In this study, we explore the effect of peers and family on University attendance and graduation. We find that parental expectations and peer effects have a significant impact on the educational outcomes which operates through the interconnectedness between grades and aspirations during high...

The debate on whether insurance companies should be allowed to use results of individuals’ genetic tests for underwriting purposes has been both lively and increasingly relevant over the past two decades. Yet there appears to be no widely agreed upon resolution regarding appropriate and...

There is a prospect of substantial advancements in the understanding of the relationship between disease and genetics at least in the medium term to long term future. In this paper we consider the implications on two aspects of behaviour - surveillance to improve the chances of early detection...

We expose a weakness in an intuitive description popularly associated with the method of Lagrange multipliers and propose an alternative intuition. According to the deficient intuition, the Lagrange technique transforms a constrained optimization problem into an unconstrained optimization...

This paper presents an axiomatic framework for measuring life time poverty over multiple periods. For an individual, we argue that lifetime poverty is influenced by both the snapshot poverty of each period and the poverty level of the "permanent" lifetime consumption; it is also influenced by...

This paper is a contribution to the debate about whether regulations that ban insurance companies from access to individuals’ genetic tests may lead in the near to medium term future to substantial adverse selection costs. We choose the specific possibility of widespread knowledge based on...

The decision to attend university is influenced by the balance of the expected returns and costs of attending university,by liquidity constraints and capital market imperfections that may modify these calculations and, hence, by the family income of prospective students. Family circumstances...

Data from the Survey of Consumer Finances and the Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics indicate that more females than males have been attending Canadian universities over the past decade. This gender imbalance in the attendance rates of females and males increased substantially during the...

Asymmetric information in the form of moral hazard and adverse selection can result in sizeable efficiency losses and program costs for government provided crop insurance plans. We present a methodology and illustrative simulations to show how these two types of information problems interact in...