41,678 research outputs found
Essays on the demand for addictive goods
No full textNon DisponibileIn the last years, the analysis of the demand for addictive goods has received renewed
and increasing interest. Since Becker and Murphy’s (1998) fundamental contribution,
theoretical and empirical studies have produced a large literature on the price and nonprice
determinants of alcohol and tobacco demand.
Theoretical and empirical studies on alcohol and tobacco consumption have drawn
attention to two topics. On the one hand, one strand of literature has focused on the
dynamics of addictive consumption and on the price responsiveness of the demand for
addictive goods, analysing the intertemporal decisions of either myopic or far-sighted
rational individuals. Empirical research on this topic has addressed the issues connected
to the application of Becker and Murphy’s (1988) rational addiction model, both with
aggregated (Becker et al., 1994) and disaggregated (Chaloupka, 1991; Baltagi and
Griffin, 1995, 2001; Baltagi and Geishecker, 2006) data.
On the other hand, the growing availability of microdata at a high disaggregated
level has allowed to model the censoring nature of alcohol and tobacco consumption,
accounting for zero observations and simultaneously exploiting the richness of survey
data information to control for heterogeneous individual (or household) behaviour
(Jones, 1989; Blaylock and Blisard, 1992, 1993; Garcia and Labeaga, 1996; Yenand
Jones, 1996). From a policy perspective, cross-sectional surveys enables to improve the
knowledge of the impacts of demographic and socio-economic variables on alcohol and
tobacco expenditure and help the design of public health programs to achieve drinking
and smoking-reduction objectives.
Recent developments in the analysis of addictive goods have followed three main
directions. Firstly, some authors (Jimenez-Martin et al., 1998; Labeaga, 1999; Jones and
Labeaga, 2003), using genuine and/or pseudo panel data, have tried to unify the two
above-mentioned approaches, by explicitly dealing with the issues of measurement
errors, unobserved individual heterogeneity and censoring in rational or myopic models
of addiction.
Secondly, the case of multiple addictive goods has been taken into account to
analyze, together with own consumption dynamics, both intra-temporal and intertemporal
interactions between goods. In particular, in the context of intertemporal
analysis of addiction, it is worth remarking the works of Bask and Melkersson (2004),
Pierani and Tiezzi (2005) and Fanelli and Mazzocchi (2006), that extend the rational
habit formation model to consider the case of two addictive goods.
Finally, following the works of Manski (1993, 1995), several studies have
emphasized the importance of social interactions and peer effects on smoking and
drinking decisions (Auld, 2005; Krauth, 2005; Powell et al., 2005). Social interactions
are widely regarded as important determinants of many behavioural and economic
outcomes, based on the idea that the utility that an individual receives from doing a
certain activity depends on the actions of the other individuals in the person’s reference
group (Becker, 1996; Brock and Durlauf, 2001). In particular, the point at issue is to
verify whether the average smoking or drinking behaviour in a group affects the
behaviour of the individuals in that particular grou
Inequality and reforms in transition countries
No full textDistributional patterns evolved quite differently and stabilized at diversified levels across the Central-Eastern European and formerly Soviet Union countries which underwent transition. In this paper we provide an overview of income inequality dynamics for 22 transition countries from 1989 to 2008 and of the explanations and interpretations proposed by the main literature. We then highlight that while the effects of different transition approaches on output dynamics and other macroeconomic aggregates have been largely analysed, scarce attention has been devoted so far to their impact on distributive patterns. However, this kind of analysis might usefully contribute to complete the complex picture of the many social, economic and structural factors affected by transition, and provide useful policy insights for those countries still experiencing deep institutional change
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The David W. Fentress Family Letters, 1856-1969
No full textTranscript of a letter by an unidentified author to David Fentress regarding sharing federal newspapers and the banning of federal newspapers in some areas. The author passes on the news of the war including the destruction of the Federal merchantmen by the Confederate fleet. He passes along world news: Russia preparing to go to War with Europe and how that could negatively affect the Confederacy. There is also speculation on the future of the war
Interest Rate Pass-Through in the Euro Area during the Financial Crisis: a Multivariate Regime-Switching Approach
No full textThe David W. Fentress Family Letters, 1856-1969
No full textTranscript of a letter by an unidentified author to David Fentress regarding sharing federal newspapers and the banning of federal newspapers in some areas. The author passes on the news of the war including the destruction of the Federal merchantmen by the Confederate fleet. He passes along world news: Russia preparing to go to War with Europe and how that could negatively affect the Confederacy. There is also speculation on the future of the war
Measuring multidimensional inequality and well-being: methods and an empirical application to Italian
No full textIn this paper, focusing on the normative approach, we review and discuss the main multidimensional inequality measures and inequality-adjusted multidimensional well-being indicators. Using Italian data on individual income, education and health status from the 2005 and 2008 Italian Survey on Income and Living Conditions (IT-SILC), an empirical analysis of multidimensional inequality and inequality-adjusted well-being levels in Italian regions has been performed. Given the variability that characterizes inequality and well-being indicators, depending on the uncertainty connected to the survey nature of the data as well as on the alternative parameter combinations chosen, the regional indices are presented together with the corresponding confidence intervals, as an instrument for assessing the robustness of well-being rankings.A significant result of the analysis is that distributional concerns, both across individuals and between dimensions, remarkably affects discrepancies in regional well-being. More specifically, increasing inequality aversion and decreasing substitutability between attributes progressively widen regional well-being differences. The same pattern emerges from the analysis of the evolution of regional well-being over time, revealing that high growth rates are related with improvements in the equity of interpersonal well-being distribution and, especially, with a recovery in its worse-off dimensions
The determinants of households’ repayment difficulties on mortgage loans: evidence from Italian microdata
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