Becoming: Identity and Spirituality

An individual’s identity answers the questions of who, what, where, and why the individual is. An overall identity is made up of multiple constituent identities. These identities may not be fixed over the life course, but may change as a result of conscious choices as well as serendipity or calamity – life transforming events which cannot be anticipated, which remove what had been the certainties and norms of life, and which can leave the individual disconnected from what had been her past and from her hoped for future. In this paper we develop a two-period behavioral model of an individual whose personal identity is an amalgam of N identities, one or more of which may be spiritual in nature. Some identities are actualized at a point in time and some remain latent. We model how individuals allocate resources among current and hoped for future identities, and how these resource allocation decisions and identity actualizations are affected by the interaction of choices and unanticipated external events. We argue why a spiritual identity may be actualized, how it interacts with other identities, and why, in giving context to an individual’s life, it enables her to define and to strive toward her overall identity – to become

Truth, Charity, and the Dismal Science: An Economist’s Response to Caritas In Veritate

In Caritas In Veritate Pope Benedict XVI decries the present state of the world socially, politically, economically, and judicially. He sets out what should be so that each and every person can attain authentic human development, rather than remain mired in physical or spiritual poverty. While Caritas In Veritate calls upon economies, governments, and institutions to be and to do more, it fails to provide direction in terms of specific, feasible, incentive compatible socio-economic policies by which these goals can be achieved. By identifying the essential message of Caritas In Veritate, from the perspective of economics rather than theology, this article determines whether or not the temporal human development goals can be achieved, and if so, how

The Loan Contract: Mechanism of Financial Control

Industry banking, the style of banking under which a single bank satisfies all the external financial needs of an industry, was recognised by Alfred Marshall (i9I9) as a positive force in the development of new industries. Today many of Marshall's reference industries have reached maturity but their industry banks continue to play an active role not only in financing their production and expansion, but also in their management (Cable, I985; Prais, 198I). To understand the economic impact of industry banking, this paper explores one aspect of it: bank directed industry coordination and control

Preferences, Choice, Goal Attainment, Satisfaction: That’s Life?

We make choices to achieve an objective. The objective is defined by an individual’s preferences. Subject to constraints, the objective is approached or achieved. Is this a good characterization of life? To answer this question we weaken one of the most basic assumptions of economics: individuals know their preferences. Instead we assume that an individual’s preferences are shaped and reshaped by his environment, experiences, expectations, and by exogenous events. In this model of individual self-discovery, preferences emerge, evolve, and change. These redefinitions change the future course of the individual’s life and reinterpret his past. They characterize a life lived

The Effects of Annuities, Bequests, and Aging in an Overlapping Generatiions Model of Endogenous Growth

We examine the effects of introducing actuarially fair annuity markets into an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth. The complete annuitisation of agents' wealth is not, in general, dynamically optimal; the degree of annuitisation that is dynamically optimal depends nonmonotonically on the expected length of retirement and on the pay-as-you-go social security tax rate. The government has an incentive to restrict the availability of actuarially fair annuities contracts, and can often move the economy from a pay-as-you-go to a fully-funded social security system via voluntary contributions to a government sponsored, actuarially fair pension today accompanied by reductions in social security taxes tomorrow

The search for equilibrium relationships in international finance: the case of the monetary model

This paper considers some of the main long-run equilibrium relationships in international linance. We supplement the Phillips-Perron test. which has a unit root under the null. with the new KPS test statistic which is based on a stationary null and apply them to the various exchange rate fundamentals. The application of the Jahansen test for multiple cointegrating factors finds evidence of the existence of stable money demand functions in both the USA and UK with relatively short-lived perturbations. However, there appears to be insuffkient information in the data to distinguish & hether the real exchange rate has a unit root or is persistent and mean reverting. The consequent persistent deviations from purchasing power parity appears the only source of rejection of the equilibrium monetary model

To Whom the Spoils?

When society changes as a result of cultural, economic, and/or political upheaval, the foundation of each individual’s identity, preferences, place and status, which were formed in reference to the society as it was but no longer is, are undermined, and success in what was can be turned into failure in what is. To understand the individual’s responses, I examine a model of a goal-oriented, socially embedded agent, then consider possible responses to societal change using the model as a lens through which to understand the world racked by convulsive change

The Loan Contract: Mechanism of Financial Control

Industry banking, the style of banking under which a single bank satisfies all the external financial needs of an industry, was recognised by Alfred Marshall (i9I9) as a positive force in the development of new industries. Today many of Marshall's reference industries have reached maturity but their industry banks continue to play an active role not only in financing their production and expansion, but also in their management (Cable, I985; Prais, 198I). To understand the economic impact of industry banking, this paper explores one aspect of it: bank directed industry coordination and control

The Economic Consequences of Despair

This paper examines despair from the perspectives of many disciplines to define despair and to characterize the despairing individual, his motivations, and his capacity for decision-making. Two models incorporating despair as a key element are then proposed. Using these models as a framework, the economics literature is examined to determine the extent to which economics has, at least implicitly, recognized despair, without necessarily confronting it either in theory or policy design, and argue why this failure has weakened both our theory and our policy. The paper concludes with the suggestions that economics can and, perhaps, should incorporate despair, narrowly, and economic agents’ emotional state, generally, into its theoretical and policy analyses

The effects of annuities, bequests, and aging in an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth.

In this paper, we examine the effects of introducing actuarially fair annuity markets into an overlapping generations model of endogenous growth. We find the complete annuitization of agents' wealth is not, in general, dynamically optimal; that the degree of annuitization that is dynamically optimal depends nonmonotonically on the expected length of retirement and on the pay-as-you-go social security tax rate. We find that the government has an incentive to restrict the availability of actuarially fair annuities contracts, and that it can often move the economy from a pay-as-you-go to a fully-funded social security system via voluntary contributions to a government sponsored, actuarially fair pension today accompanied by reductions in social security taxes tomorrow.Wealth ; Old age