infonet-economy

This study starts from the observation that today's Western trading nations are exposed to multiple risks of energy supplies, eg simultaneous shortage of oil and gas supplies. To cope with these risks, both oil and gas can be stockpiled. Adopting the viewpoint of a policy maker who aims at minimizing the expected cost of security of supply, optimal simultaneous adjustments of...

In current welfare state analysis there is little theory to explain the action of exclusive groups. This article explores the possibilities of a theory that focuses on the interaction between individual choices and strategies, the formal systems, policies and rules of governments and the informal norms and practices of groups. The argument is that club theory, a branch of public...

This paper explores the relation between non-exponential waiting times between events and the distribution of the number of events in a fixed time interval. It is shown that within this framework the frequently observed phenomenon of overdispersion, i.e. a variance that exceeds the mean, is caused by a decreasing hazard function of the waiting times, while an increasing hazard...

This article studies several attributes of a firm's long-run decisions about organizational structure, attributes that affect the firm's short-run innovative activity. We focus on flexibility, which lowers the future costs of implementing innovations, and research capabilities, which improve the future opportunities for innovation. We consider two dimensions of innovation:...

The historical institutionalist tradition in comparative politics commonly assigns analytical primacy to political institutions. Whereas this polity-centeredness may be quite justifiable for purposes of comparative public policy, students of comparative political economy should pay systematic attention not only to economic institutions but also to a range of economic-structural...

In this paper we compute the IF of a general class of estimators for grouped data, namely the class of MPE. We find that this IF can be large although it is bounded. Therefore, we propose a more general class of estimators, the MGP-estimators, which include the class of estimators based on the power divergence statistic and permits to define robust estimators. By analogy with Hampel...