We present a theoretical model to analyze the effects of two higher education loan schemes on individual schooling decisions, in a world where graduate earnings are stochastic. The paper is structured in two parts. The first part is static, we assume a single lifetime shock on graduate incomes and we compare the individual expected utilities under a mortgage loan (ML) and an income contingent l...

The issue addressed in this paper is the optimal taxation of incomes earned tn the home economy, and of incomes earned abroad, when people can migrate. As a preliminary, the optimal taxation of home incomes when there is migration and no taxation of foreign incomes, is discussed. Then in a more general setting, we deal with optimal taxation of different kinds of labour when another kind of labo...

I examine whether or not the incomes of the poor systematically grow with average incomes, and whether financial development enhances the incomes of the poorest quintile. Following the methodology of Dollar and Kraay (2002), I find, once extending Dollar and Kraay's data, their findings are robust to the Lucas critique and economic growth is important for poverty reduction universally. However,...

We survey three recent breakthroughs in algebraic combinatorics. The first is the proof by Knutson and Tao, and later Derksen and Weyman, of the saturation conjecture for Littlewood-Richardson coefficients. The second is the proof of the n! and (n + 1)n−1 conjectures by Haiman. The final breakthrough is the determination by Baik, Deift, and Johansson of the limiting behavior of the length of th...

Let u(d, n) denote the number of permuations in the symmetric group Sn with no increasing subsequence of length greater than d. u(d, n) may alternatively be interpreted as the number of closed Z-lattice walks which begin and end at the origin and take n positive steps followed by n negative steps while remaining confined to the Weyl chamber W = {(t1, t2, . . . , td) ∈ R : t1 ≥ t2 ≥ · · · ≥ td}....

Karlin and Altschul in their statistical analysis for multiple highscoring segments in molecular sequences introduced a distribution function which gives the probability there are at least r distinct and consistently ordered segment pairs all with score at least x. For long sequences this distribution can be expressed in terms of the distribution of the length of the longest increasing subseque...

The Mallows measure on the symmetric group Sn is the probability measure such that each permutation has probability proportional to q raised to the power of the number of inversions, where q is a positive parameter and the number of inversions of π is equal to the number of pairs i < j such that πi > πj . We prove a weak law of large numbers for the length of the longest increasing subsequence ...

Food production in 2050 will be sufficient, globally, but many of the poor will remain food insecure. The primary cause of food insecurity will continue to be poverty, rather than inadequate food production. Thus, policies and investments that increase the incomes of the poor will remain the best ways to extend food security to all. Investments that promote growth in sustainable agriculture and...

The econophysics ‘‘two-class’’ theory of Yakovenko and his co-authors shows that the distribution of labor incomes is roughly exponential. This paper extends this result to US subgroups categorized by gender and race. It is well known that Males have higher average incomes than Females, and Whites have higher average incomes than African-Americans. It is also evident that social policies can af...