We study the evolution of income and wealth inequality in an economy undergoing endogenous structural change with imperfect labor mobility. Our economy features two sectors: services and manufacturing. With faster TFP growth in manufacturing, labor reallocates from manufacturing to services. This reallocation is slower due to labor mobility frictions, which in turn, raises relative wages in services. As a result, income inequality is higher. Moreover, we study the impact of structural change on wealth inequality. Its economic intuition is more ambiguous. On the one hand, increased income dispersion implies increased dispersion in the ability to accumulate wealth across individuals. On the other hand, younger workers who hold the least assets are the most mobile across sectors. Their incomes are improved, which boosts their savings, which works towards equalizing wealth distribution. The consequence of these changes can only be verified with a computational model. To this end, we construct an overlapping generations model with two sectors: manufacturing and services. Our model also features heterogeneous individuals. With our model, we are able to show how the structural change affected the evolution of income and wealth inequality in Poland as of 1990.

In my paper I try to analyze Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty‑First Century as a history book. Thus, the following questions have been posed: at the intersection of which streams, tends, and traditions of the contemporary historiography could one place Piketty’s oeuvre? What can be said of those elements of the book that can be labeled as historical epistemology: source work, conceptualization of the object of study, etc.? As an attempt to revive serial history, does it inherit the baggage of “misdeeds” against which the entire movement of cultural history rose up? What role does the concept of longue durée play in the book? The historical aspects of Piketty’s thought have the potential to spark controversy among professional historians, but it is one of its many virtues.

This paper investigates the life cycle profiles of income and consumption and relative income mobility in Poland – a transition economy facing rapid structural economic and social changes. According to my results, and in line with the empirical evidence for advanced economies, the age-profiles of average income and consumption in Poland exhibit a hump. The inequality of income over the life cycle is found to flatten relatively quickly in Poland, which contrasts with the approximately linear shape observed in the US. When individual income process is fitted to match the Polish inequality profile, it exhibits less persistence than in the US. Past earnings turn out to affect current income more strongly for the group of more educated individuals. Moreover, and in contrast to the permanent income hypothesis as well as findings for other economies, no evidence of an increase in consumption inequality for households older than 30 years is found. Finally, the obtained estimates of relative income mobility in Poland are higher than those for developed countries.

This is the first insight into effect of development of nonpublic and paid schools on social stratification in Poland. Logistic and multinomial regression of the Polish general Social Survey data 1998 is conducted to test hypotheses concerning effect of the fathers’s EGP category on access to various types of schools in secondary and tertiary education. Results confirm the hypotheses that respondents from intelligentsia families are overrepresented in both secondary and tertiary paid schools and have greater odds of entry in to public tertiary education in comparison to lower non-manual categories, owners, working class and peasants. Children of intelligentsia also have more opportunities to attend “better” stationary (than non-stationary) schools in comparison to other categories. This analysis provides support for the thesis about growing role of qualitative differentiation in education.

New equivalent conditions of the asymptotical stability and stabilization of positive linear dynamical systems are investigated in this paper. The asymptotical stability of the positive linear systems means that there is a solution for linear inequalities systems. New necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of solutions of the linear inequalities systems as well as the asymptotical stability of the linear dynamical systems are obtained. New conditions for the stabilization of the resultant closed-loop systems to be asymptotically stable and positive are also presented. Both the stability and the stabilization conditions can be easily checked by the so-called I-rank of a matrix and by solving linear programming (LP). The proposed LP has compact form and is ready to be implemented, which can be considered as an improvement of existing LP methods. Numerical examples are provided in the end to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In the paper, a design method of a static anti-windup compensator for systems with input saturations is proposed. First, an anti-windup controller is presented for system with cut-off saturations, and, secondly, the design problem of the compensator is presented to be a non-convex optimization problem easily solved using bilinear matrix inequalities formulation. This approach guarantees stability of the closed-loop system against saturation nonlinearities and optimizes the robust control performance while the saturation is active.

In this paper we present and discuss a new class of singular fractional systems in a multidimensional state space described by the Roesser continuous-time models. The necessary and sufficient conditions for the asymptotic stability and admissibility by the use of linear matrix inequalities are established. All the obtained results are simulated by some numerical examples to show the applicability and accuracy of our approach.

This article aims at verifying the findings by Richard g. Wilkinson and Kate e. Pickett (2009) which point to a strong correlation between the income gap and the escalation of social problems. Wilkinson and Pickett’s thesis, described here as ‘the Spirit level concept’, states that all kinds of social problems (ranging from drug abuse to lack of trust among people) are directly connected with the scale of social inequality in a given country. In this article we test this concept by analyzing the relation between the income gap in a particular country and four important problems: health condition, trust, social activity and cultural activity. We investigate this relation in european union countries.

The paper concerns a strength optimization of continuous beams with variable cross-section. The continuous beams are subjected to a dead weight and a useful load, the six (seven) combinations of loads were analyzed. Optimal design problems in structural mechanics can by mathematically formulated as optimal control tasks. To solve the above formulated optimization problems, the minimum principle was applied. The paper is an introductory and survey paper of the treatment of realistically modelled optimal control problems from application in the structural mechanics. Especially those problems are considered, which include different types of constraints. The optimization problem is reduced to the solution of multipoint boundary value problems (MPBVP) composed of differential equations. Dimension of MPBVP is usually a large number, what produces numerical difficulties. Optimal control theory does not give much information about the control structure. The correctness of the assumed control structure can be checked after obtaining the solution of the boundary problem.

In this paper, a new class of bidimensional fractional linear systems is considered. The stability radius of the disturbed system is described according to the H _∞ norm. Sufficient conditions to ensure the stability margins of the closed-loop system are offered in terms of linear matrix inequalities. The concept of D stability region for these systems is also considered. Examples are provided to verify the applicability of our main result.

The main task of the paper is to analyse pope Benedict XVI’s social teaching on poverty as introduced in the encyclical letter ‘Caritas in veritate’. While the methodo-logical language of the papal teaching is anthropological and theological in character, the document uses its own interdisciplinary approach that is characteristic of Catholic Social Teaching. Consequently such a Christian reflection on social issues like pover-ty, inequality, marginalisation and globalisation can be compared with other social fin-dings. In the global context the pope identifies growing economic inequalities but also the advantages of cooperation within the global economy. The analysis also discerns the theories of social development that are convergent with the papal social diagnosis. Finally, comparing the pope’s social teaching with some studies in economy, sociolo-gy and political sciences, the author of the paper examines the possibility to construct an interdisciplinary link between Catholic Social Teaching and other social sciences.

This paper addresses weighted L2 gain performance switching controller design of discrete-time switched linear systems with average dwell time (ADT) scheme. Two kinds of methods, so called linearizing change-of-variables based method and controller variable elimination method, are considered for the output-feedback control with a supervisor enforcing a reset rule at each switching instant are considered respectively. Furthermore, some comparison between these two methods are also given.

The paper addresses the problem of constrained pole placement in discrete-time linear systems. The design conditions are outlined in terms of linear matrix inequalities for the Dstable ellipse region in the complex Z plain. In addition, it is demonstrated that the D-stable circle region formulation is the special case of by this way formulated and solved pole placement problem. The proposed principle is enhanced for discrete-lime linear systems with polytopic uncertainties.