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We introduce a formula for the optimal savings rate in an economy driven by an investment policy reflecting competitive equilibrium. The reasonable numbers generated by the formula should be of help not only to assess our present situation but also to prepare our future. Moreover, this chapter provides two theorems correcting a widely held belief in economic growth theory, namely that a steady state defined by income per person growing at the labor-augmenting rate can be asymptotically reached only if technical progress is labor-augmenting. We finally show that the magnitudes of the optimal savings rates are highly robust to very different, S-shaped evolutions of population and technology. The chapter closes with a daring conjecture.

The purpose of this paper is to study the problem of optimal Ramsey taxation in a finite-planning-horizon, representative-agent endogenous growth model including government expenditures as a productive input in capital formation and also with hidden actions.

Technically, Malliavin calculus and forward integrals are naturally introduced into the macroeconomic theory when economic agents are faced with different information structures arising from a non-Markovian environment.

The major result shows that the well-known Judd-Chamley Theorem holds almost surely if the depreciation rate is strictly positive, otherwise Judd-Chamley Theorem only holds for a knife-edge case or on a Lebesgue measure-zero set when the physical capital is completely sustainable.

The author believes that the approach developed as well as the major result established is new and relevant.

The purpose of this paper is to delineate the impact of social context and savings attitudes on consumers’ self-reported long-term savings and discuss how these drivers can be influenced to increase an individual’s savings rate.

An online survey was conducted among 993 German savers. A structural equation model quantified the influence of the social context and an individual’s attitudes on long-term savings behavior, as stated by consumers.

Both social context constructs – subjective norms and relationship quality – exert a significant influence on the savings attitudes of perceived anxiety and perceived importance, which in turn significantly affect long-term savings. Furthermore, the results of a mediation analysis indicated that the social context only has an indirect effect on long-term savings.

The study was conducted in Germany only. Therefore, the results may not apply across cultures. In addition, the salient belief structures, access channels used, and savings product categories were not part of this study.

The results showed that financial institutions can influence an individual’s attitudes toward long-term savings by providing a satisfying and trusted relationship. The positive effect on savings attitudes will translate to an increased long-term savings rate. According to the analysis, financial service providers can only have an indirect effect on long-term savings behavior.

This paper delineates the impact of the social environment on long-term savings. This relationship has not been investigated in previous research. In addition, the influence of the social context within the attitudes-behavior framework for long-term savings is expounded.

Homelessness has many causes and also is stigmatized in the United States, leading to much misunderstanding of its causes and what policy solutions may ameliorate the problem. The problem is of course getting worse and impacting many communities far removed from the West Coast cities the authors examine in this study. This analysis examines the socioeconomic variables influencing homelessness on the West Coast in recent years. The authors utilize a panel fixed effects model that explicitly includes measures of healthcare access and availability to account for the additional health risks faced by individuals who lack shelter. The authors estimate a spatial error model (SEM) in order to better understand the impacts that systemic shocks, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, have on a variety of factors that directly influence productivity and other measures of welfare such as income inequality, housing supply, healthcare investment, and homelessness.

William J. Baumol was one of the most prolific economists of his generation, analyzing a broad range of central economic issues addressing real problems of the world. In this essay, we present and critically evaluate Baumol’s research contributions in entrepreneurship economics and point to areas for future research. Baumol contributed an impressive number of important insights, increasing our understanding of entrepreneurship from both a macro and a micro perspective. He also devoted a large part of his writings to discussing public policy, linking his theoretical insights with policy issues in practice. His analyses are rooted in contemporary mainstream neoclassical economics, and one of his main objectives was to integrate the entrepreneur into this tradition. Today, Baumol is best known for his tripartite distinction between productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship and his associated idea that the institutional framework, “the rules of the game,” will determine how entrepreneurs allocate their time and effort across different – productive or unproductive – activities. An institutional environment that encourages productive entrepreneurship and spontaneous experimentation while disincentivizing unproductive activities becomes, through this insightful lens, the driving force of economic growth. As an economist, Baumol was knowledgeable and well acquainted with earlier scholars and their writings about entrepreneurship. Baumol’s writings were greatly inspired by Joseph Schumpeter’s views on entrepreneurship, and he made several attempts to formalize Schumpeter’s concept of the innovative entrepreneur. Baumol was in all senses an innovative contributor to entrepreneurship economics. His work has inspired the research community of entrepreneurship scholars, but like all great scientists, he also encountered criticism. His effort to integrate entrepreneurship into the mainstream theory of the firm was only partly successful.

Addresses a number of issues relating to determining whether products should be ordered independently and therefore shipped as a single‐product order, or co‐ordinated and shipped as a group, or multiproduct, order from a single source. Factors which might influence the decision include the level or volume of demand, the distribution of demand across products, the weight of items and the attractiveness of the quantity discount offered. Uses an optimal inventory‐theoretic model, that incorporates transport weight breaks and quantity discounts, to assess when product orders should be combined and what products should be ordered separately. The effects of these decisions on the order interval, the number of order groupings, the proportion of items ordered independently, the proportion of attractive discounts forgone in favour of consolidation, and the relative cost savings, are examined using an extensive set of simulated data that are based on a firm in the automobile industry supply chain.

This paper aims to investigate whether the concept of the golden rule of capital accumulation is an applicable normative guidepost for a market economy even in the absence of the distortions usually associated with income and consumption taxes.

The paper uses a simple two‐period overlapping generations model with productive public and private capital.

As long as the government is subject to some instrument limitation that constrains its ability to effect non‐distortive optimal inter‐generational income redistributions, the market optimum for capital accumulation would generally deviate from the golden rule towards either side of the rule.

The paper provides a transparent characterization of the nature of the optimal deviation from the golden rule in terms of easily interpretable consumption and production parameters.

Order picking, the activity by which a number of goods are retrieved from a warehousing system to satisfy a number of customer orders, is an essential link in the supply chain and is the major cost component of warehousing. The critical issue is to simultaneously reduce the cost and increase the speed of the order picking activity. The main objectives of this paper are: evaluate various routing heuristics and an optimal routine in a volume‐based and random storage environment; compare the performance of volume‐based storage to random storage; and examine the impact of travel speed and picking rates on routing and storage policy performance. The experimental results show the solution gap between routing heuristics and optimal routing is highly dependent on the travel speed and picking rate, the storage policy, and the size of the pick list. In addition, volume‐based storage produced significant savings over random storage, but again these savings are dependent on the travel speed and picking rate.