"This paper discusses the redistributive impact of the Dutch social security system on lifetime basis. Net benefits appear to be positive for the birth generations up to 1960. Social insurances show a declining net benefit, whereas for occupational pensions the reverse holds. It is generally assumed that flat-rated social security schemes are more redistributive ones than wage-related scheme...

Resin producing agroforestry in the Krui area of Sumatra in Indonesia is presented as an environmentally friendly, income generating land-use system which contributes to both development and conservation objectives. We studied the change in household income portfolios in three communities in the Krui area. The studies revealed that in the period 1995–2004 agroforestry remained the main source o...

Traditional empirical strategies for studying convergence—more generally, the dynamics and determinants of economic growth—can be misleading if important, underlying permanent or growth components are stochastically time-varying. This paper documents the degree to which this instability characterizes the data, and then offers an alternative empirical framework. This alternative—directly modelli...

When you open your eyes in the morning, you usually see what you expect to see. Often it will be your bedroom, with things where you left them before you went to sleep. What if you opened your eyes and unexpectedly found yourself in a steaming tropical jungle? Why do we have expectations about what is about to happen to us? Why do we get surprised when something unexpected happens to us? More g...

We conduct a panel analysis quantifying the degree to which the mixture of low-, middleand high-income males in the neighbourhood affect the subsequent labour income of individuals, and test the degree to which these effects vary by timing (lagging up to three years) duration (one to four years), and cumulative amount of exposure and to what extent these effects are persistent. We employ a fixe...