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A theoretical reflection needs words, not only numbers and mathematics. Essays and papers expand the room for thinking by sharing an international view on the subjects in order to invite the reader to co-operation with the Institute.
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Essay:Proximity
in product space and diversification strategies
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Essay:
Complexity meets development - A Felicitous Encounter on
the Road of Life The whole number of Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems where the paper appeared first.
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Essay:
Levels of product differentiation in the global mobile phones
market
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Essay:
Consumer
theory: the neoclassical model and its opposite alternative
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Essay:
Economic development from the perspective of evolutionary
economic theory While neoclassical theory sees the economy as at rest, or undergoing well anticipated change it has nothing to say about these kinds of conditions. Therefore
the author, Richard Nelson, believes the processes of economic catch-up
have to proceed under the implicit or explicit guidance of an evolutionary
economic theory. Essay: Microfinance in Ghana: an overview (2007) A sound example of vibrant and innovative economy,
Ghana offers a great institutional richness of microfinance institutions,
as explained in this paper. Outlining the challenges, a Central
Bank insider calls for further improvements in the organization
of the sector. Essay:
Peak oil and South Africa:
impacts and mitigation (8 March 2007) From a tough scenario to policies in a key African country.
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Essay: Exports and their linkages to literacy An exploration of the manyfolds relations of exports and the growth of the number of people capable to write. Essay: Survival
strategies: innovate or die To devise new modified versions earlier than expected during the product life cycle can costs you cannibalising your own product but leaves no room to competitors, thus resulting in long-term business success.
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Essay:
The impact of market structure and irreversibility
on investment under uncertainty: an empirical analysis This paper estimates a model of investment under product price uncertainty for 23 French industries during the period 1977-1997 and represents the first empirical work that includes variables of market structure (in terms of degree of competition) in a model of investment under uncertainty. In the paper, Sara Maioli presents one of the very first attempts to make explicit the empirical relationship between investment and uncertainty under different degrees of irreversibility. Essay and Software : You are a monopolistThe traditional monopolist's choice about price and quantity is now given a new dynamic setting where you can interact. Demand is unknown and the produced good is durable across periods of time. Thus, sales needn't be equal to production since inventories can pile up and go down. A lot of strategic consequences arise, as you can discover playing with the business game. Software [1900KB]
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Essay:
Who matters in a complex society?
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Essay:
Outward foreign direct investment and technology transfer:
selected results from the U.S. and Taiwan in the electronics industry This paper focuses on the electronics industry and presents some examples of countries’ policies concerning technology transfers and the effects on industry of each of the three reactions by policy makers and high-level managers. [First published at IAMOT 2006]
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Essay:
Profits, competition and opportunity costs: two introductory
papers on the flaws in neoclassical approach In the second paper, the neoclassical theory of competition is critically re-examined and compared to the solutions of classical theory.
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Essay: The economics of ex ante coordination Prof. Sergio Bruno and Alessandra De Lellis present in this paper a few fundamental elements of a new perspective in economics, stressing complex time structures and co-ordination issues in investment, production, consumption. It integrates innovation
theories and the earlier studies on the economic development
of nations to single out overlapping issues and solutions.
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Essay: Consumer decision rules for agent-based models A clear-cut introduction to evolutionary consumption microfoundation in agent-based models. It proposes several rules to cope with budget constraints, product differentiation, purchase repetition over time. In particular, you shall find the rules of consumer behavour used in the freely downloadable model "Race to market", which gave rise to these micro-data. Moreover, it suggests to ACE modellers a "golden
rule" for more realistic models.
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Essay: The production
function of students' grade A critical introduction to the neoclassical concept and use of the "production function". To help students understanding the concept and its limitations, the author proposes to take into consideration a particular production process that should be well known to them: the production of grades in an exams after an education course.
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Essay:
The
mystery of excess trade (balances) Bilateral trade balances are an important source of frictions in international trade relations, so it is important to understand their provenance. In this papers, the author provide an empirical examination of two key theories - one based on macroeconomic balances and the other based on triangular trade. Both theories perform poorly in explaining bilateral trade balances. Actual bilateral trade balance are vastly larger than those predicted by the theory, a result that may be termed the "mystery of the excess trade balances". Bilateral trade data for 99 countries
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Essay: Italy: Regional differences in public health quality management systems This short essay presents a review of the various approaches applied by the different Italian Regions with regard to Quality Management in health care policy.
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Essay: A solution for the "national resource curse": should we distribute oil revenues to the citizens directly instead that to governments? Countries with an abundance of natural resources
have on average lower economic growth than resource-poor countries.
They also have more poverty and
are more likely to suffer from violent conflict. These negative
outcomes in resource-rich countries are called the ‘curse
of natural resources.’ Dr. Martin
E. Sandbu proposes a policy of revenue distributions from taxable
resources to individuals as a way of addressing the curse. Instead
of paying resource rents in to the government treasury, they would
be distributed equally to all indviduals, but the government would
then be allowed to tax it back.
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Essay: Dynamic competition with bi-directional product differentiation, bounded rational consumers, innovation, advertising, and finance This
paper explains and offers you a powerful software tool for understanding
the introduction of product and process innovation
in a competitive market. Consumers are individual agents with different
tastes and personal income. In terms of industrial dynamics, you'll
see how product life cycles arise by personally playing the software
model or by observing how artificial agents perform. Essay and software automatic download [2400 KB]
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Essay: A new approach to business fluctuations: heterogeneous interacting agents, scaling laws and financial fragility Business fluctuations in GDP, investment, etc. can be explained in a new micro-founded way. The authors present a simple agent-based model, whose core is the interaction of heterogeneous financially fragile firms and a banking sector. In their framework, the origin of business fluctuations can be traced back to the ever changing configuration of the network of heterogeneous interacting firms. Simulations of the model replicate surprisingly well an impressive set of stylized facts, particularly two well known universal laws. Essay [300 KB]
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Essay: Financial
Fragility, asset bubbles, capital structure and real rate of growth
- A study of the Indian Economy during 1970-2000
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Essay series:
Global value chain: governance and typologies How Do We Define Value Chains and Production Networks
Value Chains: An Economist's Perspective The reference site for Global Value Chains Essay: Innovation and Growth: A Schumpeterian model of innovation The creation of a positive feedback loop is what makes the difference between sustained growth and gradual (or sudden) decline. A Positive Feedback Loop Innovation System (POLIS) is here modelled along Schumpeterian lines and applied to the actual economy of Taiwan. Essays: Agriculture
innovation system in Australia The papers identifies eleven broad categories of agents taking part to the innovation system. The kind of innovation and the goals of innovation are explored and ranked by an empirical survey.
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Essay: Influence
of delayed feedback on learning, performance and strategy search
- revisited Economic agents live in an uncertain environment, where they have to learn how to behave and which is the performance of their actions. Strategy is not given: they have to search for the "right one", if exists at all. Feedback is a crucial mechanism linking the past with the future, possibly helping the agents in their tasks. In particular, the timing of feedback signals can deeply influence their effects. Is immediate feedback always superior to delayed feedback? Are the features of the environment irrelevant? This paper offer original experimental results on the influence of delayed feedback on learning, performance and strategy search.
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Essay: Active
decisions and pro-social behavior: a field experiment on blood donation In this paper, Alois Stutzer, Lorenz Goette
and Michael Zehnder propose a decision framework where people are
individually asked to either actively consent or dissent to some
pro-social behavior. The authors hypothesize that confronting individuals
with the choice of engaging in a specific pro-social behavior contributes
to the formation of issue-specific altruistic preferences while
simultaneously involving a commitment. The hypothesis is tested
in a large-scale field experiment on blood donation. This "active-decision"
intervention substantially increases the stated willingness to donate
blood, as well as the actual donation behavior of people who have
not fully formed preferences beforehand.
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Essay: Does innovation policy matter in a transition country? Prof. Attila Havas demonstrates in this paper the simultaneous need for systemic institutional changes and macroeconomic stabilisation in order to improve microeconomic performance. Whithin an evolutionary economics framework, innovation policy is examined both theoretically and empirically in the case of a country currently undergoing deep structural changes: Hungary.
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Essay: Estimation of a dynamic discrete choice model of irreversible investment A dataset of Spanish manufacturing firms provides an important empirical evidence that business investment - at micro level - is infrequent and lumpy.There are periods in which firms decide not to invest and periods of large investment episodes. Rocío Sánchez-Mangas develops and tests consider a dynamic discrete choice model of irreversible investment with a general specification of adjustment costs including convex and nonconvex components. Essay [200 KB]
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Essay: An example of information set for the export manager Exporters
often approach new markets just by participating to trade fairs,
meeting there potential importers and building business relationships
with them by trial and error. But a systematic overview of
foreing markets can offer a more structured approach. In this report
by U.N. Bhati,
you'll find a good instance of what an export manager can find in
such documents to orient its actions and business plans. A Statistical Profile of Forest Product Market in South Korea [362 KB]
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Essay: Japanese Foreign Aid, Development Expenditures and Taxation: econometric results from a bounded rationality model of fiscal behaviour A path-breaking methodology for assessing the behaviour of foreign aid receivers. Investment in human and physical capital has been a significant factor in Malaysian GDP growth. Both internal and external sources of finance have been used in promoting investments as well as development expenditures. But foreign aid could have been used, by a bounded rational bureaucratic policymaker, in many different ways, not all conducive to development.
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Essay:
Hierarchy structures in world trade
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Essay: Country concentration of Turkish exports and imports over time Through international trade, countries develop their own net of privileged partners. Turkey is an extremely interesting example of a fast changing developing country. In this paper, Prof. Güzin Erlat shows not only data analysis but also a methodology to address the issue of concentration and diversification of exports. The Product Cycle Theory of international trade is given further data support.
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Essay: Tax base in developing countries How
to increase the tax revenue in
developing countries? By enlarging the tax base the fiscal burden
would be better distributed, comprehending the large informal economy
which is so present in these countries. Unlike in rich countries
where informality is largely a result of the tax burden, the informal
economy in developing countries is largely a result of high fixed
costs of entry into the formal sector. The tax burden is lower
in developing countries and the barriers to entry into the formal
economy are higher. Empirical analysis supports the results of this
paper by prof. Emmanuelle
Auriol and Michael Warlters.
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Essay: The new conceptual limits of laisser-faire Prof.
Sergio Bruno presents his standpoint in terms of a wide and
modern critique of laisser-fairism. General economic equilibrium
is put into question on the basis of new conceptions of time, uncertainty
and complementarities in production processes. Thus, "well
targeted policies may be of much help. [...] What these different
forms of intervention have in common is that they are based neither
on coercion nor on traditional incentives, but rather upon suasion
and negotiations". Essay [470 KB]
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Essay: A graph representation of a basic macroeconomic scheme: the IS-LM model Students of the first year of economics usually learn the basic functioning of the economy thanks to the IS-LM model. Here we present an original representation that concentrates the entire model in just one sheet. The researcher will find many innovative features to the model. To a creative economist, this representation offers the immediate possibility of adding further variables and outlining new or different linkages between variables. If you have never heard of IS-LM model, click here.
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Essay: Quality and health system: two worlds apart? Can Quality Management tools and principles, adapted to the peculiar features of the public health sector, help to solve the main challenges this system is presenting? Cost effectiveness, suitable solutions to people's needs and requests, the full account of human and professional relations could be better targeted using a Quality approach. This essay sets the stage for a discussion on the subject.
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Essay: Credit risk: a general scheme in a banking perspective What are the issues banks evaluate for assessing credit risk when they are going to give a credit facility to a borrower? This essay proposes a general synoptic scheme in order to answer to this question. The problem is crucial not only for the bank but also for the economy at large, since overall investment and consumption are affected by micro-decisions of this kind. Other papers available at the Economics Web Institute in separate pages, for instance evolutionary economics downloadable papers are here. Please use the Search tool to find where or navigate through the left top page menus. |
