The Urban Informal Sector (UIS) is a major and expanding part of developing economies both in terms of employment and output. However, they cause substantial environmental damages and worsen living conditions, prompting authorities to impose rigid environmental regulations. Yet, these steps have been mostly arbitrary and based on adhoc popular sentiment or political exigencies and not on rigoro...

Uteroplacental tissue plays a key role in substance exchanges between maternal and fetal circulation, and, therefore, in the growth and development of fetuses. In this study, proteomics and western blotting were applied to investigate the changes of proteome in the placenta and endometrium of normal and intrauterine growth restriction (IUGR) porcine fetuses during mid to late pregnancy (D60, 90...

A number of different models with behavioral economics have a reduced form representation where potentially boundedly rational decision-makers do not necessarily internalize all the consequences of their actions on payoff relevant features (which we label as psychological states) of the choice environment. This paper studies the restrictions that such behavioral models impose on choice data and...

Life settlements provide the possibility for individuals to convert their life insurance policies into cash in a secondary market transaction. Hence, this additional option is welcome from the current policyholders’ point of view, but the reasons for the attractiveness to financial investors as well as the equilibrium impacts on life insurers and future policyholders are not immediate clear. Th...

This paper analyzes the determinants of life satisfaction in a pooled data set of representative individual survey data from seven East European countries collected during the early phase of economic and political transformation using ordered logit models. Those core sociodemographic and economic variables known to be relevant from studies on the US and West European countries (u-shaped age eff...

We develop a model of political competition between two office-motivated candidates who choose which level of taxation (and implied government spending) to propose as their election platform. Candidates generally differ in the amount of public good they can produce for a given level of tax revenue. Voters differ in their incomes, as well as in their preference for the public good relative to pr...

We investigate a mechanism whereby a group of nations forming a free trade area simultaneously can efficiently satisfy industrialization targets. The mechanism does not rely on cross-country transfers, and it is efficient for each member country individually even if other members of the free trade area do not implement the efficient policy. It allows each member country to gain from participati...

In this paper we re-examine the axiomatic basis of the key result on weighted utilitarian representation of preference orders on finite utility streams. We show that a preference order satisfying the axioms of Minimal Individual Symmetry, Invariance and Strong Pareto need not have a representation, and thus in particular a weighted utilitarian representation. The example establishing this resul...

This paper proves a simple and general theorem on resource-allocation mechanisms that achieve Pareto efficiency. We say that a mechanism (game form) is normal if at any action profile, an agent who obtains his endowments neither pays nor receives a positive amount. In the context of auctions, this simply means that losers receive no bill. We prove that for any normal mechanism, if its Nash equi...

Happiness and Domain Satisfaction: Theory and Evidence In the United States happiness, on average, varies positively with socio-economic status; is fairly constant over time; rises to midlife and then declines; and is lower among younger than older birth cohorts. These four patterns of mean happiness can be predicted rather closely from the mean satisfaction people report with each of four doma...