This work covers a substantial mosaic of related concepts in utility theory as applied to financial decision-making. It reviews some of the classical notions of Benthamite utility and the normative utility paradigm offered by the von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility theory; exploring its...

The world population recently topped 6 billion people. Each person has the same need to eat, breathe, and drink. Unfortunately the world's limited resources imply a carrying capacity for the human race. As we approach this critical mass, the strain on our resources becomes increasingly severe....

Conventional estimates of the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of changes in net worth average about 4 cents on the dollar. If this is true, the $14 trillion rise in household net worth between 1995 and 2000 created an additional $567 billion in household consumption. This increase in...

This paper investigates the effects of wealth on consumer spending in the United States. A traditional life-cycle model is estimated first. Although it does find a statistically significant wealth effect, its findings are unusable due to the presence of autocorrelation and non-stationarity....

The economic repercussions of September 11th are unique in that never before have economists needed to forecast and examine the impact of an event of such magnitude. This paper explains many of the economic effects of September l Ith, from the initial aftermath to recent developments. These...

Application of multisource feedback (MSF) increased dramatically and became widespread globally in the past two decades, but there was little conceptual work regarding self-other agreement and few empirical studies investigated self-other agreement in other cultural settings. This study...

Includes bibliographical references (leaf [12]).

This paper develops multivariate methods for analyzing (1) effects of socioeconomic variables on the total fertility rate and its components and (2) effects of socioeconomic variables on the trend in the total fertility rate and its components. For the multivariate methods to be applicable, the...

Dust elevated into the atmosphere by dust storms has numerous environmental consequences. These include contributing to climate change; modifying local weather conditions; producing chemical and biological changes in the oceans; and affecting soil formation, surface water, groundwater quality,...

The number of bank failures has increased dramatically over the last twenty-two years. A common notion in economics is that some banks can become "too big to fail." Is this still a true statement? What is the relationship, if any, between bank sizes and bank failures? In this thesis, the...