1,720,984 research outputs found
Social and Behavioural Macroeconomics: Theoretical and Policy Perspectives
No full textDespite significant theoretical advances in social and behavioural macroeconomics, little has been done to synthesise the disparate developments in these fields and point the way forward to future research directions and policy implications. This book reviews, unifies and extends diverse strands of thinking and shows how these theories can be used to improve macroeconomic modelling for policy development in a range of spheres.The book explores how the most empirically relevant socio-behavioural traits can widen the scope of macroeconomics to fruitfully address new issues and challenges, such as rising inequality, the change in the functional distribution of income (labour and capital shares), and a further understanding of the government spending multiplier. Chapters also address more traditional topics such as macroeconomic policy effectiveness, growth, saving and labour supply. Other, more open-ended themes of the book include whether the concept of individual rationality should be complemented by collective rationality; whether socio-behavioural traits underlie socially inefficient outcomes such as tragedies-of-the-commons, rat races, financial crises and global warming; and whether such traits can provide new foundations for (New) Keynesian macroeconomics.This book will be essential reading for advanced researchers and students working in macroeconomics and other social sciences, including psychology and politics, as well as those working on the theoretical end of public policy
Essays on fiscal sustainability in the Caribbean
Get PDFThe PhD thesis sets out to improve fiscal sustainability assessment in the Englishspeaking Caribbean and to provide the tools for more robust dialogue on the topic. It also seeks to influence Caribbean governments’ fiscal policy actions by providing evidence on debt sustainability issues, and appropriate fiscal responses. The guiding questions of the thesis are whether Caribbean fiscal policy is conducive to debt sustainability now and into the future, and what is the region’s debt limit, important enquiries considering the islands’ comparatively high vulnerability and prolonged debt challenges. The thesis makes several original contributions, including bridging the wide gap in Caribbean research; original empirical testing; some new recommendations for policy action; methodological innovation; and lays new foundations for future research. The literature on fiscal sustainability, particularly from the perspective of the Caribbean, is extremely shallow in comparison to that of other indebted regions, including Latin America and Europe. This paucity of research on the region is startling owing to the region’s high and established rank within the halls of the globally indebted, crystallised by the region’s omission in the most recent and prominent survey on global debt issues. The lack of focus on the region and accompanying implications is the primary gap which the thesis aims to fill, as is unearthed in a critical literature review that also helps to determine the most appropriate methods for responding to the thesis’ research questions, as well as assists with establishing the status quo as pertains the state of fiscal sustainability in the Caribbean. Moreover, from the perspective of fiscal policy limits, to establish the current perspectives on the Caribbean’s debt threshold, which is important for guiding the region’s debt reduction. In search of answers on the region’s fiscal sustainability, an innovative empirical test for cointegration between the Caribbean’s revenue and expenditure outlays is undertaken using an adapted sustainability cointegration approach. From this the thesis confirms the presence of sustainable fiscal policy in 6 of the 9 Caribbean countries tested, but with a debt ratio that is seemingly unbounded. In this regard, it is recommended that governments consider implementation of expenditure rules, enshrined in the constitution, to strengthen the region’s sustainability position. Further, motivated by two recent empirical studies on debt sustainability in the region, with the use of panel data, the thesis employs fiscal reaction functions but with an estimator selected by way of Monte-Carlo simulations to determine the least biased approach for assessing fiscal sustainability in the Caribbean, noting an incongruence between recent methods employed and the Caribbean’s data structure. Through this novel approach, and with the addition of institutional variables as controls to the Caribbean fiscal response function – another original contribution, the thesis again confirms the region’s weak fiscal sustainability and finds that diversifying trade in services, reducing election spending, and improving on the perception of corruption in the region are key policy initiatives for improving the primary balance and the region’s fiscal sustainability going forward. On the question of the region’s debt capacity, the rise in Caribbean debt post COVID-19 stemming from large fiscal stimulus and positive interest-growth rate differentials, evidences the thesis’ concern on the matter. A debt threshold is an important anchor for fiscal policy generally, and more so in the Caribbean where fiscal policy is the primary policy tool. A clearly established debt threshold provides the basis for debt reduction targeting and for assessing risks around the debt trajectory. A very wide margin of thresholds has been the feature of research in this area in the Caribbean, leaving much at bay as regards the region’s debt limit. In a fresh bid to answer the related question, the thesis employs Gosh et al. (2013) fiscal fatigue theory, which postulates a positive response of fiscal policy to debt as debt rises, but a negative fiscal response at ever higher levels of debt owing to a government’s eventual fiscal fatigue. Despite this theory’s intuitive appeal and in contrast to the findings of Cevik and Nanda (2020), the thesis concludes that there is no evidence of a cubic fiscal reaction function for the Caribbean, and therefore it does not appear that a debt threshold for the region exists as defined by the theory. Instead, the thesis finds that the Caribbean’s debt threshold is defined by way of a dynamic threshold model at 106.2 percent, nearly double the IMF rule of thumb and the thresholds estimated via the debt-growth nexus. Several policy approaches are proposed to enhance and strengthen Caribbean governments’ fiscal sustainability based on the results unearthed in the thesis. These include: the introduction of fiscal rules for better expenditure management; establishing a debt threshold assessment method and undertaking regular assessments; strategic fiscal adjustment to avoid default; diversification of trade in services; containment of election spending; and improving the Caribbean’s ranking in the perception of corruption index. Collectively, the thesis’ findings imply a renewed relevance of cointegration approaches to fiscal sustainability and the applicability of the revenue-expenditure method for fiscal sustainability assessment to the Caribbean, where data is severely limited. It raises questions on the suitability of the fiscal fatigue theory for assessing debt thresholds in developing countries, given the theory’s developed country origins and due to the contrasting composition of developed countries versus Caribbean countries’ debt portfolios. The thesis warns of making policy decisions based on regional assessments that could mislead owing to the heterogeneity at country level, which could readily be missed due to the necessity of panel data to overcome serious data issues, especially as regards fiscal data. The thesis provides an excellent foundation for future research, much of which surrounds old theoretical questions on the long run, and on the limits to fiscal sustainability
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Distributive justice and social conflict in an AK model
Get PDFWe introduce distributive justice into a standard macroeconomic model with agent heterogeneity in terms of capital endowments. The labour share is the primitive in the distributive justice game. We provide a clear definition of distributive social conflict. This conflict is resolved by two positive and three normative methods. The two positive ones are ‘average voter’ in the probalistic voting model and Nash bargaining, encapsulating electoral politics and socio-political bargaining; two normative (justice) criteria are the Utilitarian and the Rawlsian. We also propose a novel criterion of ‘justice as minimal social friction’. The labour share in turn affects growth in the ‘AK’ production economy. Thus, in socio-economic equilibrium, growth and the labour share are jointly determined. Greater impatience, status comparisons, wealth inequality or a decline in productivity exacerbate social conflict. Status comparisons and wealth inequality raise the labour share under all positive and normative criteria. At least if the capital-rich individuals’ overall socio-political strength is higher than that of workers, both positive methods imply a smaller labour share and more inequality than do all our three criteria of distributive justice.JEL Classification numbers: O41, O43, E25, P16, Z1
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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