Social insurance for the elderly is judged responsible for the widely observed trend towards early retirement. In a world of laissez-faire or in a first-best setting, there would be no such trend. However, when first-best instruments are not available, because health and productivity are not observable, the optimal social insurance policy may imply a distortion on the retirement decision. The m...

Introduction A t the conclusion of World War II, several international institutions were created to manage the world economy and prevent another Great Depression. These institutions include the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (now called the World Bank), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which was expanded and ins...

This paper reviews the economic implications of employer and individual health insurance mandates. Although the cost of meeting an employer mandate is nominally paid by employers, in the long run much of the cost may be shifted backward to employees in the form of lower wages. We also compare the consequences of hypothetical employer and individual health insurance mandates for families with di...

milton friedman’s seminal article, “methodology of positive economics”, is one of the most important and contentious works ever been discussed within the realm of economic methodology. in this article, on the basis of an instrumentalist approach to the nature of theorizing, friedman declares the tenets of positive economics, and in this vein, he professes his disputable doctrine about “unrealis...

OBJECTIVE Two randomised controlled trials, AMBITION (NCT00109408) and ADACTA (NCT01119859), showed tocilizumab (TCZ) monotherapy superior to methotrexate (MTX) and adalimumab (ADA) monotherapy, respectively, for improving rheumatoid arthritis (RA) disease activity. This study compared the benefit of TCZ versus MTX or ADA monotherapy for improving patient-reported outcomes (PROs) in patients wi...

Do college students move towards ‘‘healthier values’’ over the college years? I examined this question using Kasser and Ryan’s (1993, 1996, 2001) distinction between intrinsic (community, intimacy, and growth) and extrinsic (money, popularity, and appearance) values. Graduating seniors evidenced large shifts away from extrinsic values, and to some extent shifts towards intrinsic values, compare...

This paper expands the literature on peers' influence on a youth's behaviors through the examination of the effect of subjective normative social images of smokers (perceived peers' social images of smokers) on subsequent intentions to smoke and the relation between subjective normative social images and the youth's own social images, or prototypes. Data are from the two oldest cohorts (4th and...

The field of artificial intelligence (AI) strives to build rational agents capable of perceiving the world around them and taking actions to advance specified goals. Put another way, AI researchers aim to construct a synthetic homo economicus, the mythical perfectly rational agent of neoclassical economics. We review progress toward creating this new species of machine, machina economicus, and ...