When individual or household incomes are collected for administrative or scientific surveys, the reference period of income is sometimes a month, sometimes a quarter, and sometimes a year. This reference period of income likely affects the shape of the distribution and derived measures of...

Despite the formal rigour that attends social and economic measurement, the substantive meaning of particular measures could be compromised in the absence of a clear and coherent conceptualization of the phenomenon being measured. A case in point is afforded by the status of a focus axiom in the...

Two conversion schemes are usually employed for assessing personal-income inequality from household equivalent incomes: to weight household units by size or by needs. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study, the authors show the sensitivity of country inequality rankings to conversion...

Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

In this paper we study the welfare effect of a monopoly innovation. Unlike many partial equilibrium models carried out in previous studies, general equilibrium models with non-price-taking behavior are constructed and analyzed in greater detail. We discover that technical innovation carried out...

The protection of intellectual property rights (IPR) and the distribution of rent are central issues in R&D-based growth models with the return to innovation serving as the engine of growth. In this paper the authors consider the strength of the intellectual property rights and franchise...

The effect of remittances on capital accumulation remains a contested topic. This paper uses a panel data set from rural Mexico to investigate the impact of remittances on agriculture and livestock investments. After controlling for the endogeneity of migration through an instrumental variable...

This paper sheds new light on the effects of the minimum wage on employment from a two-sided theoretical perspective, in which firms' job offer and workers' job acceptance decisions are disentangled. Minimum wages reduce job offer incentives and increase job acceptance incentives. We show that...

This paper proposes a multi-industry trade model with integrated capital markets and Mortensen and Pissarides search frictions in the labor market. Institutional changes in the model trigger adjustments at the intensive and extensive margin of labor demand. At the extensive margin a shift of the...

This paper presents a synoptic interpretation of structural unemployment in Europe. The paper consists of three parts. Part 1 summarises some major stilysed facts of the record and the state of unemployment in Europe. In part 2, these facts are taken as the basis for a theoretical interpretation...