Economics Commons^™

Income Inequality And Household Debt: A Cointegration Test, Edmond Berisha, John Meszaros, Eric Olson

Department of Economics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This article employs the Johansen and Engle–Granger methodology to determine if there is a cointegrating relationship between household debt and income inequality as measured by Atkinson, Piketty and Saez (2011). The results suggest a cointegrating relationship between the two series. A vector error correction model is estimated showing that a shock to household debt has statistically significant effects on income inequality in the United States over the time period 1919–2009.

Ramsey Equilibrium With Liberal Borrowing, Robert A. Becker, Kirill Borissov, Ram Dubey

Department of Economics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper considers a multi-agent one-sector Ramsey equilibrium growth model with borrowing constraints. The extreme borrowing constraint used in the classical version of the model, surveyed in Becker (2006), and the limited form of borrowing constraint examined in Borissov and Dubey (2015) are relaxed to allow more liberal borrowing by the households. A perfect foresight equilibrium is shown to exist in this economy. We describe the steady state equilibria for the liberal borrowing regime and show that as the borrowing regime is progressively liberalized, the steady state wealth inequality increases. Unlike the case of a limited borrowing regime, an equilibrium …

Upending The Social Ecological Model To Guide Health Promotion Efforts Toward Policy And Environmental Change, Lisa D. Lieberman, Shelley D. Golden, Kenneth R. Mcleroy, Lawrence W. Green, Jo Anne L. Earp

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

Efforts to change policies and the environments in which people live, work, and play have gained increasing attention over the past several decades. Yet health promotion frameworks that illustrate the complex processes that produce health-enhancing structural changes are limited. Building on the experiences of health educators, community activists, and community-based researchers described in this supplement and elsewhere, as well as several political, social, and behavioral science theories, we propose a new framework to organize our thinking about producing policy, environmental, and other structural changes. We build on the social ecological model, a framework widely employed in public health research and …

The Effect Of Active Video Games On The Heart Rate Of Older Adults, Yeon Bai, Shahla M. Wunderlich, Diane M. Hanel

Department of Nutrition and Food Studies Scholarship and Creative Works

Background: Heart rate is used as a health biomarker. This aim of this study was to investigate the effects of playing active video games on the heart rate of older adults, in comparison to the heart rate after common table recreational activity.

Methods: An experimental study with 40 participants was conducted: a control group (n=20) participated in common Pokeno® card games; an experimental group (n=20) played WiiTM bowling. The participants’ pre- and post-activity heart rates were measured and compared between and within groups using t-tests.

Results: The findings signified an 11.9% increase (p

Conclusions: The inclusion of active video games …

Developers' Incentives And Open-Source Software Licensing: Gpl Vs Bsd, Vidya Atal, Kameshwari Shankar

Department of Economics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

One of the puzzling aspects of open-source software (OSS) development is its public good nature. Individual developers contribute to developing the software, but do not hold the copyright to appropriate its value. This raises questions regarding motives behind such effort. We provide an integrated model of developers' incentives to describe OSS development and compare restrictive OSS licenses that force all modifications to be kept open with non-restrictive OSS licenses that allow proprietary ownership of modified works. Different incentives govern effort provision at different stages of the software development process. We show that open-source licenses can provide socially valuable software when …

A Characterization Of Ramsey Equilibrium In A Model With Limited Borrowing, Kirill Borissov, Ram Dubey

Department of Economics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

This paper considers a one-sector economic growth model with several infinitely-lived heterogeneous households, who differ both in the discount factors as well as preferences over consumption. Unlike the extreme form of borrowing constraint observed in the classical Ramsey model, recently surveyed in Becker (2006), we allow limited borrowing by the households and prove the existence of a perfect foresight equilibrium. We also show that irrespective of production technology employed by the firms, the capital stock sequence converges to the steady state stock and from some time onward all impatient households are in the maximum borrowing state, whereas the most patient …