We review the past 25 years of time series research that has been published in journals managed by the International Institute of Forecasters (Journal of Forecasting 1982-1985; International Journal of Forecasting 1985-2005). During this period, over one third of all papers_new published in these...

We analyze individual satisfaction with life as a whole and satisfaction with the personal financial situation for Israeli citizens of Jewish and Arab descent. Our data set is the Israeli Social Survey (2006). We are especially interested in the impact of the religions Judaism, Islam and...

We investigate how religious beliefs affected the take up of the birth control pill and impacted women's outcomes using the 1970 liberalization of oral contraceptives in the Netherlands. We first document a massive and immediate drop in fertility among minor women, aged 21 or younger, for whom...

What are the consequences of religious obligations conflicting with civic duties? We investigate this question by evaluating changes in the performance of practicing Muslim students when end-of-secondary-school exams and Ramadan overlapped in the Netherlands. Using administrative data on exam...

This paper reviews the Thai national character according to Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory and Komin’s nine values cluster (Psychology of the Thai people), analyses the social hierarchy of Thai consumers according to the Luxury 4P Taxonomy (Han et al., 2010), integrates the Theory of...

This paper examines the impact of psychological needs on luxury consumption. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) invented the term “conspicuous consumption” to describe luxury goods and services, in which Veblen indicated the purpose of luxury consumption was to display wealth and...

This paper introduces the Small World model (Watts and Strogatz, Nature, 1998) into the theory of economic growth and investigates how increasing economic integration affects firm size and efficiency, norm enforcement, and aggregate economic performance. When economic integration is low and...

The Middle East was once seen as a medieval great globalized force. Nowadays it shows one of the lowest intra-regional trade in the world and therefore it is claimed that the region is poorly integrated. Yet, with the steady flow of workers across national borders of the Middle East is this...