Business cycle fluctuations and the cost of insurrance in computable heterogeneous agent economies

In this paper I study the business cycle implications of alternative insurance technologies using a computable general equilibrium heterogeneous agent environment. I find that the limited monetary arrangement entails larger fluctuations in hours relative to productivity than those that obtain in an identical economy where every risk is costlessly insurable. I also find that in the monetary economy the price level displays a markedly countercyclical behavior. Finally I evaluate the welafare costs of the monetary self-insurance arrangement

A History of Journalism on the Internet: a state of the art and some methodological trends

La historiografía de los nuevos medios ha ido adquiriendo, sobre todo en la última década, una considerable importancia, especialmente aquella dedicada a la investigación histórica sobre la World Wide Web (vide Brügger, 2010). Peviamente, la hisotria de los medios de comunicación se había beneficiado de la perspectiva de la historia social y cultural, representada, entre otros, por Burke o Briggs. Desde esos puntos de vista, intentamos en este artículo explicar la historia de las primeras décadas de periodismo en internet, y poner de manifiesto algunos retos metodológicos relacionados con la investigación histórica sobre el tema.Historiography of new media has gained a remarkable importance in the last decade, especially that devoted to the historical research about the World Wide Web (i.e., Brügger, 2010). Previously, the history of the media was enforced by the perspective of the social and cultural history currents (Burke; Briggs). From these points of views, we attempt in this paper to trace the history of the first decades of online journalism, and to highlight some methodological challenges related to historical research applied to it

Economic Inequality in Spain: The European Union Household Panel Dataset

This article uses data from the 1998 European Union Household Panel to study economic inequality in Spain. It reports data on the Spanish distributions of income, labor income, and capital income, and on related features of inequality, such as age, employment status, educational attainment, and marital status. It also reports data on the income mobility of Spanish households. We find that income, earnings, and, very especially, capital income are very unequally distributed in Spain

Gender differences and the timing of first marriages

In this article we provide a simple model of the marriage market where singles search for spouses. In our model economy men and women live for many years and they differ in their survival probabilities, in their fecundity, and in their earnings. We show that modelling the marriage decision in a very simple model economy is sufficient to account for much of the observed marriage behavior in the United States in the year 2000. We conclude that gender differences in fecundity are all important in accounting for marriage behavior, and that differences in earnings matter little. We also conclude that, even though they are in short supply, the market power of fecund women is not enough for them to demand compensation in all cases. And that studying the marriage decision without modelling explicitly the roles played by age and by fecundity, as has been typically done by the previous literature, makes little sense

Flat tax reforms in the U.S.: A boon for the income poor

In this article we quantify the aggregate, distributional and welfare consequences of two revenue neutral flat-tax reforms using a model economy that replicates the U.S. distributions of earnings, income and wealth in very much detail. We find that the less progressive reform brings about a 2.4 percent increase in steady-state output and a more unequal distribution of after-tax income. In contrast, the more progressive reform brings about a -2.6 percent reduction in steady-state output and a distribution of aftertax income that is more egalitarian. We also find that in the less progressive flat-tax economy aggregate welfare falls by -0.17 percent of consumption, and in the more progressive flat-tax economy it increases by 0.45 percent of consumption. In both flattax reforms the income poor pay less income taxes and obtain sizeable welfare gains

Real returns on government debt: a general equilibrium quantitative exploration

We extend and apply computable general equilibrium methods to the study of economies with both aggregate uncertainty and uninsured household-specific uncertainty. In our economies the government issues two types of assets: a small denomination, non-interest bearing asset, which we call currency, and a large denomination, interest bearing asset, which we call T-bills. We find that a real interest rate behavior similar to that observed in the U.S. can be sustained as equilibrium behavior in our class of economies. We also find that policy induced real interest rate changes that are perceived as being permanent have significant real effects and that these effects take a few years to be fully realized

Gender Differences and the Timing of First Marriages

We study the steady state of an overlapping generations economy where singles search for spouses. In our model economy men and women live for many years and they differ in their fecundity, in their earnings, and in their survival probabilities. These three features are age-dependent and deterministic. Singles meet at random. They propose when the expected value of their current match exceeds that of remaining single. If both partners propose, the meeting ends up in a marriage. Marriages last until death does them apart, widows and widowers never remarry, and people make no other economic decisions whatsoever. In our model economy people marry because they value companionship, bearing children, and sharing their income with their spouses. The matching function depends on the single sex-ratios which are endogenous. Our model economy has only two free parameters: the search friction and the utility share of bearing children. We choose their values to match the median ages of first-time brides and grooms. We show that modeling the marriage decision in this simple way is sufficient to account for the age distributions of ever and never married men and women, for the probabilities of marrying a younger bride and a younger groom, and for the age distributions of first births observed in the United States in the year 2000. The previous literature on this topic claims that marriage is a waiting game in which women are choosier than men, and old and rich pretenders outbid the young and poor ones in their competition for fecund women. In this article we tell a different story. We show that their shorter biological clocks make women uniformly less choosy than men of the same age. This turns marriage into a rushing game in which women are willing to marry older men because delaying marriage is too costly for women. Our theory predicts that most of the gender age difference at first marriage will persist even if the gender wage-gap disappears. It also predicts that the advances in the reproductive technologies will play a large role in reducing the age difference at first marriage.marriage, search, sex ratio

System dynamics modelling in systems biology and applications in pharmacology

El modelado matemático de sistemas biológicos complejos es uno de los temas clave en la Biología de Sistemas y varios métodos computacionales basados ​​en la simulación computarizada han sido aplicados hasta ahora para determinar el comportamiento de los sistemas no lineales. La Dinamica de Sistemas es una metodología de modelado intuitivo basada en el razonamiento cualitativo por el cual un modelo conceptual se puede describir como un conjunto de relaciones de causa y efecto entre las variables de un sistema. A partir de esta estructura, es posible obtener un conjunto de ecuaciones dinámicas que describan cuantitativamente el comportamiento del sistema. Centrándose en los sistemas farmacológicos, el modelado compartimental a menudo se utiliza para resolver un amplio espectro de problemas relacionados con la distribución de materiales en los sistemas vivos en la investigación, el diagnóstico y la terapia en todo el cuerpo, los órganos y los niveles celulares. En este artículo presentamos la metodología de modelado de Dinámica del Sistema y su aplicación al modelado de un modelo compartimental farmacocinético-farmacodinámico del efecto de profundidad anestésica en pacientes sometidos a intervenciones quirúrgicas, derivando un modelo de simulación en el entorno de simulación orientada a objetos OpenModelica. La Dinamica de Sistemas se puede ver como una herramienta educativa poderosa y fácil de usar y en la enseñanza de Biología de Sistemas.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Accounting for the U.S. Earnings and Wealth Inequality

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Earnings and Wealth Inequality and Income Taxation: Quantifying the Trade-Offs of Switching to a Proportional Income Tax in the U.S. Ohio

This papaer quantifies the steady-state aggregate, distributinal and mobility effects of switching the U.S. to a proportional income tax system. As a perriquisite to the analysi, we propose a theory of earnings and wealth inequality capable of accounting quantitatively for the key aggregate and inequality facts of the U. S. economy. This theory is based on saving to smooth uninsured household-specific risk, for dynastic households that also have some life-cycle characteristics. A suitable calibration of our model economy replicates the U.S. growth facts, earnings and wealth distributions, the progressivity of the tax system and the size of the U.S. government. We also solve a similar model economy in which the government livies a proportional income tax to finance the same flow of government expenditures and public transfers. Our finding show that in this class of model worlds a switch from the U.S. tax system to a proporcional tax system implies the following trade-offs, i.) it increases efficiency as measured by aggregate output by 4,4%, ii. ) it increases inequality as measured by the Gini index of the wealth distribution by 10.4%, and iv.) it changes by little the mobility between the different earnings and wealth groups