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...

When Economic Consequences of the Peace appeared during December 1919 it was an immediate publishing success, although Keynes’s argument that the book was a serious work of economics met with a controversial response that continues to the present day. While most critics’ focus on the books...

Were Scots to be found concentrated in particular occupations? Did networks, whether through common origin, associational life, religion, employment or marital connections facilitate the careers of Scots in the colonies? Were Scots different from other immigrants, especially the English, on any...

An immediate consequence of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) is the absence of auto-correlation of the return series of the financial prices and the exclusion of excess profitability made by any (active) trading strategy. However, the precondition for the validity of EMH, which assumes that...

Cooperatives represent an alternative to large-scale corporate farms and plantations as well as to independent unaffiliated small private farms. This paper presents a comparative modeling narrative on cooperative organizational forms’ potential impact on equitable rural development. This...

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...

This paper summarizes and highlights different approaches to behavioural economics. It includes a discussion of the differences between the “old” behavioural economics school, led by scholars like Herbert Simon, and the “new” behavioural economics, which builds on the work of Daniel...

I discuss some key issues raised by behavioral economics for better understanding the working of the labor market. Amongst the key points in this paper are: (i) a revised modeling of the labor supply curve, with a specific focus on the target income approach (ii) elaborating on the importance of...