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When the policy maker contemplates the current aggregate demand (AD), she/he does so given implicitly the current state of income inequality. And, policy goals should be set based on the distance between this demand and some “optimal” AD from the viewpoint of optimal income inequality. The purpose of this paper is to relate this policy concern to the sources of modern inequality.

To characterize optimality, recent research in inequality reveals that paternalistic inheritance is the decisive source of it. Inequality is the outcome of an intergenerational externality according to which the current entrepreneurs (physical-capital formation agents) bequeath to descendants who use the inheritance as rentiers rather than as entrepreneurs. Several policy measures have been proposed to correct for this externality. Yet, it is found that if the “dynastic” character of inequality is disregarded, the distance between actual and optimal AD will be ever increasing.

Policy should be addressing the motive of the descendants to act as rentiers, which is found to be easy to attain once the policy maker adopts a natural-resource view of sizeable inheritance and proceeds to reassign property rights over it across generations.

Optimality is identified with the Cantorian (total) ordering of the social economy, which is inhibited by the institution of dynastic property rights. One way to deal with this problem is to view inheritance as a depletable natural resource.

This paper estimates the impact of environmental regulations of 1994 imposed by the State of Maryland on the blue crab industry. For the analysis a model is developed, which includes three stochastic equations and five identities. After the estimation of the model the impact multipliers are calculated. The impact multipliers indicate that the overall impact of the environmental regulations on the industry is the loss of $44 million per year. This loss is shared by all the agents involved in the industry.

Raises the question, how can sustainable development be achieved and what are the limiting constraints in achieving it? Focuses on key conceptual issues of “sustainable development” with important operational implications for its attainment but is not designed to generate a general theory of sustainability. Uses the definition put forward by Peace and Warford, which defines sustainable development as “development that secures increases in the welfare of the current generation provided that welfare in the future does not decrease”. Using this definition, considers four important sub‐objectives of sustainable development, namely: equity and social justice issues, ecological issues, economic issues (maximizing service to a given stock of resources) and environmental issues (minimizing throughput to maintain a given level of stock). Using this framework, considers the conditions necessary for sustainable development, namely: maintaining a minimum population, reducing poverty, optimal depletion of non‐renewable resources, optimal depletion of renewable but exhaustible resources, preventing environmental degradation and improving energy efficiency. Also emphasizes the need to change the current measurement of growth which fails to account for sustainability principles.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the phenomenon of debt culture in the conventional financial systems and then to compare the existing or emerging trends in the Islamic finance industry. It provides critical insight into why economic policies that are delinked from some fundamental wisdom about sustainable lifestyle might be increasingly less effective.

The paper identifies various areas of impact of the debt culture and provides qualitative analysis based on relevant data.

The data presented in the paper shows that the Islamic finance industry is clearly biased in favor of debt-creating modes, which is expected to lead to promoting the same kind of debt culture as experienced in the conventional financial system.

Finding comprehensive and current data for Islamic financial institutions is a challenging task. The IFIs are not as transparent as their conventional counterparts in sharing relevant data and information.

The paper highlights and analyzes a problem – i.e., the debt culture. Dealing with this problem would be indispensable in the long run for any credible as well as sustainable solutions to contemporary crisis.

Debt culture is more than an economic phenomena. The paper identifies/analyzes several areas, including consumption explosion, speculation, ethics, that are related to debt culture.

This is probably the first research paper that looks into the issue of debt culture in the context of Islamic finance. The contemporary, ongoing global crisis underscores the kind of conventional problems that Islamic finance needs to avoid.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the applicability of the alternative way of discounting, such as the hyperbolic discount method, for the economic feasibility test on Free Trade Zone development project that needs intergenerational analysis.

To analyze the effects of applying alternative discounting method in the cost-benefit analysis, this paper uses the hyperbolic discount method and HM-Treasury’s method (Britain), as well as the traditional exponential discount method. Also, this study uses benefit and cost data from the actual feasibility test of the Free Trade Zone development project in Korea, to obtain better policy implication.

For the case of long-term analysis, using the exponential discounting method in the benefit-cost analysis could not give us balanced analytic results, because it discounts too much on future generation’s benefits. In contrast, if we use the hyperbolic discounting method, we could obtain better balanced results since it can control the generational effects. This paper also finds that for the results to be valid, the analysis period must be expanded long enough (a minimum of 100 years).

The major findings of this paper confirm the results of previous studies regarding long-term benefit-cost analysis. Also, the result of this paper is properly compatible with the findings of behavioral economics, such as the time inconsistency of preferences. However, no research has been done with the proper length of analytic periods for using hyperbolic discounting yet. To examine this matter, this paper performs benefit-cost analysis with actual data from the feasibility studies in Korea. To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first study to find the proper length of analytic periods that can be compatible with the hyperbolic discount method.

It is known that the self‐employed are generally more satisfied than salaried workers. The aim of this paper is to test whether this phenomenon is particularly found for the first‐generation self‐employed.

French and British panel data are analysed, which include information on various measures of job satisfaction, and the respondent's parents' occupation. Job satisfaction regressions were run in which the first‐ and second‐generation self‐employed were distinguished between.

The study finds that first‐generation self‐employed (those whose parents were not self‐employed) are more satisfied overall than are the second‐generation self‐employed. The findings are consistent between the British and French data.

While the results are the same in the two countries considered, further validation work should extend the analysis across countries. While the authors are fairly sure that the second‐generation self‐employed do worse, they cannot precisely distinguish between comparison to one's parents, constrained occupational choice, and selection effects due to lower barriers to self‐employment entry.

The authors believe that this is one of the first papers to distinguish between types of self‐employed in terms of their higher satisfaction. The finding that parents' labour force status continues to have a significant impact on their children's job satisfaction argues for a more systematic consideration of intergenerational factors in the analysis of labour markets.

Taking departure in the premise that donor and recipient priorities differ with regard to the marginal costs and benefits associated with attacking global environmental externalities, and hence the relative importance attached to the global environment, this paper seeks to scrutinize specific global environmental transfer mechanisms in the light of proposed definitions of global environmental assistance and global environmental compensation. It is argued that most global environmental transfer mechanisms possess distinct compensatory elements, and that additionality of these transfers is essential in order to ensure that existing development assistance is not crowded out. Specifically, this should be achieved either directly through separation of funds for global environmental and local developmental purposes or indirectly through increased considerations for local development objectives directly in global environmental transfer design.

This paper sets out to investigate investors' sustainable preferences under different market conditions. Specifically, the authors examine the existence of a positive sustainable asset pricing gap, and whether it is influenced by the socioeconomic and financial sentiments. The increase of uncertainty rises investors' skepticism whether sustainable companies are under-performing the traditional counterparts, causing larger increasing gap. Conversely, if sustainable assets are overperforming, the increase of market uncertainty raises investors' sustainable preferences.

The authors examine the existence of a positive sustainable asset pricing gap, and whether it is influenced by the socioeconomic and financial sentiments. Through a quantile regression, the authors remark the variability of sustainable preferences where market participants, although recognizing the present and future value added of sustainable investing, also show skepticism (i.e. asymmetric tail behavior). However, the analysis of the total change of sustainable investments returns over time demonstrates the emergence of positive viewpoints incentivized by economic and market uncertainty.

The market-driven social responsibility exalts the positive insights regarding the future of sustainable developments. As the authors discuss along the paper, investors are gaining awareness about the environmental and social goals pursued by socially responsible companies. Hence, the authors consider how economic instability might stimulate the assessment of the social and environmental impact of the unsustainable production systems, switching investments toward virtuous sustainable companies. This could generate a series of positive externalities that might improve the welfare conditions of the whole society.

The authors conduct an original empirical exercise, combining different techniques (i.e. quantile regressions and wavelet analysis). To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper trying to evidence a systematic connection between market uncertainty and sustainable preferences accounting for different market states (thanks to quantile regressions).

The view is taken that the study of diverse cultures can contribute to the development of environmental accounting and reporting. The focus is upon seeking to articulate insights from three indigenous cultures: the Australian Aboriginal, the Maori and the Native American. These cultures, alive today, provide relevant insights for those concerned with challenging mainstream and Western practices and seeking to develop alternatives. Attention is focused on these insights and it is hoped that further research will be stimulated.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how parental migration due to poverty affects a child’s education and human capital formation through changes in the child’s supply of unpaid labour.

The paper uses a small open overlapping generations model where the parent migrates for the family’s subsistence and that the child has to give up a part of education to do the housework during the parent’s absence.

The paper finds that given the level of the human capital, reducing the child’s burden of housework and promoting parental migration to high-wage countries do not necessarily raise the amount of child’s education. The paper also finds a possible underdevelopment trap in the dynamic context.

Unlike previous studies on child labour, this paper focuses on unpaid labour, whose share is actually larger than that of paid labour. Even if paid labour is available, children cannot re-allocate their time from doing the housework to the market work; so the author cannot disregard this observation. Investigation into the dynamics of human capital formation under such child labour is new.