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.

„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.     

Pro-poor trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the presence of a pro-poor bias in the existing structure of protection of six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gambia, and Madagascar. We build on a simple agricultural household production model and we propose an extension to include adjustments in labor income. Our approach, which can be implemented without repeated cross-sections of household level data, suits well the data constraints in SSA. It also allows us to capture the heterogeneity in trade protection at the tariff line level. The pro-poor bias indicators suggest that SSA's trade policies tend to be biased in favor of poor households, as these policies redistribute income from rich to poor households. This is because protection increases the agricultural prices of goods that are sold by African households and this effect dominates both the impacts of higher consumption prices and the strong Stolper–Samuelson effects that benefit skilled over unskilled workers.     

Informal export barriers and poverty

This paper investigates the poverty impacts of informal export barriers like transport costs, cumbersome customs practices, costly regulations and bribes. In low-income countries, these informal barriers act as export taxes that distort the efficient allocation of resources, lower wages and agricultural income, and increase poverty. I investigate the case of Moldova, a very open economy where poverty is widespread, agriculture is a key sector, formal trade barriers are low, and informal export barriers are widespread. I find that improving export practices would benefit the average Moldovan household across the whole income distribution. Poverty would also decline, affecting 100-180 thousand individuals.     

The European debt crisis and fiscal reactions in Europe 2000–2014

After the outbreak of the global financial crisis, some governments in the EU experienced serious fiscal problems, while others were less affected. This paper seeks to shed light on the divergent fiscal performance in the EU countries before and after the outbreak of the crisis. Fiscal reaction functions of the primary balance are estimated for different groups of EU countries using quarterly data for the pre-crisis period 2001–2008 and for the crisis period 2009–2014. The pre-crisis estimations reveal some differences in persistence and cyclical reaction between different groups of countries, but in most cases little feedback from the debt stock to the primary balance. The fiscal reaction functions of the countries that eventually developed fiscal problems do not stand out. The estimations on data from the crisis period show largely unchanged persistence and counter-cyclicality but much more feedback from the debt stock, and this applies both to the crisis countries and those less affected. In spite of large deficits and accumulation of debt, the underlying fiscal reaction has become more prudent after the outbreak of the European debt crisis.     

Wrapped input selection using multilayer perceptrons for repeat‐purchase modeling in direct marketing

In this paper, we try to validate existing theory on and develop additional insight into repeat‐purchase behavior in a direct marketing setting by means of an illuminating case study. The case involves the detection and qualification of the most relevant RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) variables, using a neural network wrapper as our input pruning method. Results indicate that elimination of redundant and/or irrelevant inputs by means of the discussed input selection method allows us to significantly reduce model complexity without degrading the predictive generalization ability. It is precisely this issue that will enable us to infer some interesting marketing conclusions concerning the relative importance of the RFM predictor categories and their operationalizations. The empirical findings highlight the importance of a combined use of RFM variables in predicting repeat‐purchase behavior. However, the study also reveals the dominant role of the frequency category. Results indicate that a model including only frequency variables still yields satisfactory classification accuracy compared to the optimally reduced model. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.