The Mexican government has recently launched several initiatives aimed at increasing the use of formal financial services, under the implicit assumption that they allow households to smooth consumption and finance investment in human capital. This study seeks to determine what is the impact of...

Empirical studies have shown that preferences for redistribution are significantly correlated with expectations of future mobility and the belief that society offers equal opportunities. We add to previous research by investigating the role of individual and social norms on rent seeking. We find...

We develop an equilibrium search model of the housing market where sellers may become distressed as they are unable to sell. A unique steady state equilibrium exists where distressed sellers attempt fire sales by accepting prices that are substantially below fundamental values. During periods...

The housing market exhibits a puzzling yet repetitive seasonal boom and bust cycle where prices and trade volume rise in summers and fall in winters. This paper presents a search model that analytically generates the observed deterministic cycle.

We develop a urban economic model in which agents locate in cities of different size so as to maximize the net output of the whole system of cities in a country. From this model two new city size distributions are exactly derived. We call these functions “threshold double Pareto Generalized...

Complex systems can be characterized by classes of equivalency of their elements defined according to system specific rules. We propose a generalized preferential attachment model to describe the class size distribution. The model postulates preferential growth of the existing classes and the...

We introduce a model of proportional growth to explain the distribution of business firm growth rates. The model predicts that it is exponential in the central part and depicts an asymptotic power-law behavior in the tails with an exponent ζ = 3. Because of data limitations, previous studies in...

We present a preferential attachment growth model to obtain the distribution P(K) of number of units K in the classes which may represent business firms or other socio-economic entities. We found that P(K) is described in its central part by a power law with an exponent φ = 2+b/(1−b) which...

We study size and growth distributions of products and business firms in the context of a given industry. Firm size growth is analyzed in terms of two basic mechanisms, i.e. the increase of the number of new elementary business units and their size growth. We find a power-law relationship...

The main issue of this article is to discuss the question of ‘precarity’ in the context of the theory of social quality (see Beck et al, 2001), with which to pave the way for developing further the theoretical foundation of precarity. Societal practice is the main challenge this concept...