In the wake of a global economic recession, increased attention is being placed on societal transformations that lead to sustainable development, defined as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs” (Brundtland Commission, 1987). Sustainability addresses three overlapping and interdependent domains of development...

Despite uncertainty being intrinsic to economic evaluation of health care, existing techniques for handling uncertainty remain underdeveloped compared to the formal techniques commonly applied in the business sector. This paper develops an alternative approach to handling uncertainty in economic evaluation based on 'option-pricing' techniques. The presence of uncertainty and the degree of irrev...

Using data for 162 countries for the period 1962-2006, this paper examines the importance of the national economic growth rate for the ability of a national leader to retain his or her position. To address the potential endogeneity of economic growth, I use commodity prices, export partner incomes, precipitation, and temperature to instrument for a country’s growth rate. The results indicate th...

It is commonly hypothesized that higher cognitive abilities promote racial tolerance and a greater commitment to racial equality, but an alternative theoretical framework contends that higher cognitive abilities merely enable members of a dominant racial group to articulate a more refined legitimizing ideology for racial inequality. According to this perspective, ideological refinement occurs i...

Rural development means as overall development of rural areas social, economic, political and cultural so that the people are to lead a pleasant life. Agriculture plays the most important and decisive role in rural development. Infect, nobody can deny this fact that most of the population in India is still living in villages and their livelihood is depending on agriculture. Therefore, we rightl...

Explanations of economic growth and prosperity commonly identify a unique causal effect, e.g., institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a theoretical modeling of the interaction between culture and institutions and their effects on economic activity. We characterize conditions on the socio-economic environment such that culture and institutions complemen...

What accounts for economic growth and prosperity? What stands at their origin? Recent literature typically searches for single univariate causal explanations: institutions, culture, human capital, geography. In this paper we provide instead a first theoretical modeling of the interaction between different possible explanations for growth and prosperity (in particular, between culture and instit...

The aim of the System Dynamics Model ESCOT is to describe a path towards a sustainable transport system in Germany and to assess its economic impacts. ESCOT was developed within the environmentally sustainable transport (EST) project of the OECD that was designed to consider the ecological and technical aspects of a transition towards sustainable transportation. ESCOT comprises five models: the...

This paper compares the economic questions addressed by instrumental variables estimators with those addressed by structural approaches. We discuss Marschak's Maxim: estimators should be selected on the basis of their ability to answer well-posed economic problems with minimal assumptions. A key identifying assumption that allows structural methods to be more informative than IV can be tested w...

Applied econometric work takes a superficial approach to causality. Understanding economic affairs, making good policy decisions, and progress in the economic discipline depend on our ability to infer causal relations from data. We review the dominant approaches to causality in econometrics, and suggest why they fail to give good results. We feel the problem cannot be solved by traditional tool...