This paper analyzes optimal linear taxes on labor income and savings in a twoperiod life-cycle model with ex ante identical households, endogenous leisure demands in both periods, and general processes of skill shocks over the life cycle. We demonstrate that the Atkinson-Stiglitz theorem breaks down under risk. Capital taxes are employed besides labor income taxes for two distinct reasons: i) c...

Translated to a cross-country context, the Solow model (Solow, 1956) predicts that international differences in steady state output per person are due to international differences in technology for a constant capital output ratio. However, most of the cross-country growth literature that refers to the Solow model has employed a specification where steady state differences in output per person a...

IN A TYPICAL workweek, one in every four manufacturing production workers in the United States is employed at night. This fraction fluctuates sharply over the business cycle, accounting disproportionately for business cycle changes in employment. The variation in work at night amounts to over 40 percent of the cyclical changes in the employment of manufacturing production workers. While cyclica...

This paper develops a new index of human capital that measures cognitive skills employed by the adult population in seventy nations during 1970-2003. The index is compared to existing measures of human capital in the Benhabib and Spiegel (2005) model. Analysis goes beyond the Cobb-Douglas production function. The evidence shows that (i) the new index best explains trends in technology growth; (...

We explored the use of support vector machines (SVM) in order to analyze the ensemble activities of 24 postural and focal muscles recorded during a whole body pointing task. Because of the large number of variables involved in motor control studies, such multivariate methods have much to offer over the standard univariate techniques that are currently employed in the field to detect modificatio...

This article analyzes how politics influences Latin American and Caribbean income inequality. Most studies view the distributional process in two phases with inequality shaped first by markets and then by state redistribution. Typically, cross-national analyses of inequality limit the influence of politics to the redistributive phase. But we argue that a full understanding of how government aff...

where Y is total output (or income), t is time, H is the stock of capital, and L is the labor supply. The parameter α ∈ (0, 1) is a distribution parameter, and σ = 1/(1 − ρ) is the elasticity of substitution between capital and technology-augmented labor. The CES function is among the most commonly employed production functions, and was among the original models presented by [2]. The CES is a g...

Over the past decade the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (the Basel Committee) has released a number of consultative documents discussing the management and supervision of the interest rate risk inherent in a bank’s balance sheet. The Committee’s most recent release on this topic forms part of the proposed New Basel Capital Accord (the New Accord), which comes into effect in 2007, and de...

Expertise and experience are frequently held to be universally desirable political attributes. But under what conditions can voters benefits from improvements in the human capital of their politicians? We address this question in a model of electoral control with two districts, built upon three premises. First, both human capital (quality) and effort are key inputs of a politician’s performance...

Recently, much attention is given to financial-growth nexus, but largely via the physical capital accumulation channel. This study differed by examining this nexus, via the human capital accumulation channel in the ECOWAS region. It employed panel cointegration approaches as well as the FMOLS, DOLS. The results revealed that bank private credit and domestic private credit contribute significant...