This paper investigates the role of consumption in the emergence of the motion picture industry in Britain France and the US. A time-lag of at least twelve years between the invention of cinema and the film industry’s take-off suggests that the latter was not mainly technology-driven. In all...

The “Golden Age” of post-war European economic growth has witnessedextraordinary changes not only in the economic, but also in the social andcultural outlook of Western European societies. Eric Hobsbawm’s statementthat “[h]istorians of the twentieth century in the third millennium will...

One of the most contentious issues in Chinese history has been the assessment of foreign involvement in the Chinese economy since the end of the nineteenth century. Following Allen and Donnithorne's 1954 publication Western Enterprise in Far Eastern Economic Development which claimed the limited...

This paper examines the profile of poverty in Tajikistan, the most remoteand poorest of the independent states of the Former Soviet Union. Datais used from the first nationally representative household surveyconducted in Tajikistan since independence and the cessation of the civilwar. The...

We analytically and quantitatively examine a prominent justi…cation for capital income taxation: goodspreferred by those with high ability ought to be taxed. We study an environment where commodity taxesare allowed to be nonlinear functions of income and consumption and …nd that, when ability...

The analysis in this paper focuses on the impact of health on the savings andconsumption decisions of the elderly. In principle, there are at least five alternativechannels through which health may affect consumption and savings. Ill health mayaffect both consumption capacities and needs while...

We model the effects of consumption-type taxes which differ according to the base andlocation of the tax. Our model incorporates a monopolist producing and selling in twocountries with three sources of rent, each in a different location: a fixed factor (locatedwith production), mobile managerial...

Children’s lives have been transformed over the past century. Family incomes haveincreased, children lead more solitary lives, attitudes to childhood have changed, newproducts have been developed and commercial pressures on children have increased.The importance of these commercial pressures...

Significant attention is paid by policymakers in the UnitedKingdom to the relationship between house prices, thebusiness cycle, and inflation, on account of the pronouncedprocyclical pattern of house prices. Are house prices asymptom of macroeconomic conditions? Or are thereimportant feedback...

The second half of the 1990s has seen substantialchanges in the wealth of Americanhouseholds, primarily owing to movements inthe stock market. From mid-1994 to mid-1997, the aggregate value of household sector equityholdings (including those owned by nonprofits, mutualfunds, and pensions and...