The German firm of Siemens and Halske introduced many enterprising features of what later came to be known as welfare capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Profit sharing, annual bonuses, a pension fund, a reduction in work hours, and an annual party were all means to ensure a productive, trouble-free workforce. We investigate the reasons why Siemens and Halske introduced this internal welf...

Although the urbanisation process is widely acknowledged to be associated with increasing levels of national production and higher levels of per capita GDP, poverty remains a persistent feature of urban life in India, both in terms of income and immigrants’ living conditions. Economic growth in cities has been found to be insufficient to achieve poverty alleviation. Government action has focuse...

Animal agriculture in North America has undergone a revolution since World War II. Productivity has increased enormously through the use of animal confinement, genetic selection, scientific feed formulation, and productivity-enhancing pharmaceuticals. There has been a shift to larger production units taking advantage of economies of scale. Critics contend that these changes have reduced the wel...

Welfare of animals involves their subjective feelings. Hence it cannot be directly assessed. It is generally accepted that welfare comprise the morphological, physiological, behavioural and mental status of the animals, and most indicators are related to these scientific disciplines. Welfare is defined as “normal” morphological development and undisturbed physiological, behavioural and mental s...

This paper studies optimal income taxes and retirement benefits in a life-cycle model with an intensive margin of labor supply and an endogenous retirement age. The government insures and redistributes resources across individuals who privately observe persistent shocks to their productivity. In this environment, the optimal labor tax is hump-shaped in age, unlike in existing models with no end...

I examine the causes and the consequences of differences in labor market outcomes across local labor markets within a country. The focus is on a long-run general equilibrium setting, where workers and firms are free to move across localities and local prices adjust to maintain the spatial equilibrium. In particular, I develop a tractable general equilibrium framework of local labor markets with...

Much research in the area of construction productivity focussed on the factors affecting labour. However, these studies tend to look at the factors in isolation and thus were inadequate in the recommendations for productivity improvements. This is because labour productivity is a complex and multifaceted issue. Given the recent industrial initiatives of Rethinking Construction and Respect for P...

We use a general equilibrium model to address the question whether a regulatory emission standard or an emission tax yields higher societal welfare for any given target on aggregate emission. The key feature of the model is that the plants are heterogeneous in productivity and monopolistically competitive in the production of dirty-goods whose by-product is emission. We …nd that the standard yi...