Is the psychology of high profits favorable to industrial renewal? Experimental evidence for the theory of transformation pressure and Schumpeterian economics

The theory of transformation pressure sheds light on the importance of negative driving forces for economic growth and the countercyclical movement in innovations and productivity growth. The theory suggests that firms have a status-quo bias in periods of increasing profits leading to lower productivity growth. Firm agents are governed by changes in current profits through historical relativism, the peak-end rule and overconfidence. They will first abandon a status-quo bias after an actual decline in profits though both under- and overreaction is possible. On the other hand Schumpeterian economics stress that firm renewal is speeded up during recoveries, e.g. by psychological reasons. The two contradicting hypotheses were tested by a role play where a group of university students in economics completed a questionnaire acting as managers for an established company. The students had the opportunity to choose between different growth strategies and define the underlying psychological mechanism. The questionnaire also provided room for rational considerations. The role play confirmed the theory of transformation pressure more than Schumpeterian economics but primarily that the students expected that they would have reacted rationally as managers.Transformation pressure; Schumpeterian economics; peak-end rule; historical relativism; productivity growth; overconfidence; bounded rationality; the business cycle; heuristic decision rules; role play

The WTO Dispute Settlement System 1995-2010: Some Descriptive Statistics

The Dispute Settlement (DS) system is a central feature of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement. This compulsory and binding two-level mechanism for the adjudication of disputes between WTO Members is the most active among international courts. The functioning of the DS system has attractive research interest among both lawyers and economists. This paper reports some descriptive statistics of the working of the DS system based on the recently updated Horn and Mavroidis WTO Dispute Settlement Data Set. The data set covers all 426 WTO disputes initiated through the official filing of a Request for Consultations from January 1, 1995, until August 11, 2011, and for these disputes it includes events occurring until July 28, 2011. There are in total approximately 67 000 observations. Each dispute is followed through its legal life via the panel stage, the Appellate Body stage, through to the implementation stage. The paper provides information on fundamental aspects of the use of the DS system, such as: • How active have the different countries been as complainants and as respondents? • Which agreements and which provisions are most commonly cited? • How are the adjudicating panels composed? • How successful have the different participants been?WTO; Dispute Settlement; Developing Countries

The WTO Dispute Settlement System 1995-2016: \u3ci\u3eA Data Set and Its Descriptive Statistics\u3c/i\u3e

In this paper, we provide some descriptive statistics of the first twenty years of the WTO (World Trade Organization) dispute settlement that we have extracted from the data set that we have put together, and made publicly available. The statistical information that we present here is divided into three thematic units: the statutory and de facto duration of each stage of the process, paying particular attention to the eventual conclusion of litigation; the identity and participation in the process of the various institutional players, that is, not only complainants and defendants, but also third parties, as well as the WTO judges (panelists and Appellate Body members); and, finally, information regarding the subject-matter of various disputes, regarding the frequency with which claims regarding consistency of measures with the covered agreements (but also, at a more disaggregate level, e.g., specific provisions) have been raised. We call our work “descriptive statistics”, because, in an effort to provide raw material that will help researchers to conduct their research as they see fit, we have consciously refrained from systematically interpreting the data that we have assembled

Black Cat, White Cat: The Identity of the WTO Judges

WTO judges are proposed by the WTO Secretariat and elected to act as ‘judges’ if either approved by the parties to a dispute, or by the WTO Director-General in case no agreement between the parties has been possible. They are typically ‘Geneva crowd’, that is, they are either current or former delegates representing their country before the WTO. This observation holds for both first- as well as second-instance WTO judges (e.g. Panelists and members of the Appellate Body). In that, the WTO evidences an attitude strikingly similar to the GATT. Whereas the legal regime has been heavily ‘legalized’, the people called to enforce it remain the same

The WTO Dispute Settlement System: 1995-2010 Some Descriptive Statistics

This paper reports descriptive statistics based on the WTO Dispute Settlement Data Set (Ver. 3.0). The data set contains approximately 67 000 observations on a wide range of aspects of the Dispute Settlement (DS) system, and is exclusively based on official WTO documents. It covers all 426 WTO disputes initiated through the official filing of a Request for Consultations from January 1, 1995, until August 11, 2011, and for these disputes it includes events occurring until July 28, 2011.1 In this paper however, we will omit data pertaining to 2011 and only consider the full years 1995—2010. In order to shed some light on differences across WTO Members in participation in the DS system, we will divide Members into five groups, as specified in detail in Table 1. Broadly speaking, these groups are: G2 - The European Union (EU), and the United States (US); IND - Other industrialized countries; DEV - Developing countries other than LDC; LDC - Least developed countries; BIC - Brazil, India and China. The EU is taken to be EU-15, since the enlargements came relatively late during the period we cover. For the most part, the choice in this regard makes little difference quantitatively, since most of the 12 countries acceding to the EU in 2004 and 2007 have been relatively inactive in the WTO. The LDC group corresponds to the list of LDCs prepared by the United Nations. A more discretionary line is drawn between IND and DEV. We have classified under IND, OECD Members, the non-OECD Members among the 12 countries that most recently became members of the EU, those that are currently at an advanced stage of their accession negotiations, as well as countries that are not OECD Members but have a very high per capita income, such as Singapore. The DEV group consists of all countries which do not fit into either of the above mentioned categories, and are not BIC countries either. BIC refers to Brazil, India, and China: the sheer number of cases in which Brazil, India and China have participated, as well as their overall participation in WTO, led us to these three countries as a separate group. The paper is structured as follows: Section 2 highlights the evolution of the total use of the DS system; Section 3 discusses some aspects of participation of the groups defined above when acting as complainants or respondents; Section 4 deals with the subject-matter of disputes; Section 5 highlights a few aspects of countries’ success with regard to the legal claims they made before panels; Section 6 provides information as to the nationality and the appointment process of WTO panelists; Section 7 focuses on the duration of dispute settlement procedures at different stages of the adjudication process; Section 8 concludes

Coherent evolution of parahydrogen induced polarisation using laser pump, NMR probe spectroscopy : Theoretical framework and experimental observation

We recently reported a pump-probe method that uses a single laser pulse to introduce parahydrogen (p-H2) into a metal dihydride complex and then follows the time-evolution of the p-H2-derived nuclear spin states by NMR. We present here a theoretical framework to describe the oscillatory behaviour of the resultant hyperpolarised NMR signals using a product operator formalism. We consider the cases where the p-H2-derived protons form part of an AX, AXY, AXYZ or AA′XX′ spin system in the product molecule. We use this framework to predict the patterns for 2D pump-probe NMR spectra, where the indirect dimension represents the evolution during the pump-probe delay and the positions of the cross-peaks depend on the difference in chemical shift of the p-H2-derived protons and the difference in their couplings to other nuclei. The evolution of the NMR signals of the p-H2-derived protons, as well as the transfer of hyperpolarisation to other NMR-active nuclei in the product, is described. The theoretical framework is tested experimentally for a set of ruthenium dihydride complexes representing the different spin systems. Theoretical predictions and experimental results agree to within experimental error for all features of the hyperpolarised 1H and 31P pump-probe NMR spectra. Thus we establish the laser pump, NMR probe approach as a robust way to directly observe and quantitatively analyse the coherent evolution of p-H2-derived spin order over micro-to-millisecond timescales

Effects of ocean sprawl on ecological connectivity: impacts and solutions

The growing number of artificial structures in estuarine, coastal and marine environments is causing “ocean sprawl”. Artificial structures do not only modify marine and coastal ecosystems at the sites of their placement, but may also produce larger-scale impacts through their alteration of ecological connectivity - the movement of organisms, materials and energy between habitat units within seascapes. Despite the growing awareness of the capacity of ocean sprawl to influence ecological connectivity, we lack a comprehensive understanding of how artificial structures modify ecological connectivity in near- and off-shore environments, and when and where their effects on connectivity are greatest. We review the mechanisms by which ocean sprawl may modify ecological connectivity, including trophic connectivity associated with the flow of nutrients and resources. We also review demonstrated, inferred and likely ecological impacts of such changes to connectivity, at scales from genes to ecosystems, and potential strategies of management for mitigating these effects. Ocean sprawl may alter connectivity by: (1) creating barriers to the movement of some organisms and resources - by adding physical barriers or by modifying and fragmenting habitats; (2) introducing new structural material that acts as a conduit for the movement of other organisms or resources across the landscape; and (3) altering trophic connectivity. Changes to connectivity may, in turn, influence the genetic structure and size of populations, the distribution of species, and community structure and ecological functioning. Two main approaches to the assessment of ecological connectivity have been taken: (1) measurement of structural connectivity - the configuration of the landscape and habitat patches and their dynamics; and (2) measurement of functional connectivity - the response of organisms or particles to the landscape. Our review reveals the paucity of studies directly addressing the effects of artificial structures on ecological connectivity in the marine environment, particularly at large spatial and temporal scales. With the ongoing development of estuarine and marine environments, there is a pressing need for additional studies that quantify the effects of ocean sprawl on ecological connectivity. Understanding the mechanisms by which structures modify connectivity is essential if marine spatial planning and eco-engineering are to be effectively utilised to minimise impacts

The WTO dispute settlement system 1995-2016 : a data set and its descriptive statistics

In this paper, we provide some descriptive statistics of the first twenty years of the WTO (World Trade Organization) dispute settlement that we have extracted from the data set that we have put together, and made publicly available (http://globalgovernanceprogramme.eui.eu/wto-case-law-project/ ). The statistical information that we present here is divided into three thematic units: the statutory and de facto duration of each stage of the process, paying particular attention to the eventual conclusion of litigation; the identity and participation in the process of the various institutional players, that is, not only complainants and defendants, but also third parties, as well as the WTO judges (panelists and Appellate Body members); and, finally, information regarding the subject-matter of various disputes, regarding the frequency with which claims regarding consistency of measures with the covered agreements (but also, at a more disaggregate level, e.g., specific provisions) have been raised. We call our work "descriptive statistics", because, in an effort to provide raw material that will help researchers to conduct their research as they see fit, we have consciously refrained from systematically interpreting the data that we have assembled