Mississippian Communities in the St. Francis Basin: A Central Place Model

The development of Mississippian settlement models for northeast Arkansas is reviewed. It is argued that a five-tier central place hierarchy best accounts for the variability currently known to exist among Mississippian communities in the St. Francis basin

Diversification, innovation, and imitation inside the Global Technological Frontier

Recent research highlights the relationship between economic development and productive diversification, which may be hindered by market failures. After identifying stages of diversification in disaggregated export data, the authors develop a metric for the flows of export"discoveries,"or inside-the-frontier innovations in developing countries. They then explore the empirical relationship between economic development and (1) inside-the-frontier-innovation as reflected by the introduction of new export products, (2) export diversification measured by an index of export-revenue concentration, and (3) on-the-frontier innovation as reflected in patents. The data suggest, unsurprisingly, that inside-the-frontier innovation is more common among poor countries than among industrial economies. Overall export diversification increases at low levels of development but declines with development after a high-income point, whereas patenting activity rises exponentially with development. The data also suggest that the relationship between the frequency of export discoveries and economic development is not due to changes in the industrial composition of exports. The authors use a simple model of innovation and imitation to test the hypothesis that the threat of imitation inhibits the discovery of new exports. Econometric evidence suggests that the frequency of export discoveries across countries rises with the returns of export activities (proxied by exogenous export growth during the sample period), but the magnitude of this effect increases with barriers to entry. The count-data estimations deal with unobserved international heterogeneity, and the results are robust to various changes in the specification of the empirical model. This finding supports the hypothesisthat market failures inhibit inside-the-frontier innovation.Economic Theory&Research,Markets and Market Access,Water Resources Assessment,Achieving Shared Growth,Airports and Air Services

Self-Referential Noise as a Fundamental Aspect of Reality

Noise is often used in the study of open systems, such as in classical Brownian motion and in Quantum Dynamics, to model the influence of the environment. However generalising results from G\"{o}del and Chaitin in mathematics suggests that systems that are sufficiently rich that self-referencing is possible contain intrinsic randomness. We argue that this is relevant to modelling the universe, even though it is by definition a closed system. We show how a three-dimensional process-space may arise, as a Prigogine dissipative structure, from a non-geometric order-disorder model driven by, what is termed, self-referential noise.Comment: 7 pages, Latex, 3 ps figures. Contribution to the 2nd International Conference on Unsolved Problems of Noise, Adelaide 199

What explains changes in full-time and part-time employment in Western Germany? : a new method on an old question

"From 1992 to 2005, part-time employment in Western Germany has grown by 82 percent, whereas full-time employment has shrunk by 14 percent. Behind these general figures there is substantial variation of employment schemes across industries. Beside this, the share of the service industries in gross value added has grown, whereas the importance of manufacturing and construction has decreased considerably. We analyse the extent to which the changes in part-time and full-time employment can be explained by changes in the sectoral composition of the economy or by other factors. Using West German yearly data from 1992-2005, we estimate a regression analogue shiftshare model. It allows us to divide the overall development of employment into the business cycle effect, the sector effect and the employment status effect. Moreover, we control for sectoral gross value added, unit labour costs and working time. As a methodological contribution we extend the shift-share approach into a dynamic panel model. We use a bias-corrected least squares dummy variable (LSDVc) estimator which is appropriate for our data structure. As a second step, we decompose the fixed effects of the LSDVc estimation into parameters for part-time, full-time, and self-employment as well as six sectors. Our results confirm previous deterministic shift-share analyses: Characteristics inherent in full-time or part-time employment dominantly explain changes in employment patterns in Western Germany. The sectoral composition of the economy plays a significant but minor role. The model extensions reveal that much of the status and sector effects in the simple shiftshare analysis can be captured by determinants of labour demand." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))Vollzeitarbeit - Determinanten, Teilzeitarbeit - Determinanten, Wirtschaftsstrukturwandel, Shift-Analyse, Arbeitskräftenachfrage, Westdeutschland, Bundesrepublik Deutschland

"Voto por voto, casilla por casilla?" : Democratic consolidation, political intermediation, and the Mexican election of 2006

After he had only tightly lost the election in July 2006, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his Coalición claimed fraud and asserted that unfair conditions during the campaign had diminished his chances to win the presidency. The paper investigates this latter allegation centering on a perceived campaign of hate, unequal access to campaign resources and malicious treatment by the mass media. It further analyzes the mass media’s performance during the conflictual post electoral period until the final decision of the Federal Electoral Tribunal on September 5th, 2006. While the media’s performance during the campaign tells us about their compliance with fair media coverage mechanisms that have been implemented by electoral reforms in the 1990s, the mass media is uncontained by such measures after the election. Thus, their mode of coverage of the postelectoral conflicts allows us to “test” the mass media’s transformation to a more unbiased, social responsible “fourth estate”. Finally the paper scrutinizes whether the claims of fraud and the protests by the leftist movement resulted in lower levels of institutional trust and democratic support. The analysis of the media performance is based on data provided by the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Its Media Monitor encompassed more than 150 TV stations, 240 radio stations and 200 press publications. However, there is no comparable data available for the postelectoral period. Interviews with Mexican media experts, which the author has conducted during the postelectoral period, serve as empirical basis for the second part. Data on the public opinions and attitudes of Mexican citizens are taken from the 2007 Latinobarometro, the 2006 Encuesta Nacional and several polls conducted by Grupo Reforma. The results do not support López Obradors notions. Even though a strong party bias is characteristic of the Mexican media system, all findings hint at a continuity of balanced campaign coverage and fair access to mass media publicity. Coverage during the postelectoral period was more polarized, yet both sides remained at least partially open for oppositional views. The claims of fraud, mass protest mobilization and anti-institutional discourse by Lopez Obrador’s leftist movement seem not to have caused significant loss in institutional trust, support of and satisfaction with democracy, even though these levels remain quite low