Empirical studies of the role of non-cognitive skills in driving economic behavior often rely heavily on the assumption that these skills are stable over the relevant time frame. We analyze the change in a specific non-cognitive skill, i.e. locus of control, in order to directly assess the...

Consider a lump-sum pension fund problem, in which an agent deposits an amount with a fund manager up front and is later repaid a lump sum x(T) after time T. The fund manager may be both cautious in seeking a payoff x(T) meeting a certain target, but relaxed toward the possibility of exceeding...

We study a newly released data set of scanner prices for food products in a large Swiss online supermarket. We find that average prices change about every two months, but when we exclude temporary sales, prices are extremely sticky, changing on average once every three years. Non-sale price...

In many countries, current water-pricing policies are dictated by the sole objective of breaking-even in each period. This results in large withdrawals, which are not sustainable in the long-run, hence not optimal. In this paper, I derive the optimal dynamic water resource management policy of a...

This paper studies implementation of the social optimum in a model of habit formation. We consider taxes that address inefficiencies due to negative consumption externalities, imperfect competition, and self-control problems. Our contributions are to: i) account for producers’ market power;...

We provide an introduction to a model of social inequality dynamics. Because capital is distributed less equally than labour, we propose that that one of the main forces driving income inequality is the ratio of factor shares. In this paper we give an easy proof to show that this ratio is driven...

This paper examines whether changes in New Zealand income inequality can be attributed to the shares of national income taken by capital and labour. Data on income inequality aggregates both capital income (rents, interest, profits) and labour income (wages and salaries). It is possible that...

This study builds on recent findings that target-based utility measures, used in the dynamic portfolio optimisation, deliver investment policies that can generate leftskewed payoff distributions. These policies can lead to small probabilities of low payoffs. This is in contrast to the classical...

This paper describes a suite of MATLAB® routines devised to provide an approximately optimal solution to an infinite-horizon stochastic optimal control problem. The suite is an updated version of that described in [1] and [2]. Its routines implement a policy improvement algorithm to optimise a...

This manual introduces and provides usage details for an application we have developed called VIKAASA, as well as the library of functions underlying it. VIKAASA runs in GNU Octave or MATLAB®, using the numerical computing and graphing capabilities of those packages to approximate, visualise...