. Our main result states that every equilibrium policy with positive consumption that is nondecreasing in initial output must be either fully Pareto optimal, or “consumption inefficient” in the sense of Malinvaud (1953) and Phelps (1962, 1965). Moreover, we provide sufficient conditions for either outcome to occur.
(with Siwan Anderson), Journal of the European Economic Association 2019 17(5), 1585–1616; jvy027, https://doi.org/10.1093/jeea/jvy027
Summary. We provide systematic estimates of the excess female mortality faced by older unmarried women in developing regions. We place these estimates in the context of the missing women phenomenon. There are approximately 1.5 million missing women between the ages of 30 and 60 years old each year. We find that 35% of these missing women of adult age can be attributed to not being married. These estimates vary by region. India has the largest proportion of missing adult women who are without a husband, followed by the countries in East Africa. By contrast, China has almost no missing unmarried women. We show that 70% of missing unmarried women are of reproductive age and that it is the relatively high mortality rates of these young unmarried women (compared to their married counterparts) that drive this phenomenon.