Thomas Krichel

The UPS Prototype: An Experimental End-User Service across E-Print Archives

A meeting was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, October 21--22, 1999, to generate discussion and consensus about interoperability of publicly available scholarly information archives. The invitees represented several well known e-print and report archive initiatives, as well as organizations with interests in digital libraries and the transformation of scholarly communication. The central goal of the meeting was to agree on recommendations that would make the creation of end-user services--such as scientific search engines and linking systems--for data originating from distributed and dissimilar archives easier. The Universal Preprint Service (UPS) Prototype was developed in preparation for this meeting. As a proof-of-concept of a multi-discipline digital library of publicly available scholarly material, the Prototype harvested nearly 200,000 records from several different archives and created an attractive end-user environment. This paper describes the results of the project. This is done in two ways. On the one hand, the experimental end-user service that was created during the project is illustrated. On the other hand, the lessons that the project team drew from the experience of creating the Prototype are presented.

The Welfare Economics of Rural-To-Urban Migration: The Harris-Todaro Model Revisited

The Harris-Todaro model of rural to urban migration is extended to include urban agglomeration effects, some urban real wage flexibility and a government budget constraint. Without employment subsidies, laissez-faire migration is excessive unless real wage flexibility and agglomeration effects are high. Laissez-faire migration is too low compared with the first best outcome supported by a subsidies, if its financing involves no costs. Simulations suggest that such a program would imply a substantial increase in taxation. If, as seems likely, an increase of this magnitude involves economic costs, then the optimal outcome falls well short of first best.

Personal Data in a Large Digital Library

The RePEc Economics library offers the largest distributed source of freely downloadable scientific research reports in the world. RePEc also contains details about Economics institutions, publication outlets and people working in the field. All this data forms a large relational dataset. In this paper we describe HoPEc, a system that allows to implement access control records personal data within RePEc. The bulk of these records describe the authors of documents. These records are maintained by the authors themselves. We discuss the technical and social aspects of this system.

Fiscal and monetary policy in a monetary union: Credible inflation targets or monetized debt?

Fiscal and Monetary Policy in a Monetary Union: Credible Inflation Targets or Monetized Debt? —The paper examines the interrelationship between fiscal and monetary policy in a two-country monetary union. The worst scenario occurs when an independent central bank sets the nominal interest rate and responds to rising government debt/GDP ratios by monetization. The result is high inflation, high debt/GDP ratios and a large public sector. Government debt and inflation are contained if the governments bear sole responsibility for solvency, but the public sector remains excessively large. The best scenario occurs if the central bank removes the incentive for the governments to engineer surprise inflation by credible inflation targeting.ZusammenfassungFinanz-und Geldpolitik in einer Währungsunion -Glaubhafte Inflationsziele oder monetisierte Staatsverschuldung? —Die Verfasser untersuchen die Beziehung zwischen Finanz-und Geldpolitik in einer Währungsunion von zwei Ländern. Das schlechteste Szenario liegt vor, wenn eine unabhängige Zentralbank den nominalen Zinssatz festlegt und auf einen Anstieg der Staatsverschuldung (im Verhältnis zum BIP) mit Monetisierung reagiert. Das Ergebnis ist hohe Inflation, ein ungünstiges Verhältnis zwischen Staatsschulden und BIP und ein aufgeblähter öffentlicher Sektor. Staatsschulden und Inflation werden gebremst, wenn die Regierungen die alleinige Verantwortung für die Solvenz tragen, aber der öffentliche Sektor übertrieben groß bleibt. Das beste Szenario ist gegeben, wenn die Zentralbank den Regierungen den Anreiz nimmt, überraschende Inflationen zu inszenieren, indem sie in ihrer Politik glaubwürdige Inflationsziele verfolgt.

International evidence on the long-run implications of the neoclassical growth model

Quarterly data from the International Finance Statistics of the international Monetary Fund is used to test the long-run implications of the neoclassical stochastic growth model for ten OECD countires – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom and the united States. In doing so, Johasens maximum likelihood approach for estimating and testing long-run stedy-state relations in multivariate vector autoregressive models is used (Johansen, S. (1988) Statistical analysis of cointegration vectors. Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 231 –54).

A Brief Business History of an On-Line Distribution System for Academic Research Called NEP, 1998-2010

Applications of information technology have been directly responsible for the increase in productivity of business, government and academic activities. Business and management historians have yet to contribute to better understanding such processes. This paper aims to address this shortcoming through the internal and organisational history of a system for speedy, online distribution of recent additions to the broad literatures on economics and related areas called NEP: New Economic Papers. This is a first person account (partly autobiographical) which also includes interviews and the use of archived e-mail correspondence. The advent of the Internet promised a revolutionary change by democratising the social institutions related to the creation and dissemination of academic knowledge. Instead, this story tells how participants slowly but steadily tended to replicate established institutions. Researching the impact of the Internet on organizations is a promising topic for historians, for which this might be one case study. The development of NEP provides an illustrative example for the kind of new business models that have emerged as the Internet has been used by creative minds to provide existing services in a new way. This paper provides a story of the NEP project and shows how one person’s drive could generate a broader community of volunteers (constituted by a large number of academics and practitioners who provide critical support for its functioning). We provide details of the social and technological challenges for the construction of the technological platform as well as the evolution of its governance. There is no historiography in business and management history on how to deal with changes in archived material resulting from the application of information and telecommunication technologies. Given the rate of change for events in the third industrial revolution, this article shows is its possible and indeed relevant to document events in the recent past.

Some aspects of citation indexes in Spain: A comparative analysis

This paper studies the main characteristics of the citation indexes currently developed in Spain. The paper compares the impact factors offered by Spanish citation indexes with the impact factor of Spanish journals also collected by the JCRs of the ISI (SCI and SSCI) over a five-year period (2001–2005). Spanish journals published in English have higher impact factor scores in the JCR databases of the ISI than in Spanish citation indexes.

Growth, Debt and Public Infrastructure

This paper presents a closed economy model of endogenous growth driven by capital externalities arising from both private capital and public infrastructure. The model is calibrated to fit data for India, an approximately closed economy. Simulations suggest that fiscal policy certainly matters and the choice of the income taxation rate, the mix of government spending between infrastructure and public consumption goods, and the long-run government debt/GDP ratio can all significantly affect the long-run growth rate. Intertemporal aspects of fiscal policy are also important and the precommitment (time-inconsistent) and non-precommitment policies differ substantially.

Patterns of research collaboration in a digital library for Economics

RePEc (Research Papers in Economics) has been conceived and developed to promote scholarly communication and to enhance the dissemination of research findings in the field of economics. RePEc offers the RePEc Author Service (RAS) where economics authors can claim authorship of the research papers that are described in RePEc archives. The data from this service forms a high-quality authorship database. We investigate the structure of research collaborations within RePEc by applying social network analysis to the co-authorship network formed by the RAS registrants. We perform a component size analysis and calculate centrality metrics. Our findings imply that the RAS registrant population is made up of highly active academics that are well connected to each other. In addition, RAS registrants appear to have a broad range of coauthors, with most individuals having only a few coauthors, whereas a few have many. We compare and contrast results from a number of recent studies of similar scope on co-authorship networks.

Cataloging economics preprints : An introduction to the RePEc project

SUMMARY Cataloging resources that assist in educating a domain specific community can require a finer level of granularity than objects that arc to be accessed by a more general domain community, and can become a costly process. One possible approach towards cataloging such resources is to get a community of providers involved in cataloging the materials that they provide. This paper introduces RePEc (http://netec.wust.edu/RePEc) as an example tor such an approach. RePEc is mainly a catalog of research papers in Economics. RePEc is based on set of over 80 archives, which all work independently but are interoperable. The key issue of the paper is to evaluate the success in providing data of reasonable quality a decentralized approach.