[...]Inflation targeting in New Zealand followed legislationthat mandated a Policy Targets Agreement (PTA)between the elected government and the newlyindependent central bank, which resulted in a jointlydecided numerical target for inflation.[...]

In practice, central banks have been confronted with a trade-off between stabilising inflation and output when dealing with rising oil prices. This contrasts with the result in the standard New Keynesian model that ensuring complete price stability is the optimal thing to do, even when an oil...

While consumption habits have been utilised as a means of generating a hump shapedoutput response to monetary policy shocks in sticky-price New Keynesian economies,there is relatively little analysis of the impact of habits (particularly, external habits) onoptimal policy. In this paper we...

This paper investigates relative or absolute happiness.

People spend more and more time commuting and often find it a burden. According to economics, the burden of commuting is chosen when compensated either on the labor or on the housing market so that individuals utility is equalized....

Vorliegende Studie beschäftigt sich mit der Frage, wie zufrieden pflegebedürftige Menschen, die häusliche Pflege in Ansprung nehmen, mit den Leistungen ihrer Pflegedienstes sind.

Based on outcomes for residents and qualitative studies, it is widelythought that public services meet the needs of residents less well indeprived areas, and that this is due to both the demands placed onservices being greater and the services themselves being of a lowerquality. This paper looks...

This paper is an overview of the social welfare systems of five EastAsian countries, namely Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong andSingapore. It analyses the overall costs of welfare as well as incomedistribution aspects, based on both aggregate data and a programme-byprogrammereview of their...

Katharine Mumford reports on her first round of interviews with 100 familiesliving in two East London neighbourhoods. CASE’s qualitative, longitudinalstudy in low income areas seeks to understand area change from theperspective of families, and to uncover the significance of area conditions...

Over the last decades, empirical research on subjective well-being in the socialsciences has provided a major new stimulus to the discourse on individual happiness.Recently this research has also been linked to economics where reported subjective wellbeingis often taken as a proxy measure for...