Previous literature has mostly considered R&D and licensing activities separately. In this paper we examine the effect of licensing on R&D and social welfare. We show that the effect of licensing on the incentive for doing R&D is ambiguous and depends on the costs of doing R&D. We also show that the possibility of licensing can change the identity of the innovating firm. However, we find that s...

The concentration index is widely used to measure income-related inequality in health. No insight exists, however, whether the concentration index connects with people's preferences about distributions of income and health and whether a reduction in the concentration index reflects an increase in social welfare. We explored this question by testing the central assumption underlying the concentr...

This article describes the problem of homelessness in Japan, and contrasts the status of the problem between the United Kingdom and Japan. Demographic characteristics of the homeless, including age and gender, vary across the two countries (for example, there are very few homeless women in Japan). Factors contributing to the development of homelessness in each country are discussed and contrast...

We propose graphical methods to determine whether commodity-tax changes are “socially efficient”, in the sense of improving social welfare or decreasing poverty for large classes of social welfare and poverty indices. We also derive estimators of critical poverty lines and economic efficiency ratios which can be used to characterize socially-efficient tax reforms. The statistical properties of ...

the voluntary worker in the social services What to say and what to do when mostly your friends love reading? Are you the one that don't have such hobby? So, it's important for you to start having that hobby. You know, reading is not the force. We're sure that reading will lead you to join in better concept of life. Reading will be a positive activity to do every time. And do you know our frien...

Food price increases and the introduction of radical social welfare and enterprise reforms during the 1990s generated significant changes in the lives of urban households in China. During this period urban poverty increased considerably. This paper uses household level data from 1986 to 2000 to examine what determines whether households fall below the poverty line over this period and investiga...

There is a lot of anecdotal evidence that entry of new firms reduces not only prices but also costs. However, it is far from clear how this cost-reduction works. In this paper I investigate three models of how entry may cause cost reduction: managerial incentives, survival of the fittest, and imitation. The models have somewhat different implications for social welfare.