Demand theory can be applied to analyse how a human or animal consumer changes her selection of commodities within a certain budget in response to changes in price of those commodities. This change in consumption assessed over a range of prices is defined as demand elasticity. Previously, income-compensated and income-uncompensated price changes have been investigated using human and animal con...

The paper explores the conditions making for success in Human Development (HD) in developing countries. For this purpose it defines success in HD in a materialistic and reductionist way as being measured by progress in improving life expectancy and reducing infant mortality rates. Drawing on general reasoning and previous empirical work, the paper identifies probable conditions for country succ...

Income inequalities widened considerably from 1987 to 2007 in Finland. We compared the association between household income and health problems across three periods and in several different ways of modelling the dependence. Our aim was to find out whether the change in the distribution of income might have led to wider income-related inequalities in health problems. The data represent an 11-per...

A large body of empirical work in labor and public economics analyzes the behavioral response of earnings to taxes and transfers using the standard static model where agents choose to supply hours of work until the marginal disutility of work equals marginal utility of disposable (net-of-tax) income. This model, which from now on we call the standard model, predicts that, if individual preferen...

How wages and non labor income affect the decisions to work and hours of work are critical for understanding the work disincentive effects of taxes and transfers, and the attendant design of optimal income tax and transfer schemes. I use data from the Current Population Survey and variation induced by fundamental reforms to the U.S. tax and welfare systems in recent decades to estimate the labo...

This paper analyses the relation between air quality and subjective well-being in Germany. Life Satisfaction (LS) data from the German Socio-Economic Panel Study (SOEP) is connected with daily county pollution in terms of carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen dioxide (NO2) and ozone (O3) from 1998 to 2008. The assumed microeconometric happiness function is estimated considering individual time invaria...

Rotating electrical machines with their inherently high inertial energy density are finding applications in a variety of laboratory based as well as field based pulsed power systems. Of particular interest to the electromagnetic/ electrothermal launch community is the campensated pulsed alternator. This machine has over the past few years shown greater potential, because, besides the high energ...

We develop a two-country, two-sector model of trade where the only difference between the two countries is their distribution of human capital endowments. We show that even if the two countries have identical aggregate human capital endowments the pattern of trade depends on the properties of the two human capital distributions. We also show that the two distributions of endowments also complet...

We present a model of conflict in which discriminatory government policy or social intolerance is responsive to various forms of ethnic activism, including violence. It is this perceived responsiveness—captured by the probability that the government gives in and accepts a proposed change in ethnic policy—that induces individuals to mobilize, often violently, to support their cause. Yet, mobiliz...