Social Spending Generosity and Income Inequality: A Dynamic Panel Approach This paper explores if more generous social spending polices in fact lead to less income inequality, or if redistributive outcomes are offset by behavioral disincentive effects. To account for the inherent endogeneity of social policies with regard to inequality levels, I apply the System GMM estimator and use the presum...

Do People Seek to Maximize Their Subjective Well‐Being?* In a new survey we ask respondents, after a standard Subjective Well‐Being (SWB) question, if they can think of changes in their lives that would improve their SWB score. If the SWB score is just one argument among others in the respondents’ goals in life, they should easily find ways to improve it, at the expense of other dimensions they...

This paper develops a theory of social norms: what they are, how they form, and how they change. The theory also makes predictions about group formation, categorization, and discrimination, and it can be extended to model leadership and fairness. The paper accounts for the existence of “oppositional culture,” where minority groups disparage the majority and are disparaged in turn. An explanatio...

D-values were obtained for Listeria monocytogenes and Yersinia enterocolitica at 50, 55 and 60 degrees C in vacuum-packed minced beef samples heated in a laboratory water-bath. The experiment was repeated using vacutainers, which allowed heating of the beef to the desired temperature before inoculation. D-values of between 0.15 and 36.1 min were obtained for L. monocytogenes. Pre-heating the be...

The Happiness Gains from Sorting and Matching in the Labor Market Sorting of people on the labor market not only assures the most productive use of valuable skills but also generates individual utility gains if people experience an optimal match between job characteristics and their preferences. Based on individual data on reported satisfaction with life it is possible to assess these latter ga...

A recent literature on the economics of conflict has provided conditions under which an “anarchic” outcome may come to serve as an equilibrium for an economy, as well as conditions under which a “dictator” or “government agent” is empowered to make collective action choices that enable the economy to achieve a Pareto superior equilibrium. This paper reports results from a laboratory experiment ...

A new method for the determination of oligosaccharide chains, known as the D60 one-dimensional TOCSY method is introduced in this paper. The results show that the use of this method enables a more effective coherent long-range magnetic relay transfer compared with that of existing DIPSI-2 and MMDY methods. Further, the method is easy to use and is not sensitive to the error of the pulse width. ...

The control of drug activity currently favors supply-side policies: drug suppliers in the U.S. face a higher arrest rate and longer sentences than demanders. We construct a simple model of drug activity with search and entry frictions in labor and drug markets. Our calibration analysis suggests a strong "dealer replacement effect." As a result, given a variety of community objectives, it is ben...

In this paper we examine whether the “tunnel effect” was an intrinsic feature of two different periods of transition in Russia: recession (1994-1998) and growth (2000-2004). Making use of the panel data nature of the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey, linear an non-linear estimation strategies are applied for modeling the individual well-being measured by selfreported levels of satisfactio...

This paper computes a quality adjusted price index for the personal computer CPU from 1996 to 2000. The index is based on the pure characteristics demand model. I …rst compute the quality adjusted price index for the whole market, and show that it is very comparable with the hedonic price index but more sensitive to changes in product quality. Two types of the hedonic index are considered. One ...