In this paper, I present a theory of dynamic economic growth, business cycles, and asset pricing that integrates (1) Marx's idea (and emphasized by Klein) of a two-class heterogeneity of the ownership structure of physical capital and human capital in a capitalist society, (2) Keynes' idea of...

With a foreigner share of almost 20 percent and a traditionally tight labourmarket, Switzerland has evolved into an immigration country against its own intention. In thepast, many low-qualified workers originally recruited on a temporary basis were allowed tosettle in Switzerland. This approach...

We consider asymmetric kernel density estimators and smoothed histogramswhen the unknown probability density function f is defined on [0, +∞). Uniform weak consistency on each compact set in [0, +∞) is proved for these estimators when "f" is continuous on its support. Weak convergence in L...

We cionsider semiparmetric assymetric kernel density estimators when the unkonwn density has support on [0,∞). We provide a unifying framework which contains assymmetric kernel versions of several semiparametric density estimators considered previously in the literature. This framework allows...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent con-sumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarceempirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African householddata and nds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively moreon visible...

Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson (2002) have claimed that the world incomedistribution underwent a "Reversal of Fortune" from 1500 to the present, wherebyformerly rich countries in what is now the developing world became poor whilepoor ones grew rich. We question their analysis with regard to both...

Specific functional forms are often used in economic models of distributions;goodness-of-fit measures are used to assess whether a functional form is appropriatein the light of real-world data. Standard approaches use a distance criterion based onthe EDF, an aggregation of differences in...

This article is a comparative analysis of the sources of income inequalityin four countries, namely Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the UnitedKingdom. It relies upon decompositions of inequality measures bypopulation groups and income sources (except for Japan because of datalimitations)....

We examine the performance of measures of mobility when allowance ismade for the possibility of data contamination. We find that “singlestage”indices – those that are applied directly to a sample from amultivariate income distribution – usually prove to be non-robust in theface of...