Growth at the EU periphery: the next enlargement

In 2004, 75 million people are scheduled to become EU citizens, making this the largest round of expansion of the Western European club to date. Of the 10 new entrants, 8 are former socialist economies, for which membership in the EU represents the coronation of an effort began with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. Based on their recent economic performance, the Central and Eastern European countries appear to be well on their way to successfully integrate in the Western European club, while the Baltic Republics still lag behind. The gap between the two groups emerges when we consider the adjustment of the production structure, the composition of trade and FDI flows, and income distribution. The evidence we review appears to support the role of institutional quality to facilitate integration in the world market and overall economic performance.     

Unpacking ostensive and performative aspects of organisational routines in the context of monitoring systems: A critical realist approach

Drawing on the theory of organisational routines as generative systems, we deploy a critical realist approach based on Searle's philosophy of language to analyse the generative mechanisms that specify the pre-conditions for recognisable, repetitive patterns of interdependent activities. Using the example of the organisational routines implemented in Germany to monitor the allocation and disbursement of the European Social Fund, we contend that constitutive rules of the type “X counts as Y in context C” are at the very centre of organisational routines. Such rules consist of generative mechanisms that account for the emergence of the ostensive aspects of organisational routines out of artefacts and/or procedures in a social structure of power relations. We further claim that, far from being proxies for the ostensive aspects of routines, artefacts whether tangible or intangible are instantiations of such ostensive aspects on a par with any other performative aspects of routines. On this basis, a re-conceptualisation and a re-labelling of the ostensive and performative aspects of routines are proposed. The former are the result of the activation of systems of constitutive rules, i.e. actual routines in critical realist terminology, the latter are patterns of interdependent activities instantiating the ostensive aspects of routines, i.e. empirical routines in critical realist terminology. Implications for theory and practice are discussed by developing a model of organisational routines that interweaves extant research streams.     

Challenges in approximating the Black and Scholes call formula with hyperbolic tangents

Decisions in Economics and Finance - In this paper, we introduce the concept of standardized call function and we obtain a new approximating formula for the Black and Scholes call function through...     

Advertising and search engines. A model of leadership in search advertising

We analyze the role of leadership in a multi-sided market as search advertising, assuming quantity competition and different entry conditions (with barriers to entry or endogenous entry). The model can be microfounded taking into account network effects, multi-homing on the advertising side and scale in search. If there are barriers to entry and the network effects are strong, there is an incentive for the leader to exploit them and attract more consumers to monopolize advertising. Under barriers to entry, the leading platform has also a strategic incentive to exploit scale in search, to manipulate search results to divert search traffic from other platforms, and to introduce limits to multi-homing, with the aim of expanding its market share and deny scale to competitors.     

MACROECONOMIC STABILIZATION POLICIES IN THE EMU: SPILLOVERS, ASYMMETRIES AND INSTITUTIONS

This paper studies the institutional design of the coordination of macroeconomic stabilization policies within a monetary union in the framework of linear quadratic differential games. A central role in the analysis plays the partitioned game approach of the endogenous coalition formation literature. The specific policy recommendations in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) context depend on the particular characteristics of the shocks and the economic structure. In the case of a common shock, fiscal coordination or full policy coordination is desirable. When anti‐symmetric shocks are considered, fiscal coordination improves the performance but full policy coordination does not produce further gains in policymakers' welfare.