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This chapter aims to quantify and compare inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries considering two alternative normative ways of treating the correlation between effort, as measured by lifestyles, and circumstances, as measured by parental and childhood characteristics, championed by Brian Barry and John Roemer. This study relies on regression analysis and proposes several measures of inequality of opportunity. Data from the Retrospective Survey of SHARELIFE, which focuses on life histories of European people aged 50 and over, are used.

In Europe at the whole, inequalities of opportunity stand for almost 50% of the health inequality due to circumstances and efforts in Barry scenario and 57.5% in Roemer scenario. The comparison of the magnitude of inequalities of opportunity in health across European countries shows considerable inequalities in Austria, France, Spain and Germany, whereas Sweden, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland present the lowest inequalities of opportunity. The normative principle on the way to treat the correlation between circumstances and efforts makes little difference in Spain, Austria, Greece, France, Czech Republic, Sweden and Switzerland, whereas it would matter the most in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland and Denmark.

In most countries, inequalities of opportunity in health are mainly driven by social background affecting adult health directly, and so would require policies compensating for poorer initial conditions. On the other hand, our results suggest a strong social and family determinism of lifestyles in Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland and Denmark, which emphasises the importance of inequalities of opportunity in health within those countries and calls for targeted prevention policies.

This chapter examines the impact of education on income inequality in 18 Latin American countries between 2000 and 2010. This period has raised interest in the academic community because inequality has fallen across the region, after several years of consistent high levels. Employing the novel technique proposed by Firpo, Fortin, and Lemieux (2007), the author’s research provides a detailed decomposition of inequality. Three main findings emerge from the author’s results: First, the expansion of education increases inequality in six countries but reduces inequality in four countries. Second, the changes in returns to education are the driving component of the effects of education on inequality. Those countries where education contributes to a fall in inequality are those where the returns to education fell at the top of the income distribution. Third, the rise in the average years of education, considered alone, had an inequality-increasing effect in most of the countries under analysis.

The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on the behavior of Income Inequality and Inequality of Opportunity over time for 26 European countries. The analysis is carried out using microdata collected by the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which incorporates a wide variety of personal harmonized variables, allowing comparability between countries. The availability of this database for years 2004 and 2010 is particularly relevant to assess changes over time in the main inequality indices and the contribution of circumstances to inequality of opportunity. Furthermore, a bootstrap estimation is performed with the aim of testing whether the differences between both years are statistically significant.

The purpose of this paper is to describe a preliminary investigation into the heat treatment of Ti‐6Al‐7Nb components that had been produced via selective laser melting (SLM).

Bars of Ti‐6Al‐7Nb were produced using SLM by MCP‐HEK Tooling GmbH in Lubeck, Germany. These bars were then subjected to a range of heat treatments and the resultant microstructure evaluated with respect to its likely effect on fatigue.

It was found that the as received material consisted of an α′ martensitic structure in a metastable β matrix. Evidence of the layer‐wise thermal history was present, as were large (up to ∼500 μm) pores. Solution treatment at 955°C (below the β transus) did not completely disrupt this layered structure and is therefore not recommended. When solution treatment was performed at 1,055°C (above the β transus) a homogeneous structure was produced, with a morphology that depended on the post‐solution treatment cooling rate. It was concluded that the most promising heat treatment consisted of a moderate cooling rate after solution treatment at 1,055°C.

The study had only limited material and therefore it was not possible to perform any mechanical property testing.

The paper presents the initial findings of a project which is aimed at optimising the mechanical properties of Ti‐6Al‐7Nb components produced using SLM.

Currently, little is known about the heat treatment and subsequent mechanical properties of this Ti‐6Al‐7Nb alloy when produced using rapid manufacturing techniques. Such lack of knowledge limits the potential applications, especially in the biomedical field where the consequences of implant failure are high. The paper presents the first step in developing this understanding.

This paper aims to propose a new valuation method for income producing properties. The model originally called cyclical dividend discount models (d’Amato, 2003) has been recently proposed as a family of income approach methodologies called cyclical capitalization (d’Amato, 2013; d’Amato, 2015; d’Amato, 2017).

The proposed methodology tries to integrate real estate market cycle analysis and forecast inside the valuation process allowing the appraiser to deal with real estate market phases analysis and their consequence in the local real estate market.

The findings consist in the creation of a methodology proposed for market value and in particular for mortgage lending determination, as the model may have the capability to reach prudent opinion of value in all the real estate market phase.

Research limitation consists mainly in a limited number of sample of time series of rent and in the forecast of more than a cap rate or yield rate even if it is quite commonly accepted the cyclical nature of the real estate market.

The implication of the proposed methodology is a modified approach to direct capitalization finding more flexible approaches to appraise income producing properties sensitive to the upturn and downturn of the real estate market.

The model proposed can be considered useful for the valuation process of those property affected by the property market cycle, both in the mortgage lending and market value determination.

These methodologies try to integrate in the appraisal process the role of property market cycles. Cyclical capitalization modelling includes in the traditional dividend discount model more than one g-factor to plot property market cycle dealing with the future in a different way. It must be stressed the countercyclical nature of the cyclical capitalization that may be helpful in the determination of mortgage lending value. This is a very important characteristic of such models.

We investigate the reasons why income inequality is so high in Spain in the EU context. We first show that the differential in inequality with Germany and other countries is driven by inequality among households who participate in the labor market. Then, we conduct an analysis of different household income aggregates. We also decompose the inter-country gap in inequality into characteristics and coefficients effects using regressions of the Recentered Influence Function for the Gini index. Our results show that the higher inequality observed in Spain is largely associated with lower employment rates, higher incidence of self-employment, lower attained education, as well as the recent increase in the immigration of economically active households. However, the prevalence of extended families in Spain contributes to reducing inequality by diversifying income sources, with retirement pensions playing an important role. Finally, by comparing the situations in 2008 and 2012, we separate the direct effects of the Great Recession on employment and unemployment benefits, from other more permanent factors (such as the weak redistributive effect of taxes and family or housing allowances, or the roles of education and the extended family).

Efficiency wage theory predicts that firms can induce worker effort by the carrot of high wages and/or the stick of monitoring worker performance. Another option available to firms is to tilt the remuneration package over time such that the lure of high future earnings acts as a deterrent to current shirking. On the assumption that firms strive for the optimal trade-off between these various instruments, we develop a two-period model of efficiency wages in which increased monitoring attenuates the gradient of the wage-tenure profile. Our empirical analysis, using two cross sections of matched employer-employee British data, provides robust support for this prediction.

This paper is the first to present empirical evidence consistent with models of signaling through unemployment and to uncover a new stylized fact using the 1988–2006 Displaced Worker Supplement (DWS) of the Current Population Survey (CPS), namely that, among white-collar workers, post-displacement earnings fall less rapidly with unemployment spells for layoffs than for plant closings. Because high-productivity workers are more likely to be recalled than low-productivity ones, they may choose to signal their productivity though unemployment, in which case the duration of unemployment may be positively related to post-displacement wages. Identification is done using workers whose plant closed as they cannot be recalled, and no incentives to signal arise.

We use Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) data from the United States and Great Britain to investigate the association between adults’ health and the income inequality they experienced as children up to 80 years earlier. Our inequality data track shares of national income held by top income percentiles from the early 20th century. We average those data over the same early-life years and merge them to CNEF data from both countries that measure self-reported health of individuals between 1991 and 2007. Observationally, adult men and women in the United States and Great Britain less often report being in better health if inequality was higher in their first five years of life. Although the trend in inequality is similar in both countries over the past century, the empirical association between health and inequality in the United States differs substantially from the estimated relationship in Great Britain. When we control for demographic characteristics, measures of permanent income, and early-life socio-economic status, the health–inequality association remains robust only in the U.S. sample. For the British sample, the added controls drive the coefficient on inequality toward zero and statistical insignificance.

WHERE are we going? The aim is to double our standard of living in the next 25 years and, as Sir Alexander Fleck, K.B.E., Chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries Ltd., so aptly staled recently, ‘The man who knows where he is going is the one who is most likely to arrive.’ One might venture to expand this statement by adding that he is still more likely to arrive if the cluttering debris of inefficient methods and movements are cleared away.