Expectations, employment and prices: a suggested interpretation of the new 'farmerian' economics

This paper aims at providing a critical assessment of the new ‘Farmerian’ economics, i.e. the recent Farmer’s attempt to provide a new micro-foundation of the General Theory grounded on modern search and business cycle theories. Specifically, I develop a theoretical model that summarizes the main arguments of the suggested approach by showing that a special importance has to be attached to the search mechanism, the choice of units and ‘animal spirits’ modelling. Thereafter, referring to self-made real-business-cycle experiments, I discuss the main empirical implications of the resulting framework. Finally, I consider its policy implications by stressing the problematic nature of demand management interventions and the advisability of extending the role of the central bank in preventing financial bubbles and crashes.Old Keynesian Economics; search; demand constrained equilibrium; Shimer puzzle; economic policy.

The animal spirits hypothesis and the Benhabib-Farmer condition for indeterminacy

This paper provides a self-contained review of the introduction of the animal spirits hypothesis into the infinite horizon optimal growth model. The analysis begins with an economic discussion of Pontryagin’s maximum principles. Thereafter, I develop a version of the increasing-returns Benhabib-Farmer model by showing the possible sub-optimality of the central planner solution and deriving the bifurcation condition for indeterminacy. Moreover, I give some insights on how to model intrinsic and extrinsic uncertainty. Finally, analysing the equilibrium condition of the labour market, I provide an intuitive rationale for the mechanism that in this model might lead prophecies to be self-fulfilling.Maximum problems in continuous time; indeterminate equilibrium paths; self-fulfilling prophecies.

Optimal Growth with Labor Market Frictions

In this paper, I build a capital accumulation model in which labour has to be alternatively employed in the production of goods or in the recruitment of workers. Within this setting, I show that (i) the intensive measure of capital may converge towards its stationary value in a non-monotonic manner; (ii) Pareto optimal allocations can also be achieved in a decentralized environment in which the wage is indexed to labour market tightness; (iii) the consistency of the wage that implements efficient allocations with the competitiveness of the market for goods relies on vanishing values of the discount rate

Caratterizzazione biologica di matrici per il trattamento di erniazioni addominali: MES-STAR project

Le erniazioni della parete addominale, causate dalla fuoriuscita di un viscere dalla cavità che lo accoglie, sono la patologia più frequente in cui si imbatte un chirurgo; in Italia il numero di interventi supera i 100.000 l'anno, questo ovviamente comporta un elevato costo sociale. Le tecniche chirurgiche utilizzate per trattare le ernie si sono molto sviluppate e, negli ultimi anni, si è passati da Erniorrafie under-tension, che prevedono la sola ricostruzione della parete suturando i diversi piani anatomici, alle Ernioplastiche prostetiche, ricostruzioni tension-free eseguite con l'ausilio di protesi biocompatibili che sostituiscono e rinforzano i tessuti stessi. Nonostante il notevole decremento delle recidive, che sono passate dal 40% dei casi con le Erniorrafie al 20% con le tecniche prostetiche, il problema dello sviluppo di laparocele (erniazioni secondarie) rimane di primaria importanza. L'ampio impiego delle protesi nella chirurgia delle ernie addominali ha portato l'esigenza di uno studio accurato dei materiali impiegati e degli effetti collaterali. Il progetto MES-STAR si pone l'obiettivo di sviluppare protesi tecnologicamente innovative capaci di incrementare il tasso di rigenerazione tissutale e, al tempo stesso, di ridurre gli effetti secondari come lo sviluppo della reazione da corpo estraneo e la formazione di adesioni con i visceri. Il lavoro di tesi, svolto in collaborazione con l'azienda DIPROMED s.r.l (San Mauro Torinese, TO), mira alla caratterizzazione biologica di matrici per la realizzazione di nuove protesi erniarie. La sperimentazione ha previsto, inizialmente, la valutazione di biocompatibilità delle matrici prese in considerazione grazie a test di citotossicità, effettuati seguendo le direttive ISO 10993 standard. Questi test hanno permesso di fare uno screening dei campioni e di selezionare i materiali da sottoporre alle fasi successive di caratterizzazione biologica. Sui questi materiali è stato valutato sia il trend di crescita cellulare, con saggi di vitalità a tempistiche definite, sia la produzione di marker correlati al processo infiammatorio. Nello specifico, nel mezzo di coltura, è stata quantificata la presenza dell'interleuchina 6 (IL-6, marker pro-infiammatorio) e l'interleuchina 10 (IL-10 marker anti-infiammatorio). La caratterizzazione ha previsto inoltre l’analisi di distribuzione del collagene di tipo I e di tipo III (coinvolti nel processo di rigenerazione del tessuto) con tecniche di immunoistochimica nonché la produzione delle diverse componenti della matrice extracellulare e del relativo secretoma cellulare tramite spettrometria di massa. Sulle protesi risultate biocompatibili e con un buon trend di crescita cellulare, le analisi dei marker infiammatori nel mezzo di coltura hanno mostrato la tendenza all'incremento dell'IL-6 e, parallelamente, al decremento dell'IL-10. I saggi immunoistochimici effettuati al 21° giorno di coltura hanno evidenziato un aumento nella secrezione del collagene di tipo III (neoformato). Gli esperimenti sono stati eseguiti sotto la supervisione del Dott. Federico Vozzi nel laboratorio di Materiali Biomimetici ed Ingegneria dei Tessuti Biologici del Prof. Claudio Domenici sito presso l'Istituto di Fisiologia Clinica (IFC) del CNR di Pisa

Coronavirus Chronicles

https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/pandemic-pandemonium-prompts/1003/thumbnail.jp

Efficiency-Wage Competition: What Happens as the Number of Players Increases?

In this paper, I explore the consequences of extending the number of firms within an efficiency-wage competition setting by showing that the shape of the effort function is crucial in determining key features of the economy. Specifically, when workers are endowed with a concave (sigmoid) effort function, the wage behaviour of firms follows a collusive (competitive) pattern and the symmetric Nash equilibrium is unstable (stable). Moreover, when effort is concave (sigmoid), full employment is characterized by a labour exploitation that increases (decreases) together with the number of productive units required to sustain that allocation. These findings may have intriguing implications for the existence of involuntary unemployment as well as for policies aimed at increasing employment

The determination of the price of capital goods: A differential game approach

In this paper, building upon a q-model of investment with adjustment costs, we address the strategic determinants of the price of newly installed productive capacity. Specifically, we develop a differential game in which a competitive producer of consumption goods deals with a seller of capital goods endowed with market power. From a theoretical perspective, we show that an open-loop Stackelberg equilibrium with non-cooperative features requires the producer of consumption goods to be more impatient than the seller of capital goods. Thereafter, relying on some numerical simulations, we show that our theoretical setting is able to replicate the countercyclical pattern of the relative price of capital goods as well as its negative relationship with the investment-output ratio

Dynamic wage bargaining and labour market fluctuations: the role of productivity shocks

AbstractIn this paper, we explore the way in which different bargaining settings affect labour market fluctuations by means of an analytical apparatus that has never been used for this purpose. Specifically, modelling wage negotiations as a problem of stochastic optimal control, we analyze how productivity disturbances shape the dynamics of output, employment, and wages by focusing on the way in which firms' technology and workers' preferences interact with the adjustment rules of employment underlying the bargaining process. With a quadratic production function and risk averse workers, we show that wage negotiation outcomes whose employment adjustments go in the direction of the labour demand of the firms match the cyclical behaviour of the involved variables but fail to replicate the observed wage rigidity. By contrast, we show that wage bargaining outcomes whose employment adjustments target the contract curve of two negotiating parties are also able to deliver a strong degree of wage stickiness

The dynamics of working hours and wages under implicit contracts

In this paper, we explore the dynamics of working hours and wages in a model economy where a firm and its workforce are linked to each other by an implicit contract. Specifically, we develop a deterministic and a stochastic framework in which the firm sets its level of labor utilization by considering that workers’ earnings tend to adjust in the direction of a fixed level. Withoutany uncertainty about firm’s profitability, we show that the existence and the properties of stationary solutions rely on the factors that usually determine the enforceability of contracts and we demonstrate that wages move countercyclically towards the allocation preferred by the firm. Moreover, we show that adding uncertainty does not overturn the countercyclical pattern of wages but is helpful in explaining their dynamic behavior in response to demand shocks as well as their typical stickiness observed at the macrolevel