We study whether pessimism and optimism about the future by forward looking agents provides a rationale for social security. We first distinguish between an agent's true and pessimistic preferences and then analyze whether this agent's level of saving depends on the pessimism parameter (π) and...

Standard income inequality indices can be interpreted as a measure of welfare loss entailed in departures from equality of outcomes, for egalitarian social welfare functions defined on the distribution of outcomes. But such a welfare interpretation has been criticized for a long time on the...

We analyze inefficiency and inequality associated with the use of creative capital to produce a final good. We first study a case in which the creative capital units are perfect substitutes in the production of the final good. We show that the equilibrium outcome is inefficient and that there is...

We analyze inefficiency and inequality associated with the use of creative capital to produce a final good. We first study a case in which the creative capital units are perfect substitutes in the production of the final good. We show that the equilibrium outcome is inefficient and that there is...

The regional economics and geography literature on urban population size has in recent years shown interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on the validity of Gibrat's Law and Zipf's Law. Despite distinct modeling features, they express similar fundamental characteristics in an...

The regional economics and geography literature on urban population size has in recent years shown interesting conceptual and methodological contributions on the validity of Gibrat’s Law and Zipf’s Law. Despite distinct modeling features, they express similar fundamental characteristics in...

An avalanche of empirical studies has addressed the validity of the rank-size rule (or Zipf's law) in a multi-city context in many countries. City size in most countries seems to obey Zipf's law, but the question under which conditions (e.g. sample size, spatial scale) this 'law' holds remained...

Regions, independent of their geographic level of aggregation, are known to be interrelated partly due to their relative locations. Similar economic performance among regions can be attributed to proximity. Consequently, a proper understanding, and accounting, of spatial liaisons is needed in...

We analyze a two-sector model of a trading creative regional economy (TCRE) of the sort studied by Florida. Our analysis focuses on two cases. The first (second) case concerns the impact of faster neutral (non-neutral) productivity growth in the tradable sector on the employment of creative...

Using a panel of 439 German regions we evaluate and compare the performance of various Neural Network (NN) models as forecasting tools for regional employment growth. Because of relevant differences in data availability between the former East and West Germany, the NN models are computed...