The SMARTKOM project Dialogue-Based Human Computer Interaction by Coordinated Analysis and Generation of Multiple Modalities was one of six lead projects in the area of human computer interaction funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the Federal Ministry of Economics and Labour of Germany. We describe the intention of this initiative and summarize the organizational and f...

In spite of their importance in real economics, multiple equilibria in closed exchange and production-and-exchange economies are usually ignored in macroeconomic models. We argue that default and bankruptcy laws create conditions for a unique equilibrium. We report experimental evidence on the effectiveness of assigning default penalties on fiat money to resolve this multiplicity and select a s...

* This study was undertaken as part of the Social Policy Research Services Contract with the Australian Commonwealth Department of Family and Community Services (FaCS). Central to the study are the data in the confidentialised unit record file from FaCS’ Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, which is managed by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research...

Although much attention has already been devoted to the benefits of extracurricular activities (ECAs) in general – both from a developmental and from a social perspective – little time has been devoted to a complete academic study of the effects of university ECAs in particular. This review draws on insights from psychology, social psychology, economics and sociology in an attempt to develop a ...

The Nursing Health Services Research Unit (NHSRU), funded by the Ontario Ministry of Health and LongTerm Care, consists of Co-Principal Investigators Dr. Linda O’Brien-Pallas at the Toronto site (see profile in CJNL Volume 21 Number 1) and Dr. Andrea Baumann at the McMaster site. The NHSRU has a multidisciplinary team of 46 co-investigators and more than 50 researchers representing nursing, bus...

The broad range of activities undertaken in a hotel, combined with its high labour intensity and volatile demand, signify a predisposition particularly suited to outsourcing. In this paper, transaction cost economics (TCE) theory, agency theory and the broader outsourcing literature are drawn upon to inform the distillation of 20 outsourcing / insourcing motives. The relative significance of th...

This paper sets out a formal framework for the biological-evolutionary study of human economic behaviour. Femina economica is a hypothetical parthenogenetic species with a simple economy. Individuals make decisions about labour supply and fertility subject to time and resource constraints. Labour is of differing types and a parent determines the type of her offspring's labour. Wages are determi...

The existence of an inverse relationship between wage levels and regional unemployment rates, commonly referred to as the wage curve, is well established in the economic literature and was described by Card (1995) as being ‘close to an empirical law of economics’. This microeconomic wage–unemployment relationship, first identified by Blanchflower and Oswald (1994), has since been observed in mo...

ON THE ECONOMIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MARGINAL INTRA-INDUSTRY TRADE AND LABOUR ADJUSTMENT IN A DIVISION OF LABOUR MODEL In the context of Ethier’s (1982) division of labour model, this paper accomplishes three tasks. First, we complement existing literature on the algebraic properties of marginal intra-industry trade (MIIT) measures by embedding one of these measures in a general equilibrium mod...

The evidence that earnings rise with firm size and that human capital affects earnings based on labour market data are two of the most robust empirical findings in economics. In contrast the evidence for scale economies in firm data is very weak. The limited direct evidence of human capital on firm productivity suggests that human capital is indeed productive and that the magnitudes are consist...