Distributional Energy Justice and the Inclusive Human Development Agenda in Africa

This study advances the economic development and wellbeing scholarship through three key contributions. First, we show how distributional energy justice (hereafter: energy justice) affects inclusive human development (IHDI) in Africa. Second, we demonstrate how climate readiness moderates the effect of energy justice on IHDI. Third, we provide new evidence on how the joint effect of energy justice and climate readiness differs across low- and high-income African countries. We make these contributions using macro data for 36 African countries from 2010 to 2020. The results reveal that energy justice promotes IHDI. The contingency analysis also demonstrates that climate readiness amplifies the positive impact of energy justice on IHDI. Notably, across the economic, social, and governance perspectives of climate readiness, the results show that the moderating effect of governance readiness is striking. Evidence from sensitivity analysis also indicates that economic and governance readiness conditions energy justice to enhance IHDI in both high- and low-income African countries; however, these gains become elusive for the latter once social readiness is considered. These findings underscore the urgent need for investments in energy justice and climate readiness to foster IHDI in Africa

Distributional Energy Justice and the Inclusive Human Development Agenda in Africa

This study advances the economic development scholarship through three key contributions. First, it examines the impact of distributional energy justice (hereafter referred to as energy justice) on inclusive human development (IHDI) in Africa. Second, we investigate how climate readiness moderates the effect of energy justice on IHDI. Third, we explore whether the joint effect of energy justice and climate readiness differs across low- and high-income African countries. We make these contributions using macro data for 36 African countries from 2010 to 2020. The results reveal that energy justice promotes IHDI. The contingency analysis also demonstrates that climate readiness amplifies the positive impact of energy justice on IHDI. Notably, across the economic, social, and governance perspectives of climate readiness, the results show that the moderating effect of governance readiness is striking. Evidence from sensitivity analysis also suggests that relative to their low-income counterparts, high-income countries realise a remarkable increase in IHDI with progress in energy justice and climate readiness. These findings underscore the urgent need for investments in energy justice and climate resilience to foster inclusive human development in Africa

From Negative to Positive: A Balance-Sheet NPV Profile of the Trans Mountain Pipeline under State Ownership

Governments periodically acquire capital-intensive infrastructure projects that private actors are unable or unwilling to complete, often under conditions where conventional net present value (NPV) analysis indicates strongly negative project economics. Such interventions are typically framed as political rescues or fiscal failures, with limited attention paid to how forward-looking project value evolves once construction risk is resolved. This paper examines the Trans Mountain Expansion Project (TMX), acquired by the Government of Canada in 2018, as a detailed empirical case of infrastructure completion under state ownership. Using publicly available financial statements, the paper constructs a balance-sheet Net Present Value Profile that evaluates the project at successive points in time based solely on remaining future cash flows, treating all past expenditures as economically irrelevant for valuation. The results show that TMX’s forward-looking NPV was strongly negative at the time of acquisition but became decisively positive as construction risk was eliminated, stabilizing at a high steady-state value upon commissioning. This transition occurs without any revision to historical costs or operating assumptions and is robust to discount-rate variation. The analysis demonstrates how state intervention can function as risk absorption rather than capital misallocation, converting uncertainty into a valuable operating asset. By distinguishing completion dynamics from project failure cases, the paper clarifies why static ex ante NPV calculations can mischaracterize the economic logic of public intervention in long-lived infrastructure projects

The Citizens Standard as Counterfactual Benchmark: Empirical Analysis of an Alternative US Monetary Architecture, 1960–2055

This paper provides the first retrospective empirical reconstruction of the Citizens Standard monetary framework against US historical data. The architectural paper (Neo-Solon, 2026) proposes a constitutional monetary framework with three mode configurations and projects substantial retirement wealth outcomes under 2025 launch parameters. The present paper asks a different question: applied to actual US economic data from 1960 to 2025, what outcomes would the framework's Mode B configuration have produced for representative citizens, and how do those outcomes compare to what citizens actually experienced under the discretionary monetary system? Using an annual dataset drawn from authoritative public sources — FRED M2SL, BEA nominal GDP, BLS CPI-U, Census population, and S&P 500 total returns from Damodaran/NYU Stern through 2024 — we apply Mode B's K1 and K2 issuance formulas to four cohorts born in 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990. The central finding is that Mode B reliably produces a Stable Floor at retirement that exceeds the median American's actual retirement wealth by a factor of 1.9 to 4.0 across all four cohorts under central return assumptions. This finding holds for fully retrospective cohorts with high empirical confidence and for projected cohorts under all three return scenarios including pessimistic assumptions. A decomposition analysis reveals that approximately 96 percent of the framework's projected retirement wealth derives from compound equity returns on deposited principal; only 4 percent is the monetary principal itself. The Citizens Standard's contribution is to guarantee the structural conditions under which compounding can occur — universal participation, automatic deposits, constitutional locking, fee minimization, no early withdrawal — rather than to provide the wealth directly. Stress tests using Depression-era and stagflation-era equity sequences show that under catastrophic equity conditions during peak accumulation years, the framework's median advantage is significantly diminished or eliminated for the most adversely timed cohorts. Non-survivor analysis drawing on the Dimson, Marsh, and Staunton global returns dataset shows that the framework's structural advantages persist in any equity market that avoids confiscation, though absolute outcomes are proportional to country-level long-run equity returns. The paper concludes that the Citizens Standard is most accurately described as a structural retirement-security architecture — one that eliminates the behavioral and institutional leakages that cause median Americans to accumulate far less than a disciplined investor — rather than as a monetary-stimulus mechanism. Its principal social contribution is eliminating the savings-discipline lottery

Operationalizing the Symbolic–Functional Model of Motivation: Empirical Indicators Derived from a Field Framework

Motivational theory remains limited by its failure to specify how selection between competing alternatives occurs. Hierarchical models assume ordered progression among needs, while variable-based approaches treat motivation as an internal quantity; neither provides a mechanism explaining how behavior emerges from comparison across alternatives or why small contextual changes can produce abrupt shifts in action. This article introduces a symbolic–functional model that defines motivation as the outcome of structured evaluation across competing alternatives. Each alternative is characterized by symbolic value, functional return, and constraint conditions, and is evaluated through a context-sensitive weighting function. Selection is governed by a formal rule in which an alternative becomes dominant when its evaluative score exceeds both competing alternatives and a context-dependent threshold. The model specifies three core processes: evaluative reweighting driven by contextual variation, shifts in comparative dominance across alternatives, and threshold-based selection producing discontinuous behavioral change. A formal representation is provided, along with an illustrative example demonstrating how reweighting alone—without changes in the intrinsic properties of alternatives—can produce abrupt transitions in selection. To enable empirical implementation, the article develops an operational framework for estimating evaluative weighting, modeling constraint effects, and detecting threshold dynamics using structured choice designs and longitudinal approaches. This reframes empirical analysis from measuring motivational states to reconstructing evaluative functions and selection conditions. By defining a closed evaluative mechanism linking context, constraints, weighting, and selection, the model provides a basis for formal modeling, empirical estimation, and prediction of motivational transitions beyond hierarchical and state-based assumptions

Inmigración, empresa y trabajo autónomo en España

La inmigración suele entrar en el debate económico español por la puerta del empleo asalariado. Es comprensible: ahí están los grandes volúmenes, las cotizaciones y las urgencias de muchos sectores. Pero esa lectura deja fuera una parte menos visible de la misma realidad: inmigrantes que trabajan por cuenta propia, pequeños empleadores que contratan, negocios familiares, profesionales autónomos, proyectos nacientes que todavía no han alcanzado una forma empresarial estable y actividades que sostienen comercio, hostelería, cuidados, transporte, construcción o servicios de proximidad. El análisis de los datos no permite una frase fácil. En la EPA del primer trimestre de 2026, la población extranjera representa el 15,8 % de la ocupación y el 16,0 % del trabajo por cuenta propia. Vista así, su presencia empresarial se parece mucho a su peso laboral. La diferencia aparece al abrir el grupo extranjero: los comunitarios alcanzan una tasa de trabajo por cuenta propia del 20,8 %, bastante por encima de la española, mientras que los no comunitarios quedan en el 12,3 %. Estos últimos, aun con menor intensidad relativa, reúnen más volumen absoluto dentro del autoempleo extranjero. No es una contradicción. Es la diferencia entre tasa y tamaño. La investigación combina EPA, Seguridad Social, GEM España 2024-2025, Censo anual del INE, Banco de España y literatura académica reciente. Se compara población española, doble nacionalidad, extranjeros de la Unión Europea y extranjeros no comunitarios. La primera generación se aproxima con el país de nacimiento; la segunda se aborda con cautela, porque la estadística pública todavía no cruza de forma cómoda generación migratoria, condición empresarial, sector y tamaño de negocio. Esa laguna no es menor. Precisamente por eso las conclusiones se formulan con prudencia

The Effects of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning on Language Acquisition and Integration Outcomes: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Integration Courses in Germany

This paper evaluates the effectiveness of a low-cost intervention combining Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) with behavioral economics insights, specifically motivational framing and near-peer role models. Using a randomized controlled trial among 317 migrants and refugees in German integration courses across six cities, I examine whether such an intervention can shift learning behavior and improve German language proficiency. The intervention raised adoption of the official state-recommended app "Ankommen" from 5% to 46% and doubled daily mobile learning time from 15 to 30 minutes. Intention-to-treat estimates show treatment increased self-reported German proficiency by 0.3 standard deviations, while Complier Average Causal Effect estimates indicate actual MALL adoption improved language skills by 0.76 to 0.83 standard deviations. These findings demonstrate that a brief, replicable encouragement intervention can meaningfully complement formal language instruction at negligible cost, offering a scalable policy tool for integration programs across Europe

Heaven or Earth? The Evolving Role of Global Shocks for Domestic Monetary Policy

Business cycles are increasingly driven by global shocks, rather than the domestic demand shocks prominent in earlier decades, posing challenges for central banks seeking to meet domestic mandates and communicate their policy decisions. This paper analyzes the evolving influence and characteristics of global and domestic shocks in advanced economies from 1970-2024 using a new FAVAR model that decomposes movements in interest rates, inflation, and output growth into four global shocks (demand, supply, oil, and monetary policy) and three domestic shocks (demand, supply, and monetary policy). We find that the role of global shocks has increased sharply over time and that their characteristics differ from those of domestic shocks across multiple dimensions. Compared to domestic shocks, global shocks have a larger supply component, higher variance, more persistent effects on inflation, and are more asymmetric (contributing more to tightening than to easing phases of monetary policy). As global supply shocks have become more prominent, central banks have also been less willing to “look through” their effects on inflation than for comparable domestic shocks. The distinct characteristics and rising influence of global shocks—particularly global supply shocks—have significant implications for modeling monetary policy and designing central bank frameworks

Mortality Prediction as Boundary Value Problem

We present a mathematical framework for mortality prediction from discrete medical event sequences, formulating the problem as a boundary value problem on causal path space. Discrete event sequences lift to rough path space; signatures provide coordinate-free trajectory analysis. The transformer architecture emerges as computing weighted projections of path signatures, with Time2Vec temporal encoding providing spectral parameterization of the rough path lift. We establish connections to tropical geometry: ReLU networks compute tropical rational functions, and the decision boundary is a tropical hypersurface interpretable as the viscosity solution to a Hamilton-Jacobi equation on trajectory space. Mortality acts as absorbing boundary condition, with gradients propagating retroactively to reshape early event representations - the computational realization of ”boundary conditions determine interior.” The framework unifies perspectives from causal set theory (discrete causal ordering as primitive), rough path theory (coordinate-free trajectory invariants), tropical geometry (piecewise-linear structure from max-plus algebra), and viscosity solutions (weak solutions selected by vanishing diffusion). The architecture’s parameter efficiency is explained by alignment with the problem’s intrinsic mathematical structure: tropical decision boundaries, Lie algebraic dimension reduction, and binary boundary factorization

Online Signals, Consumer Trust and Confidence in Online Commerce

Drawing on signaling theory, this study investigates how reputation, perceived ethics, service quality, and website design influence consumer trust in e-commerce, and how trust, in turn, shapes consumer confidence in online transactions. Using a web-based survey of online shoppers, the proposed relationships are intended to be tested through confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. The study offers an integrated framework for understanding how online signals help reduce information asymmetry and strengthen confidence in e-commerce