How useful is generalized Darwinism as a framework to study competition and industrial evolution?

The role of Darwinist concepts in evolutionary economics has long been a contentious issue. The controversy has recently been rekindled by the proposal of a “Universal” or “generalized” Darwinism, which holds that the ontology of all evolutionary systems accords to the Darwinist scheme of variation, selection and inheritance. This paper focuses on the application of the generalized Darwinist framework to the analysis of markets and industries. It argues that selection and inheritance concepts narrowly construed after the biological example are of limited usefulness. As an alternative to the ‘top–down’ approach of Universal Darwinism, the development of ‘bottom–up’ theories is advocated.

Dynastic Inequality Compared: Multigenerational Mobility in the United States,the United Kingdom,and Germany

Using harmonized household survey data, we analyze long‐run social mobility in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany, and test recent theories of multigenerational persistence of socioeconomic status. In this country comparison setting, we find evidence against a universal law of social mobility. Our results show that the long‐run persistence of socioeconomic status and the validity of a first‐order Markov chain in the intergenerational transmission of human capital is country‐specific. Furthermore, we find that the direct and independent effect of grandparents' social status on grandchildren's status tends to vary by gender and institutional context.     

CONTROLLING INFLATION WITH TIMID MONETARY–FISCAL REGIME CHANGES

Can monetary policy control inflation when both monetary and fiscal policies change over time? When monetary policy is active, a long-run fiscal principle entails flexibility in fiscal policy that preserves determinacy even when deviating from passive fiscal, substantially for brief periods or timidly for prolonged periods. In order to guarantee a unique equilibrium, monetary and fiscal policies must coordinate not only within but also across regimes, and not simply on being active or passive, but also on their extent. The amplitude of deviations from the active monetary/passive fiscal benchmark determines whether a regime is Ricardian: Timid deviations do not imply wealth effects.     

„Wir haben bei Henkel international eine einheitliche Arbeitsweise im Finanzbereich geschaffen“

Praxis / ArtikelInterview

„Wir haben bei Henkel international eine einheitliche Arbeitsweise im Finanzbereich geschaffen“ Jürgen H. Daum im Gespr?ch mit Dr. Carlo Mackrodt, vormals Vice President Global Financial Services, Henkel KGaA, zur Neugestaltung des Henkel-Finanzbereichs     

The Corn–Guano Model

The model presented here can be seen as an extension, specifically designed to deal with the issue of exhaustible resources, of the well‐known ‘corn model’. We believe that useful insights are obtained by concentrating on a benchmark case, that of an economy with only one reproducible ‘good’, corn, and only one ‘resource’, guano. The corn–guano model aims at delineating some major issues related to the introduction of exhaustible resources within a post‐Sraffian model. In this paper we concentrate on the dynamics of the price variables. The ultimate goal concerns more generally the treatment of intertemporal economies outside a regular growth path, i.e. it concerns the degree of generality of the post‐Sraffian theory itself.     

Cost Recovery in Congested Electricity Networks

Large scale investments in European electricity networks are foreseen in the next decade. Pricing the network at marginal cost will not be sufficient to pay for those investments as the network is a natural monopoly. This paper derives numerically the socially optimal transmission prices for cost recovery, taking into account that electricity networks are often congested, while allowing for market power in generation. The model is illustrated with a Stackelberg game for the Belgian electricity market.     

Place the good after the bad: effects of emotional shifts on consumer memory

Marketing research has a limited understanding about the effects arising from emotional shifts (i.e., the transition from one emotion to another) during the same advertising message. This paper sheds light on this topic through two studies. Study 1 examines whether an advertising message that features a negative-to-positive emotional shift (i.e., a shift from a negative to a positive emotion) generates greater recall of an advertised brand than an advertising message with a neutral-to-positive emotional shift (i.e., a shift from a neutral to a positive emotion) or one with no emotional shift. Study 2 examines whether an advertising message that simulates a buyer-seller encounter—with the seller reproducing a negative-to-positive emotional shift via facial expressions—generates a greater recall of the advertised content than an identical advertisement with no emotional shift. Results confirm that a negative-to-positive shift facilitates the recall of both the brand and the advertised information.