The paper investigates the public’s attitude towards monetary union arrangements associated with different levels of monetary policy autonomy. The results indicate that support for monetary union declines significantly with expected loss of autonomy. Survey data from Kenya shows that public support for the proposed East African Community monetary union is highest in an arrangement where the cou...

The distinction between concrete and abstract concepts is psychologically valid but so far it can hardly be quantified in any objective way, which prevents it from being further studied in computational linguistics. This paper proposes a systematic way to measure concreteness from the surface structure of dictionary definitions. Comparing the scores from WordNet definitions with human ratings, ...

In most developed countries, gender equality and neutrality have been widely promoted and embraced— through public policy—as a socio-cultural goal since at least the mid-twentieth century. Accordingly, we predicted that a population of highly educated youth from a relatively wealthy developed country (mostly students from a Canadian university) would display little or no significant gender bias...

Food manufacturers need to understand the taste preferences of their consumers in order to develop successful new products. The existence of consumer segments that differ in systematic ways in their taste preferences can have important implications for product development. Rather than developing a product to please all potential consumers, the manufacturer may decide to optimize the product for...

The main issue raised in this note is the nonequivalence between the infinitehorizon model where agents are infinitely lived and the successive generations model with altruistic finitely lived agents: in the presence of a nonnegative bequest requirement, endowment heterogeneity imposes a revision of the acritical adoption of the infinitely lived agent representation in modern macro-economics. B...

Human mating is a complex phenomenon. Although men and women have different preferences in mate selection, there should be compatibility in these preferences since human mating requires agreement of both parties. We investigate how compatible the mating preferences of men and women are in a given property such as age, height, education and income. We use dataset of a large online dating site (N...

We consider a political economy with two partisan parties; each party represents a given constituency of voters. If one party (Labour) represents poor voters and the other (Christian Democrats) rich voters, if a redistributive tax policy is the only issue, and if there are no incentive considerations, then in equilibrium the party representing the poor will propose a tax rate of unity. If, howe...

While scholars have thoroughly explored the logic of two candidate electoral competition, much less has been accomplished in gaining an understanding of the role of party primaries. This paper presents an incomplete information model of primary and general elections and argues that party primaries do more than select party candidates. Party primaries serve an informational function. In an envir...

We study concurrent games with finite-memory strategies where players are given a Büchi and a mean-payoff objective, which are related by a lexicographic order: a player first prefers to satisfy its Büchi objective, and then prefers to minimise costs, which are given by a mean-payoff function. In particular, we show that deciding the existence of a strict Nash equilibrium in such games is decid...

This paper investigates how interest rates on liquid assets and excess returns on risky assets are determined when only safe assets can be used as liquid assets when waiting for an informative signal of future payoffs. In particular, we carefully differentiate between a demand for liquid assets while waiting for new information and a demand for safe assets for precautionary reasons. Employing K...