Teaching chemical product design to engineering students: course contents and challenges

The master course Chemical and Biochemical Product Design has been taught at DTU for the past 10 years. The course covers the main phases of product design from mapping of customer needs, over idea generation and selection, to production of the product. The primary aim of the course is to provide the students with a quantitative approach that enables them to analyse products and ideas using fundamental scientific disciplines from the engineering curriculum. The course is comprised of four team projects of which the last one is dedicated to the student teams own identified needs. Examples of needs that students have worked on are solvent free nail polish, new ways to anti-icing on cars, slow-melting ice cream, and coffee tablets for instant coffee

Pension saving responses to anticipated tax changes:Evidence from monthly pension contribution records

AbstractA Danish tax reform, passed in May 2009 and taking effect from the beginning of 2010, lowered the marginal tax rate on top bracket taxable income from 63% to 56%. Because contributions to pension accounts are tax deductible, the reform provided an incentive to increase pension contributions before the change in taxation. Using high frequency panel data, we document a temporary increase in pension contributions in the second half of 2009 in response to the anticipated change in taxation, and that this led to an increase in total savings in this period. The response is driven by less than 5% of those affected by the policy