Energy and Resource Allocation: A Dynamic Model of the "Dutch Disease"

It is well known that a domestic resource discovery gives rise to wealth effects that cause a squeeze of the tradeable good sector of an open economy. The decline of the manufacturing sector following an energy discovery has been termed the "Dutch disease," and has been investigated in many recent studies. Our model extends the principally static analyses to date by allowing for: (1 ) short-run capital specificity and long-run capital mobility; (2) inter- national capital flows; and (3) far-sighted intertemporal optimizing behavior by households and firms. The model is solved by numerical simulation.

Input Price Shocks and the Slowdown in Economic Growth: The Case of U.K.Manufacturing

This paper provides a theoretical and empirical analysis of the effects of input price shocks on economic growth, with a focus on United Kingdom manufacturing in the 1970s. The theoretical model predicts a discrete decline in out- put and productivity after an input price rise, and a longer-run slowdown in productivity growth, real wage growth, and capital accumulation. These features characterize the United Kingdom and most other OECD economies after 1973. The empirical results confirm the important role of input prices in recent U.K. adjustment, but also point to an important role for other supply and demand factors.

Supply vs. Demand Approaches to the Problem of Stagflation

We develop a model of aggregate supply and demand in the open economy to explain the important characteristics of international macroeconomic adjustment in the 1970s. Traditional demand-oriented models cannot account for the worldwide phenomenon of rising inflation and unemployment in the mid-70s, or for the failure of most industrialized economies to recover from the deep recession of 1974-75. When aggregate supply is carefully treated, it is found that much of the inflation and sluggish output performance may be attributed to the jump in the real costs of intermediate inputs and the failure of real wages to adjust downward after the input price shock. A simulation model shows that fuel inputs are sufficiently important in production that a large part of the worldwide recession may be attributed to the change in the relative price of oil, since 1973. In an empirical section, it is suggested that countries differ in their response to supply shocks and macro-policies because of differences in key structural relationships, particularly in wage determination.

Metal Parts Generation by Three Dimensional Printing

Mechanical Engineerin

Transient spectroscopic studies of disordered semiconductors for solar-driven fuel synthesis

In this thesis, time-resolved spectroscopic techniques are used to link the activity of materials for solar-driven fuel generation with their excited state dynamics. Chapter 1 provides an introduction to the wider scope of this work, discussing global warming and the opportunities of solar energy in its mitigation, leading on to artificial photosynthesis as a means of storing solar energy at large scale. Chapter 2 covers the fundamentals of semiconducting photocatalysts and their photophysics before discussing the properties of metal oxide and polymer photocatalysts in particular. The aims and objectives of this thesis are presented. Chapter 3 describes the spectroscopic techniques used to characterise the photocatalyst materials in this thesis and elaborates on the experimental challenges which arise from applying these techniques to the materials studied herein. Chapter 4, the first results chapter, investigates a series of conjugated polymers as photocatalysts for hydrogen evolution. These polymers have sulfone groups embedded into their backbone and represent some of the most active materials discovered in the class of conjugated polymers so far. Photogenerated reaction intermediates are monitored on timescales of femtoseconds to seconds after excitation, and the yield of long-lived electrons is found to qualitatively correlate with the photocatalytic activity in this polymer series. Photocatalysts prepared via palladium-catalysed coupling reactions typically contain considerable amounts of palladium impurities, which have been shown to act as co-catalysts for hydrogen evolution in F8BT nanoparticles. Chapter 5 studies the effect of these palladium impurities in such F8BT nanoparticles on the excited state of the polymer, and demonstrates that the palladium centres within these particles quench photogenerated excitons about twice as fast as the electron donor diethylamine in the solution phase. A comparison to one of the sulfone polymers characterised in the previous chapter is made under charge accumulation conditions. Chapter 6 switches the focus to metal oxides and investigates the photophysical differences between near-stoichiometric and highly oxygen-deficient oxides using WO3 as a model material. Highly oxygen-deficient WO3 exhibits a strong blue colouration due to a large density of states within the bandgap, which is found to also give rise to rapid trapping of photogenerated holes. This rapid trapping process prolongs the lifetime of photogenerated charges by several orders of magnitude, but also leads to a severe reduction in oxidative driving force, thus compromising the efficiency of demanding oxidation reactions such as water oxidation. In Chapter 7, a series of 11 different metal oxides is investigated in order to test whether common activity-related photophysical characteristics arise from similarities in their electronic configurations. It is found that metal oxides with empty (d0) or closed d-shells (d10) exhibit delocalised electrons with generally longer lifetimes compared to oxides with open d-shells. This stark lifetime difference is due to a rapid sub-picosecond localisation process in the latter materials, which is attributed to the formation of small polarons. Finally, Chapter 8 presents the overall conclusions of this thesis and discusses the different chapters in context to each other. Directions for future work are suggested.Open Acces

Fitting dynamic factor models to non-stationary time series

Factor modelling of a large time series panel has widely proven useful to reduce its cross-sectional dimensionality. This is done by explaining common co-movements in the panel through the existence of a small number of common components, up to some idiosyncratic behaviour of each individual series. To capture serial correlation in the common components, a dynamic structure is used as in traditional (uni- or multivariate) time series analysis of second order structure, i.e. allowing for infinite-length filtering of the factors via dynamic loadings. In this paper, motivated from economic data observed over long time periods which show smooth transitions over time in their covariance structure, we allow the dynamic structure of the factor model to be non-stationary over time, by proposing a deterministic time variation of its loadings. In this respect we generalise existing recent work on static factor models with time-varying loadings as well as the classical, i.e. stationary, dynamic approximate factor model. Motivated from the stationary case, we estimate the common components of our dynamic factor model by the eigenvectors of a consistent estimator of the now time-varying spectral density matrix of the underlying data-generating process. This can be seen as time-varying principal components approach in the frequency domain. We derive consistency of this estimator in a "double-asymptotic" framework of both cross-section and time dimension tending to infinity. A simulation study illustrates the performance of our estimators.econometrics;

Consider the Source: Receiver-Assigned Attributions of Credibility to Influential Bloggers

The purpose of this study is to examine credibility as it pertains to blogging. While studies have traditionally considered credibility in the context of the material being created, this study examines source credibility in the context of the personality creating the material. Therefore, this study functions primarily as an exploratory study and seeks to present an understanding of source credibility from the perspective of the individuals participating in blogging communities cultivated by influential bloggers. An interview questionnaire was specially developed for this study. Ten participants were selected for this study. Eight of them are females, two of the participants are males. All but one of the participants are Caucasians. The study’s results show that support for attributions of credibility differing based on receiver gender and ethnicity does not exist. However, there was a difference in the types of credible behavior attributed to the bloggers in this study. Responses concerning the male Hispanic blogger indicate credibly behavior oriented toward providing depth of information, whereas responses concerning the White female blogger indicated an inclination toward a community-centric blog focused on providing a broad range of resources. Due to the limited sample size of this study, the ability to make general statements and infer statistical significance is limited, thus relegating this study to being only useful for exploratory purposes. This study’s results, data interpretation, implications, and possibilities for future research are discussed at length

Globalization Report 2016: Who Benefits Most from Globalization? Bertelsmann Policy Brief #2018/02

The globalization report appears regularly and sets an authoritative standard for the comprehensive analysis of current globalization issues and global economic development. The 2016 globalization report comes in two parts. Building on the previous report, the first part focuses on the question of to what extent different countries have benefited from globalization in the past and to which degree this is possible in the future. The second part analyses the export performance and the development of the international competitiveness of 42 globally important economies. The first part of the investigation creates a globalization index which takes into account the economic, political and social aspects of globalization. Subsequently, the index data are used, together with a regression analysis, to quantify and compare the impacts on growth caused by globalization in the various countries. Then the country is identified which has achieved the most growth as a result of globalization