96 research outputs found
Algorithmic Complexity for Short Binary Strings Applied to Psychology: A Primer
Since human randomness production has been studied and widely used to assess
executive functions (especially inhibition), many measures have been suggested
to assess the degree to which a sequence is random-like. However, each of them
focuses on one feature of randomness, leading authors to have to use multiple
measures. Here we describe and advocate for the use of the accepted universal
measure for randomness based on algorithmic complexity, by means of a novel
previously presented technique using the the definition of algorithmic
probability. A re-analysis of the classical Radio Zenith data in the light of
the proposed measure and methodology is provided as a study case of an
application.Comment: To appear in Behavior Research Method
Are public and private social expenditures complementary?
Most analyses of social protection are focussed on public arrangements. However, social effort is not
restricted to the public domain; all kinds of private arrangements can be substitutes to public programs.
OECD-data indicate that accounting for private social benefits and the impact of the tax system on social
expenditure has an equalising effect on levels of social effort across a number of countries. This suggests
complementarity between public and private social expenditures. Changes in the public/private mix in
social protection will, however, have distributional effects. We expect that private schemes will generate
less income redistribution than public programs.
In this paper we will perform an empirical analysis. Using comparative international data we analyse
whether there is a relationship between public and private social expenditures, and the distribution of
income. We find a negative relationship between net public social expenditures and income inequality, but
a positive relationship between net private social expenditures and income inequality across countries. In
fact, when we incorporate private social security expenditures, the impact of total social expenditure on
the income distribution becomes statistically trivial. We conclude that changes in the public/private mix in
the provision of social protection may affect the redistributive impact of the welfare state
Colloquium: Statistical mechanics of money, wealth, and income
This Colloquium reviews statistical models for money, wealth, and income
distributions developed in the econophysics literature since the late 1990s. By
analogy with the Boltzmann-Gibbs distribution of energy in physics, it is shown
that the probability distribution of money is exponential for certain classes
of models with interacting economic agents. Alternative scenarios are also
reviewed. Data analysis of the empirical distributions of wealth and income
reveals a two-class distribution. The majority of the population belongs to the
lower class, characterized by the exponential ("thermal") distribution, whereas
a small fraction of the population in the upper class is characterized by the
power-law ("superthermal") distribution. The lower part is very stable,
stationary in time, whereas the upper part is highly dynamical and out of
equilibrium.Comment: 24 pages, 13 figures; v.2 - minor stylistic changes and updates of
references corresponding to the published versio
Inequality, mobility and the financial accumulation process: A computational economic analysis
Our computational economic analysis investigates the relationship between inequality, mobility and the financial accumulation process. Extending the baseline model by Levy et al., we characterise the economic process trough stylised return structures generating alternative evolutions of income and wealth through historical time. First we explore the limited heuristic contribution of one and two factors models comprising one single stock (capital wealth) and one single flow factor (labour) as pure drivers of income and wealth generation and allocation over time. Then we introduce heuristic modes of taxation in line with the baseline approach. Our computational economic analysis corroborates that the financial accumulation process featuring compound returns plays a significant role as source of inequality, while institutional configurations including taxation play a significant role in framing and shaping the aggregate economic process that evolves over socioeconomic space and time
Disentangling Income Inequality and the Redistributive Effect of Social Transfers and Taxes in 36 LIS Countries
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