I study how transitory increases in the opportunity cost of schooling affect dropout rates and long-run outcomes. Exploiting a tax-free year in Iceland and comparing teenagers around compulsory schooling age, I document increased dropout rates and a permanent loss in educational attainment for...

This paper charitably develops a possible metaphysical argument against usury, as a common ground on which theology and economics can consider the issue. The metaphysical framework is derived from Anselm's Augustinian-Platonist metaphysics of participation whereby all goods are good through the...

15% of Danish workers account for 60% of unemployment. Are these workers unemployed more frequently because of their lower productivity or higher opportunity costs of employment? Using administrative data linking workers to their earnings, wealth, debt, health records, parental backgrounds,...

This paper addresses a critical gap in migration literature by quantifying the opportunity cost of labour emigration for countries of origin within the European Union, using Greece and Poland as case studies from 2004 to 2019. Despite the growing policy and academic interest in the effects of...

This study evaluates urbanization's impact on carbon emission rights value in China using translog production functions and carbon shadow pricing models. Firstly, the MK trend test and decoupling analysis divided the city into four carbon emission pressure types, where an enhanced translog...

This study provides the first global, plant-level analysis of technical and environmental efficiency in steel production using data from 143 mills across 50 countries (2019–2023). Using a Stochastic Directional Distance Function, we estimate plants’ distance to the frontier and compute...

Usage of containers beyond the predetermined period results in container demurrage and detention (D&D) that is charged by the carriers. The D&D charges are often perceived as a profit-making revenue stream for carriers, which raises the question of whether D&D charges adequately balance the...

This paper investigated the technical and allocative efficiency of commercial banks in Ethiopia. The analysis was based on unbalanced panel data of 19 banks over the period of 1990-2022. The study has applied shadow pricing approach to estimate and decompose the overall cost inefficiency into...

The U.S. is currently the country with the highest number of COVID-19 deaths. By the second week of October 2021, over 700,000 people in the U.S. had died after contracting the virus. When estimating the cost and benefit of a COVID-19 prevention measure, the value of a statistical life (VSL) has...

We propose a general approximation method for the determination of optimal trading strategies in markets with proportional transaction costs, with a polynomial approximation of the residual value function. The method is exemplified by several problems, from optimally tracking benchmarks and...

Parental encouragement improves a child's academic performance, which reflects the individual accumulation of human capital and can prevent the child from becoming poor in the future. We provide a model to clarify the mechanism by which parental encouragement influences the child's efforts by...

According to the regulations in force, including in Poland, loan institutions must disclose the costs of consumer credit. However, these costs can be presented in many ways. By conducting in -depth interviews with experts, we analyse whether the way in which the applicable regulations are...

We introduce a Path Shadowing Monte-Carlo method, which provides prediction of future paths, given any generative model. At any given date, it averages future quantities over generated price paths whose past history matches, or `shadows', the actual (observed) history. We test our approach using...

Firms are using freemium pricing strategies in many industries, including software, mobile apps, games, and streaming music and video. Freemium combines free services supported by advertising with premium services supported by subscriptions. We obtain the firm's optimal pricing strategy when...

State violence inflicts obvious direct costs on citizens, but its more significant consequences may be indirect. Building on the literature on agency problems in authoritarian regimes, we argue that coercion against bureaucrats motivates them to pursue over-zealous goals at the expense of wider...