Happiness Economics: Validity of subjective wellbeing measures and considerations for public policy

Happiness is a relatively new discipline within economics. Traditionally, economists have not paid too much attention to it since they considered that both indicators and theoretical assumptions in which this discipline was based were not neither reliable nor useful for policy recommendations. However, especially in the last decade, there has been extensive research which, if not proved, at least has provided enough arguments to believe that this discipline can be worthy for anyone interested in understanding what are the truly determinants that make people think they have a good life. This literature review emphasizes the validity, reliability and usefulness of happiness economics as a novel discipline to provide new insights in economics research, especially in public policy decision-making

Growth regimes, intangible capital and the labour share

This paper examines how far an increase in the intangible capital to output ratio contributes to changes in the labour share. We focus on a selection of OECD countries using industry-level data from 1995 to 2017. We show that the relationship between intangible capital and labour share is heterogeneous, and whether it is positive or negative depends on the types of intangibles and the growth regime of the national economy

Analysis of the neural hypercolumn in parallel PCSIM simulations

AbstractLarge and sudden changes in pitch or loudness occur statistically less frequently than gradual fluctuations, which means that natural sounds typically exhibit 1/f spectra. Experiments conducted on human subjects showed that listeners indeed prefer 1/f distributed melodies to melodies with faster or slower dynamics. It was recently demonstrated by using animal models, that neurons in primary auditory cortex of anesthetized ferrets exhibit a pronounced preference to stimuli that exhibit 1/f statistics. In the visual modality, it was shown that neurons in primary visual cortex of macaque monkeys exhibit tuning to sinusoidal gratings featuring 1/f dynamics.One might therefore suspect that neurons in mammalian cortex exhibit Self-Organizing Criticality. Indeed, we have found SOC-like phenomena in neurophysiological data collected in rat primary somatosensory cortex. In this paper we concentrated on investigation of the dynamics of cortical hypercolumn consisting of about 128 thousand simulated neurons. The set of 128 Liquid State Machines, each consisting 1024 neurons, was simulated on a simple cluster built of two double quad-core machines (16 cores).PCSIM was designed as a tool for simulating artificial biological-like neural networks composed of different models of neurons and different types of synapses. The simulator was written in C++ with a primary interface dedicated for the Python programming language. As its authors ensure it is intended to simulate networks containing up to millions of neurons and on the order of billions of synapses. This is achieved by distributing the network over different nodes of a computing cluster by using Message Passing Interface.The results obtained for Leaky Integrate-and-Fire model of neurons used for the construction of the hypercolumn and varying density of inter-column connections will be discussed. Benchmarking results for using the PCSIM on the cluster and predictions for grid computing will be presented to some extent. Research presented herein makes a good starting point for the simulations of very large parts of mammalian brain cortex and in some way leading to better understanding of the functionality of human brain

Periodotopy in the gerbil inferior colliculus: local clustering rather than a gradient map

Periodicities in sound waveforms are widespread, and shape important perceptual attributes of sound including rhythm and pitch. Previous studies have indicated that, in the inferior colliculus (IC), a key processing stage in the auditory midbrain, neurons tuned to different periodicities might be arranged along a periodotopic axis which runs approximately orthogonal to the tonotopic axis. Here we map out the topography of frequency and periodicity tuning in the IC of gerbils in unprecedented detail, using pure tones and different periodic sounds, including click trains, sinusoidally amplitude modulated (SAM) noise and iterated rippled noise. We found that while the tonotopic map exhibited a clear and highly reproducible gradient across all animals, periodotopic maps varied greatly across different types of periodic sound and from animal to animal. Furthermore, periodotopic gradients typically explained only about 10% of the variance in modulation tuning between recording sites. However, there was a strong local clustering of periodicity tuning at a spatial scale of ca. 0.5 mm, which also differed from animal to animal

Education, Informality and the Pandemic: Explaining the Unequal Impacts of Covid-19 in the Mexican Labour Market

The impact of the Covid-19 in Mexico was especially severe for non-graduates and for workers in informal employment. We argue that this occurred despite the adverse shocks from the pandemic being similar for all workers, because non-graduates and informal workers are in a weaker position in the labour market. We support this argument by presenting novel evidence of shorter job tenures and higher rates of transition from employment to non-employment for these workers and by showing that simulation of a DSGE model with the same shocks for all workers matches the experience of Mexico during the pandemic well. To do this, we develop an innovative model that differentiates between graduates and non-graduates as well as between formal and informal workers; the key feature of our model is that the job surplus for non-graduates and informal workers is smaller, making these workers more vulnerable to adverse shocks. Our results are likely to be applicable to other emerging economies with large numbers of informal workers

Supply chain networks, trade and the Brexit deal:a general equilibrium analysis

We develop a multi-country general equilibrium model featuring (i) migration flows across borders; (ii) explicit supply chain networks both across sectors and across countries; (iii) services sector with a significant role in both production and trade; and (iv) a separate banking sector. We then carefully calibrate this model to the UK's withdrawal from the EU, guided by the terms specified in the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), signed in December 2020. We find that supply networks aggravate the losses from trade disintegration significantly, raising the cost of Brexit, even in the absence of tariffs. We also quantify the effects of trade liberalisation between the UK and the third countries, revealing gains, yet, only at a fraction of the losses from the new frictions to the UK-EU trade. Importantly, losses from the UK's exit from the EU are not shared equally and fall disproportionately on low-skilled households.</p