Relative wage concern: the missing piece in the contract multiplier?

Recent research has cast serious doubts on the explanatory power of staggered wage/price setting to account for both output and inflation persistence following money shocks. This paper extends a dynamic general equilibrium model with wage staggering by incorporating relative wage concern on the part of workers. In sharp contrast to previous analyses, in this model both output and inflation dynamics exhibit substantial persistence. Moreover, persistence results hold for a wide range of parameterisations. Our results suggest that relative wage concern may be the missing piece in the money shock persistence puzzle.     

Perpetual youth and endogenous labor supply: A problem and a possible solution

In the “perpetual youth” overlapping-generations model of Blanchard and Yaari, if leisure is a “normal” good then some agents will have negative labor supply. We suggest a solution to this problem by using a modified version of Greenwood, Hercowitz and Huffman’s utility function. The modification incorporates real money balances, so that the model may be used to analyze monetary as well as fiscal policy. In a Walrasian version of the economy, we show that increased government debt and increased government spending raise the interest rate and lower output, while an open-market operation to increase the money supply lowers the interest rate and raises output.     

The refoundation of the symmetric equilibrium in Schumpeterian growth models

We provide a refoundation of the symmetric growth equilibrium characterizing the research sector of vertical R&D-driven growth models. We argue that the usual assumptions made in this class of models leave the agents indifferent as to where targeting research: hence, the problem of the allocation of R&D investment across sectors is indeterminate. By introducing an “?-contamination of confidence” in the expected distribution of R&D investment, we prove that the symmetric structure of R&D investment is the unique rational expectations equilibrium compatible with ambiguity-averse agents adopting a maxmin strategy.     

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.     

Preserving Knowledge on IS Business Value

The economic relevance of information systems has been studied for many years and has attracted an abundance of research papers. However, the “productivity paradoxon” of the 1990s, Carr’s widely recognized paper “IT doesn’t matter”, and several studies that do not find a positive correlation between IS investments and economic performance reveal long-lasting difficulties for IS researchers to explain “IS business value”. Business executives and researchers also continue to question the value of IS investments. This raises the question of whether literature reviews have tapped their potential to address the concerns by covering key research areas of IS business value and preserving their key findings. In order to address this question, this paper identifies and describes 12 key research areas, and synthesizes what literature reviews published in pertinent academic outlets have done to preserve knowledge. The analysis of 22 literature reviews shows that some crucial areas have not been (sufficiently) covered. They provide fertile areas for future literature reviews. As this work is based on the results of more than 200 research papers, it is capable of drawing a comprehensive picture of the current state-of-the-art in IS business value research.     

Globalization vs. localization: global food challenges and local solutions

The objective of this study was to examine the effect of global–local interactions on food production and consumption in Ghana, and identify possible local solutions. Primary data were collected using a combination of quantitative‐qualitative methods, which included focus group discussions and one‐on‐one interviews. Approximately 450 household heads were randomly selected and interviewed between August 2007 and August 2008 in Eastern, Central, Upper East and Northern Regions of Ghana. Findings revealed increasing consumption of foreign rice as opposed to decreasing consumption of local rice and other staples like millet, sorghum and yam because of global–local interactions. However, opportunities exist to re‐localize production‐consumption patterns through the use of ‘glocal foods’ like improved ‘koose and waakye’. Referencing the situation in Ghana, the study recommends improved production and processing practices backed with appropriate technologies that reflect changing consumption dynamics in order to take full advantage of opportunities created as a result of global–local interactions.     

EVIDENCE THEORY AS A PROCEDURE FOR HANDLING NOVEL EVENTS

Evidence Theory is a branch of the mathematics of uncertain reasoning that entails profound epistemological differences with respect to Probability Theory. In fact, its paradigmatic situation is the judge who must evaluate testimonies, rather than the gambler who must evaluates odds. Unlike a gambler, who faces a definite set of possibilities, a judge maybe forced to change her evaluation because of novel possibilities suggested by unexpected testimonies. In this sense, Evidence Theory provides a formalization of some among Shackles intuitions. While the details of the connections between Shackle's theory and Evidence Theory have been explored elsewhere, this article is devoted to a detailed explanation of the working of Evidence Theory. An example is discussed in detail and several domains of application are briefly sketched.     

Impostazione Bayesiana di un problema di analisi discriminatoria nell'ambito di un modello non parametrico

Seguendo l'impostazione predittiva delineata da J. Aitchison e I. R. Dunsmore (1975) viene proposto un modello non-parametrico di analisi discriminatoria dal punto di vista bayesiano.Si ricorre a tal fine ad una versione modificata dello schema di scambiabilità parziale e si utilizza il processo «mistura di prodotti di processi di Dirichlet» introdotto da D. M. Cifarelli ed. E. Regazzini (1978). Si presenta infine un'applicazione del modello ad un tipico problema di diagnosi medica.

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J. Aitchison and I. R. Dunsmore (1975) have stressed the importance of the predictive distribution for the solution of classical statistical problems. Following this approach we show initially how a modified version of the model of partial exchangeability can be usefully applied to derive the so called diagnostic distribution. Subsequently a nonparametric model of discriminatory analysis is derived, wherein a crucial role is played by a particular process named «mixture of products of Dirichlet processes» introduced by D. M. Cifarelli and E. Regazzini (1978) following a paper by C. E. Antoniak (1974) which in turn generalized the well known Dirichlet process developed by T. S. Ferguson (1973). Finally a numerical application to a medical problem is provided.

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Versione definitiva pervenuta il 24-9-81

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Lavoro eseguito nell'ambito del GNAFA-CNR. L'argomento di questo lavoro mi è stato suggerito dal professor Eugenio Regazzini. A quest'ultimo ed al prof. Donato Michele Cifarelli sono grato per avermi segnalato alcune oscurità nel testo originario.     

The Adjustment Property

An input–output (IO) system which is capable of producing any semi-positive net product by an adequate choice of the activity levels of its processes satisfies the ‘adjustment’ property. We analyze under which conditions the adjustment property holds for IO systems in which some produced goods have a purely intermediate character. The peculiarity of these pure capital goods is that final demand for them is identically zero. One of the ways to deal with this type of system is to eliminate the pure capital goods, by means of vertical integration.     

Discursive Rationality and the Division of Labour

A bstract One of the great achievements of economic science is the explanation of the benefits of the division of labour in market economies. However, despite its merits this utilitarian explanation is insufficient as an account for the widespread division of labour. This insufficiency stems from the normative shortcomings of the harmony-of-interests doctrine, which cannot justify the respect of private-property titles and. therefore, cannot explain on purely utilitarian grounds the fact that the division of labour is as widespread as it in fact is. Mariam Thalos has recently provided a partial solution to this problem by arguing that religious relief in God performs a public function that facilitates human co-operation. In critical elaboration of her thesis, the division of labour is explained by taking into account a different aspect of human reason, namely, discursive rationality.