Unemployment or credit: Which one holds the potential? Results for a small open economy with a low degree of financialization

This paper investigates the relative importance of unemployment versus credit in determining the potential level of real activity for a small open economy with a low degree of financialization. We use a multivariate unobserved component model (MUC) to derive the potential output and the associated output gap for the Lithuanian economy. The model is estimated via Bayesian methods and the time paths of unobserved variables are extracted via the Kalman filter. The inclusion of unemployment in the MUC model substantially improves the estimates of the output gap in real time. Adding information about credit further emphasizes the overheating of the economy in the pre-crisis period, both in real time and ex post. Including credit preserves the conclusions regarding turning points. We uncover a strong negative correlation between the model-implied unemployment gap (without accounting for credit) and real credit growth. Data revisions do not appear to be the primary source of revisions of output gap estimates.     

The Decarbonisation Challenge of Southeast Europe: A Case Study of Romania

Intereconomics - Not only is Romania facing some crucial energy system problems, but the proposed solutions have often been improvised and incoherent. This also raises doubts about the...     

The historical development of the Swiss rental market – A new price index

A new data set is employed to construct an index of the Swiss rental residential market starting as early as 1936. Given the data sample at our disposal of slightly less than 1000 paired data points spread across all Switzerland, we focus on using the most efficient type of repeated-measurement index to evaluate the yearly price development of the rental property market. In the process of building the index, an alternative of the SPAR method (Sale Price Appraisal Ratio) is developed and compared against a structural time series model and the Case–Shiller approach. The newly developed ISPAR (Inverse SPAR) method yields qualitatively similar results to the regression based methodology yet is influenced to a lesser extent by the sample size. The structural time series model is the version least influenced by the sample size. An interesting finding in our sample is that despite the large time span between successive price measurements, no notable improvement is obtained using the 3SLS method of Case–Shiller instead of the traditional Bailey et al. method.     

E-Alliance: A Negotiation Infrastructure for Virtual Alliances

In this paper we provide an overview of E-Alliance, a software infrastructure we are developing to support negotiation activities in concurrent inter-organisational alliances. Our baseline is to offer a collaboration framework which fully preserves the autonomy of organisations grouped in an alliance, while enabling concurrency of their activities, flexibility of their negotiations and dynamic evolution of their environment. We propose to support negotiation between the partners within such alliances by combining different technologies, such as software engineering techniques, middleware-level coordination facilities and multiagent systems support. We present our approach in the context of a sample scenario of an alliance where partners are printshops capable of (out/in) sourcing print jobs among them to better accomplish their customers' requests.     

Thinking strategically about thinking strategically: the computational structure and dynamics of managerial problem selection and formulation

A new model of managerial problem formulation is introduced and developed to answer the question: ‘What kinds of problems do strategic managers engage in solving and why?’ The article proposes that a key decision metric for choosing among alternative problem statements is the computational complexity of the solution algorithm of alternative statements. Managerial problem statements are grouped into two classes on the basis of their computational complexity: P‐type problems (canonically easy ones) and NP‐type problems (hard ones). The new model of managerial cognitive choice posits that managers prefer to engage with and solve P‐type problems over solving NP‐type problems. The model explains common patterns of managerial reasoning and decision making, including many documented ‘biases’ and simplifying heuristics, and points the way to new effects and novel empirical investigations of problem solving‐oriented thinking in strategic management and types of generic strategies, driven by predictions about the kinds of market‐ and industry‐level changes that managers will or will not respond to. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Capital versus talent. The battle that's reshaping business

For much of the twentieth century, labor and capital fought bitterly for control of the industrialized economy. The titans of industry ultimately won a resounding victory over the unions, but the story doesn't end there. In today's economy, value is largely the product of knowledge and information. Companies cannot generate profits without the ideas, skills, and leadership capabilities of knowledge workers. It's these factors--not technologies, not factories, and certainly not capital--that give the most successful companies their unique advantages. As knowledge workers come to realize this, and see that the demand for their talent outstrips the supply, they are steadily wresting more and more of the profits from shareholders. This time the battle is between the sources of capital and the producers of value, and how it will end is far from clear. The roots of the current conflict lie in the twentieth-century shift from industrial to managerial capitalism and the creation of a new class of professional talent, the authors explain. Since the arrival of the information-based economy in the past decade, tensions have escalated. The dramatic rise of CEO pay--and the public fire it has drawn--is a telling symptom. With this new battle, we're also witnessing a fundamental change in the political alignment of capital. The Left is now siding with "the common shareholder" against the well-compensated top tier of the labor pool. Shareholders seeing an unprecedented proportion of the return on their investments siphoned off to employees may well ask, is there no end to it? Increasingly, it's human capital that is the basis of value, and financial capital has become far more generic than shareholders would like to believe. The growing tensions between shareholders and managers cannot be ignored, and capitalism is at a crossroads--again.