History of Economics or a Selected History of Economics?

While research on the history of economics can be important to modern economics, the work of historians of economics is more often than reasonable associated with either non-contemporary or heterodox issues. I provide quantitative evidence of this, by analyzing the publications in the three main history of economics journals over the last fourteen years (1993-2006). This trend must change if the work of historians of economics is to be taken seriously by mainstream economists.History of Economics

Comment on "Productive Public Expenditure and Imperfect Competition with Endogenous Price Markup"

In this note we show that the claim from Chen et al (2005) that their model generates an endogenous markup is incorrect. This is not only a nomenclature issue: using the �fixed markup which we show to be the only one consistent with the structure of the model implies the main conclusions in that paper do not hold. In particular, government expenditure in infrastructure cannot affect the business cycle in this model by deliberately changing the market structure of the economy.Endogenous markup

Innovation, Market Structure and Economic Growth

This paper presents a dynamic partial equilibrium model that endogenizes firms' investment decision on innovation: product innovation causes horizontal expansion growth, and process innovation causes vertical expansion growth. Market structure in different markets emerges as a consequence of different investment on innovation opportunities. Main variables that constrain this structure in a given market are the rate of scientific (basic) discoveries that permit innovation productivity, and the degree of substitution between varieties, together with the possible existence of scope economies.R&D, Market Structure, Growth.

Productive Public Expenditure and Imperfect Competition with Endogenous Price Markup: Comment

In a recent article Chen et al. (2005) analyse the role of government expenditure in an imperfectly competitive static model, introducing a government-expenditure externality through the production function. Our purpose in the present paper is to argue that the claim from the authors that their model generates an endogenous markup is in our view incorrect. We argue that their model does not contain an endogenous markup, but a fixed one and that their claim is based upon an incorrect interpretation of what is the marginal cost in their own model.Endogenous markup.

Sailing away from Malthus: intercontinental trade and European economic growth, 1500-1800

What was the contribution of intercontinental trade to the development of the European early modern economies? Previous attempts to answer this question have focused on static measures of the weight of trade in the aggregate economy at a given point in time, or on the comparison of the income of specific imperial nations just before and after the loss of their overseas empire. These static accounting approaches are inappropriate if dynamic and spillover effects are at work, as seems likely. In this paper I use a panel dataset of ten countries in a dynamic model which allows for spillover effects, multiple channels of causality, persistence and country-specific fixed effects. Using this dynamic model, simulations suggest that in the counterfactual absence of intercontinental trade, rates of early modern economic growth and urbanization would have been moderately to substantially lower. For the four main long-distance traders, by 1800 the real wage was, depending on the country, 6.1 to 22.7% higher, and urbanization was 4.0 to 11.7 percentage points higher, than they would have otherwise been. For some countries, the effect was quite pronounced: in the Netherlands between 1600 and 1750, for instance, intercontinental trade was responsible for most of the observed increase in real wages and for a large share of the observed increase in urbanization. At the same time, countries which did not engage in long-distance trade would have had real wage increases in the order of 5.4 to 17.8% and urbanization increases of 2.2 to 3.2 percentage points, should they have done so at the same level as the four main traders. Intercontinental trade appears to have played an important role for all nations which engaged in it, with the exception of France. These conclusions stand in contrast with the earlier literature which uses a partial equilibrium and static accounting approach

Introduction to Special Issue on the Economic History of Portugal

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The effects of market linkages and the natural rate of discoveries on market structure

The traditional approach makes investment in innovation constrained by market structure. This paper explores the causality from innovation to market structure. Omitting this causality direction on empirical models may explain empirical problems and contradictions on these models

Productive public expenditure and imperfect competition with endogenous price markup: comment

In a recent article Chen et al. (2005) analyse the role of government expenditure in an imperfectly competitive static model, introducing a government-expenditure externality through the production function. Our purpose in the present paper is to argue that the claim from the authors that their model generates an endogenous markup is in our view incorrect. We argue that their model does not contain an endogenous markup, but a fixed one and that their claim is based upon an incorrect interpretation of what is the marginal cost in their own model

Not an ordinary bank but a great engine of state: the Bank of England and the British economy, 1694–1844

From its foundation as a private corporation in 1694, the Bank of England extended large amounts of credit to support the British private economy and to support an increasingly centralised British state. The Bank helped the British state reach a position of geopolitical and economic hegemony in the international economic order. In this paper, we deploy recalibrated financial data to analyse an evolving trajectory of connections between the British economy, the state, and the Bank of England. We show how these connections contributed to form an effective and efficient fiscal–naval state and promote the development of a system of financial intermediation for the economy. This symbiotic relationship became stronger after 1793. The evidence that we consider here shows that although the Bank was nominally a private institution and profits were paid to its shareholders, it was playing a public role well before Bagehot's doctrine

A process-based control for evolvable production systems

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Electrotécnica e de ComputadoresNowadays, companies in a challenging environment are compelled to adapt to the rapid changes in the manufacturing business. The search for new processes to create products with short life-cycles at low cost, while keeping the same levels of productivity and quality is greater than ever. This has generated the need to create even more agile manufacturing systems, which could easily adapt to the market changes at a low cost. Advances in information technologies have allowed manufacturing systems to achieve new levels of agility, opening the doors to new approaches. These same advances helped companies in several sectors other than manufacturing to gain e ectiveness through the synchronization of the processes of their several departments by using Business Process Management tools. This thesis proposes a system that reacts and adapts itself to di erent production orders by means of recon guration. To reach this goal, the concept of Business Process Management was used. This concept, already used in many companies, allows them to model their inner behaviours with processes that can be changed according to their needs. A manufacturing system using this may become equally agile and alter its functioning in accordance with the needs of other departments of the same company. To create the system presented in this thesis it was used a multi-agent architecture based on process execution. Each agent contains a knowledge base, used by its processes,that stores internal or external information. This system may be used not only in the manufacturing shop oor, but also in any other areas within a company. This thesis also presents an application of the system to the shop oor, based on the Evolvable Production Systems concept, in which each agent represents a manufacturing resource that o ers a given set of services useful to the production process. The resources,by means of the agents, may aggregate among themselves to execute services together. Keywords: Manufacturing system, multi-agent system, ontology, process, BPM, EPS