Economics

This research aims to provide an explanatory analyses of the business cycles divergence between Euro Area and Romania, respectively its drivers, since the synchronisation of output-gaps is one of the most important topic in the context of a potential EMU accession. According to the estimates, output-gaps synchronisation entered on a downward path in the subperiod 2010-2017, compared to 2002-2009. The paper demonstrates there is a negative relationship between business cycles divergence and three factors (economic structure convergence, wage structure convergence and economic openness), but also a positive relationship between it and its autoregressive term, respectively the GDP per capita convergence.

We compare two established jury selection procedures meant to safeguard against the inclusion of biased jurors that are also perceived as causing minorities to be under-represented in juries. The Strike and Replace procedure presents potential jurors one-by-one to the parties, while the Struck procedure presents all potential jurors before the parties exercise vetoes. In equilibrium, Struck more effectively excludes extreme jurors than Strike and Replace but leads to a worse representation of minorities. Simulations suggest that the advantage of Struck in terms of excluding extremes is sizable in a wide range of cases. In contrast, Strike and Replace only provides a significantly better representation of minorities if the minority and majority are heavily polarized. When parameters are estimated to match the parties' selection of jurors by race with jury-selection data from Mississippi in trials against black defendants, the procedures' outcomes are substantially different, and the size of the trade-off between objectives can be quantitatively evaluated.

While patents and standards have been identified as essential driving components of innovation and market growth, the inclusion of a patent in a standard poses many difficulties. These difficulties arise from the contradicting natures of patents and standards, which makes their combination really challenging, but, also, from the opposing business and market strategies of different patent owners involved in the standardisation process. However, a varying set of policies has been adopted to address the issues occurring from the unavoidable inclusion of patents in standards concerning certain industry sectors with a constant high degree of innovation, such as telecommunications. As these policies have not always proven adequate enough, constant efforts are being made to improve and expand them. The intriguing and complicated relationship between patents and standards is finally examined through a review of the use cases of well-known standards of the telecommunications sector which include a growing set of essential patents.

Society is undergoing many transformations and faces economic crises, environmental, social, and public health issues. At the same time, the Internet, mobile communications, cloud technologies, and social networks are growing rapidly and fostering the digitalization processes of business and society. It is in this context that the shared economy has assumed itself as a new social and economic system based on the sharing of resources and has allowed the emergence of innovative businesses like Airbnb. However, COVID-19 has challenged this business model in the face of restrictions imposed in the tourism sector. Its consequences are not exclusively short-term and may also call into question the sustainability of Airbnb. In this sense, this study aims to explore the sustainability of the Airbnb business model considering two theories which advocate that hosts can cover the short-term financial effects, while another defends a paradigm shift in the demand for long-term accommodations to ensure greater stability for hosts.

Investment in research and development is a key factor in increasing countries' competitiveness. However, its impact can potentially be broader and include other socially relevant elements like job quality. In effect, the quantity of generated jobs is an incomplete indicator since it does not allow to conclude on the quality of the job generated. In this sense, this paper intends to explore the relevance of R&D investments for the job quality in the European Union between 2009 and 2018. For this purpose, we investigate the effects of R&D expenditures made by the business sector, government, and higher education sector on three dimensions of job quality. Three research methods are employed, i.e. univariate linear analysis, multiple linear analysis, and cluster analysis. The findings only confirm the association between R&D expenditure and the number of hours worked, such that the European Union countries with the highest R&D expenses are those with the lowest average weekly working hours.

We conduct a unique, Amazon MTurk-based global experiment to investigate the importance of an exponential-growth prediction bias (EGPB) in understanding why the COVID-19 outbreak has exploded. The scientific basis for our inquiry is the well-established fact that disease spread, especially in the initial stages, follows an exponential function meaning few positive cases can explode into a widespread pandemic if the disease is sufficiently transmittable. We define prediction bias as the systematic error arising from faulty prediction of the number of cases x-weeks hence when presented with y-weeks of prior, actual data on the same. Our design permits us to identify the root of this under-prediction as an EGPB arising from the general tendency to underestimate the speed at which exponential processes unfold. Our data reveals that the "degree of convexity" reflected in the predicted path of the disease is significantly and substantially lower than the actual path. The bias is significantly higher for respondents from countries at a later stage relative to those at an early stage of disease progression. We find that individuals who exhibit EGPB are also more likely to reveal markedly reduced compliance with the WHO-recommended safety measures, find general violations of safety protocols less alarming, and show greater faith in their government's actions. A simple behavioral nudge which shows prior data in terms of raw numbers, as opposed to a graph, causally reduces EGPB. Clear communication of risk via raw numbers could increase accuracy of risk perception, in turn facilitating compliance with suggested protective behaviors.

In most of the recent literature on state capacity, the significance of wars in state-building assumes that threats from foreign countries generate common interests among domestic groups, leading to larger investments in state capacity. However, many countries that have suffered external conflicts don't experience increased unity. Instead, they face factional politics that often lead to destructive civil wars. This paper develops a theory of the impact of interstate conflicts on fiscal capacity in which fighting an external threat is not always a common-interest public good, and in which interstate conflicts can lead to civil wars. The theory identifies conditions under which an increased risk of external conflict decreases the chance of civil war, which in turn results in a government with a longer political life and with more incentives to invest in fiscal capacity. These conditions depend on the cohesiveness of institutions, but in a non-trivial and novel way: a higher risk of an external conflict that results in lower political turnover, but that also makes a foreign invasion more likely, contributes to state-building only if institutions are sufficiently incohesive.

In our country, majority of agricultural workers (who may include farmers working within a cooperative framework, or those who work individually either as owners or tenants) are shown to be reaping the least amount of profits in the agriculture value chain when compared to the effort they put in. There is a good amount of literature which broadly substantiates this situation in our country. Main objective of this study is to have a broad understanding of the role played by public systems in this value chain, particularly in the segment that interacts with farmers. As a starting point, we first try to get a better understanding of how farmers are placed in a typical agriculture value chain. For this we take the help of recent seminal works on this topic that captured the situation of farmers' within certain types of value chains. Then, we isolate the segment which interacts with farmers and deep-dive into data to understand the role played by public interventions in determining farmers' income from agriculture. NSSO 70th round on Situation Assessment Survey of farmers has data pertaining to the choices of farmers and the type of their interaction with different players in the value chain. Using this data we tried to get a econometric picture of the role played by government interventions and the extent to which they determine the incomes that a typical farming household derives out of agriculture.

We show that the quotient of Levy processes of jump-diffusion type has a fat-tailed distribution. An application is to price theory in economics. We show that fat tails arise endogenously from modeling of price change based on an excess demand analysis resulting in a quotient of arbitrarily correlated demand and supply whether or not jump discontinuities are present. The assumption is that supply and demand are described by drift terms, Brownian (i.e., Gaussian) and compound Poisson jump processes. If P −1 dP/dt (the relative price change in an interval dt ) is given by a suitable function of relative excess demand, $\left( \mathcal{D}% -\mathcal{S}\right) /\mathcal{S}$ (where D and S are demand and supply), then the distribution has tail behavior F(x)∼ x −ζ for a power ζ that depends on the function G in P −1 dP/dt=G(D/S) . For G(x)∼ |x| 1/q one has ζ=q. The empirical data for assets typically yields a value, ζ = ~ 3, or ζ∈[3,5] for some markets. The discrepancy between the empirical result and theory never arises if one models price dynamics using basic economics methodology, i.e., generalized Walrasian adjustment, rather than the usual starting point for classical finance which assumes a normal distribution of price changes. The function G is deterministic, and can be calibrated with a smaller data set. The results establish a simple link between the decay exponent of the density function and the price adjustment function, a feature that can improve methodology for risk assessment. The mathematical results can be applied to other problems involving the relative difference or quotient of Levy processes of jump-diffusion type.

This article analyzes the procedure for the initial employment of research assistants in Turkish universities to see if it complies with the rules and regulations. We manually collected 2409 applicant data from 53 Turkish universities to see if applicants are ranked according to the rules suggested by the Higher Education Council of Turkey. The rulebook states that applicants should be ranked according to a final score based on the weighted average of their GPA, graduate examination score, academic examination score, and foreign language skills score. Thus, the research assistant selection is supposed to be a fair process where each applicant is evaluated based on objective metrics. However, our analysis of data suggests that the final score of the applicants is almost entirely based on the highly subjective academic examination conducted by the hiring institution. Thus, the applicants GPA, standardized graduate examination score, standardized foreign language score are irrelevant in the selection process, making it a very unfair process based on favoritism.