ver the past several decades, economists have devoted ever-growing effort to developing economic models to help us understand how changes in interest rates brought about by monetary policy actions affect the production and provision of goods and services in the economy. Although New Keynesian models have broad appeal in explaining how changes in the money stock can affect business activity, the...

We are moving towards a radical transformation of our energy systems. The success of the new paradigm created by the Smart Grid vision will require not only the creation and integration of new technologies into the grid, but also the redesign of the market structures coupled with it. In order to design the market structures for the grid of the future, economic models able to capture the new phy...

vi 1 Definitions and Dimensions of Livelihood Diversification 1 1.1 Definitions of diversification: multiplicity and/or change? 1 1.2 Livelihoods in the economy: basic dimensions of livelihood activities 1 2 Structural Transformation and the Non-farm Economy 4 2.1 Industrialisation and urbanisation 4 2.2 Regional growth theory and the rise and fall of the rural non-farm economy 5 2.3 Global str...

Peak oil” refers to the future decline in world production of crude oil and to the accompanying potentially calamitous effects. The majority of the literature on peak oil is non-economic and ignores price effects even when analyzing policies. Unfortunately, most economic models of depletable resources do not generate production peaks. I present four models which generate production peaks in equ...

Based on the misleading expectation that weighted network properties always offer a more complete description than purely topological ones, current economic models of the International Trade Network (ITN) generally aim at explaining local weighted properties, not local binary ones. Here we complement our analysis of the binary projections of the ITN by considering its weighted representations. ...

There is abundant evidence that many individuals violate the rationality assumptions routinely made in economics. However, powerful evidence also indicates that violations of individual rationality do not necessarily refute the aggregate predictions of standard economic models that assume full rationality of all agents. Thus, a key question is how the interactions between rational and irrationa...

Existing economic models of suicide provide no systematic means of addressing how suicidal persons choose their suicide methods. In this article, the tools of search theory are used to characterize suicidal persons’ choices about when, how, and whether to commit suicide in a dynamic context. The theory has implications for policies a¤ecting the availability of suicide methods such as guns. Amon...

A new deforestation and land-use change scenario generator model (FOREST-SAGE) is presented that is designed to interface directly with dynamic vegetation models used in latest generation earth system models. The model requires a regional-scale scenario for aggregate land-use change that may be time-dependent, provided by observational studies or by regional land-use change/economic models for ...

The combination of economic and biological factors is likely to result in overeating, in the current environment of cheap and readily available food. This propensity is shown using a “dual-decision” approach where choices reflect the interaction between two parts of the brain: a “deliberative” system, operating as in standard economic models, and an “affective” system that responds rapidly to s...

Duality Theory of production imposes a number of simplifying assumptions regarding the production technology, including various maintained convexity assumptions. Emphasizing the technological information content of alternative models, this paper challenges some widely held views on the role of convexity. The role of convexity in Duality Theory is asymmetric: While convexity is of importance in ...