Macroeconomic Implications of Alternative Tax Regimes: The Case of Greece

This paper uses a Dynamic General Equilibrium model that incorporates a detailed fiscal policy structure to examine how changes in the tax mix influence economic activity and welfare in the Greek economy. The results suggest that tax reforms that reduce the labour and capital income tax rates and increase the consumption tax rate lead to higher levels of output, consumption and private investment. If the goal of tax policy is to promote economic growth by changing the tax mix, then it should reduce the capital income tax rate and increase the consumption tax rate. In contrast, a lifetime welfare promoting policy would be to cut the labour income tax rate and increase the consumption tax rate.Fiscal Policy; Transitional dynamics; Economic growth; Welfare

Η στρατηγική των ελληνικών επιχειρήσεων στην αντιμετώπιση της κρίσης

Εθνικό Μετσόβιο Πολυτεχνείο--Μεταπτυχιακή Εργασία. Διεπιστημονικό-Διατμηματικό Πρόγραμμα Μεταπτυχιακών Σπουδών (Δ.Π.Μ.Σ.) “Διοίκηση Επιχειρήσεων (ΜΒΑ)

The Expansion of ICT: A New Framework of Inclusion and Exclusion from the Global Realm

The proliferation of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their interaction with certain social systems, led to the emergence of the phenomenon of globalization. Globalization lays on a technological infrastructure that makes it possible, by minimizing the time needed for communication and inter-systemic interactions. This also, has led to a strong support of the global financial system to the ICT industry, so that the latter can provide faster applications at any level of networking, thus putting both globalization and the ICT industry in an accelerating mutual development. This paper, examines the problems certain social systems face into this new environment, due to the structural coupling of those systems with a technological backbone that functions as a system of inclusion (and thus exclusion as well) of those social systems which do not conceive of the ICT as a prerequisite for their own continuation. That situation is challenging the political subsystems, as to their ability to govern the social systems through their way towards a global society. The paper initially presents the state of globalization in a brief way and next introduces some of the basic concepts of contemporary systems theory. At the rest parts, we examine the problems posed to the basic social system-reconstituting functions by the “real-time” communications global network and finally we introduce some preliminary thoughts about the ways the political system (or any other management system for the matter) can try to solve those problems

An alternative characterization of MAR in shared parameter models for incomplete longitudinal data and its utili

Dropout is a common complication in longitudinal studies, especially since the distinction between missing not at random (MNAR) and missing at random (MAR) dropout is intractable. Consequently, one starts with an analysis that is valid under MAR and then performs a sensitivity analysis by considering MNAR departures from it. To this end, specific classes of joint models, such as pattern-mixture models (PMMs) and selection models (SeMs), have been proposed. On the contrary, shared-parameter models (SPMs) have received less attention, possibly because they do not embody a characterization of MAR. A few approaches to achieve MAR in SPMs exist, but are difficult to implement in existing software. In this article, we focus on SPMs for incomplete longitudinal and time-to-dropout data and propose an alternative characterization of MAR by exploiting the conditional independence assumption, under which outcome and missingness are independent given a set of random effects. By doing so, the censoring distribution can be utilized to cover a wide range of assumptions for the missing data mechanism on the subject-specific level. This approach offers substantial advantages over its counterparts and can be easily implemented in existing software. More specifically, it offers flexibility over the assumption for the missing data generating mechanism that governs dropout by allowing subject-specific perturbations of the censoring distribution, whereas in PMMs and SeMs dropout is considered MNAR strictly

Financial sector and business cycles determinants in the EMU : an empirical approach (1996-2011)

This paper investigates potential business cycles determinants for the EMU countries among financial sector indicators examining at the same time the link between financial sector variables and business cycles volatility. We find that the total value of stocks traded, the private sector debt and the net inflows of FDI constitute significant determinants of business cycles fluctuations. Financial openness has an increasing effect on business cycles volatility while there is an unsettled relationship between financial depth and volatility. Another important finding of the paper is that the analysis provides evidence in favor of the occurrence of opportunistic political business cycles among EMU counterparts. The robustness of the above findings is verified via the use of relevant econometric methods such as EGLS, GLM and fixed-effect models.peer-reviewe

Using the WinQSB Software in Critical Path Analysis

In the present paper will be appealed sub modules from the PERT/CPM module of WinQSB software, adequate to solve the scheduling problems.CPM, PERT, critical path, normal duration, crash duration

Using Joint Models for Longitudinal and Time-to-Event Data to Investigate the Causal Effect of Salvage Therapy after Prostatectomy

Prostate cancer patients who undergo prostatectomy are closely monitored for recurrence and metastasis using routine prostate-specific antigen (PSA) measurements. When PSA levels rise, salvage therapies are recommended to decrease the risk of metastasis. However, due to the side effects of these therapies and to avoid over-treatment, it is important to understand which patients and when to initiate these salvage therapies. In this work, we use the University of Michigan Prostatectomy registry Data to tackle this question. Due to the observational nature of this data, we face the challenge that PSA is simultaneously a time-varying confounder and an intermediate variable for salvage therapy. We define different causal salvage therapy effects defined conditionally on different specifications of the longitudinal PSA history. We then illustrate how these effects can be estimated using the framework of joint models for longitudinal and time-to-event data. All proposed methodology is implemented in the freely-available R package JMbayes2