o ne of the effective strategies for economic development of clusters is the conduct of networking activities by cluster members. indeed, the majority of cluster members are micro and small enterprises, so, should attempt to overcome their inherent constraints and influence the market through networking activities. in addition, these enterprises lack an intra-firm research and development unit ...

t his paper investigates the asymmetric behavior of inflation. we use logistic smooth transition autoregressive (lstar) model to characterize the regime-switching behavior of iran’s monthly inflation during the period may 1990 to december 2013. we find that there is a triple relationship between the inflation level, its fluctuations and persistence. the findings imply that the behavior of infla...

abstract t he return of capital is fundamental to the intertemporal allocation of resources by changing the consumption behavior and capital accumulation over time. taxation on return of capital increases the marginal product of capital, meaning that capital stock is lower than when capital is not taxed, which results decreased growth and welfare in steady state. this paper studies the impact o...

abstract i n this paper, we investigate the existence and the nature of real exchange rate misalignment in organization of the petroleum exporting countries (opec). to do this we estimated a cross country basic real exchange rate determination model for 1990-2012 and extracted historic trend of misalignment. the results imply that all opec countries have had misalignment -of different kinds tho...

abstract in this study, we applied recently developed panel unit root and cointegration techniques to examine the long-run real income per capita and price elasticities for demand of electricity in selected middle east and north african (mena) countries using an annual data series from 1990 to 2011.our main finding from the panel analysis is that the demand for electricity is highly price elast...

JEL Classification: L14

Regression and neural network models of wage determination are constructed where the explanatory variables include detailed information about skills. People skills, strategic skills, and IT skills all carry strong and significant wage premia; problemsolving skills (surprisingly) and physical skills (less surprisingly) do not. In contrast to the impact of school curriculum on subsequent earnings...

We investigate whether a rare event (like the default of the annuity provider) can explain the annuity market participation puzzle. High risk aversion is needed to change behavior in the presence of such a disastrous shock but higher risk aversion also makes annuities more valuable. Therefore, these rare events are unlikely candidates to explain the low take-up of voluntary annuities. JEL Class...

This article adds technology choice to a free-entry Cournot model with linear demand and constant marginal costs. Firms can choose from a discrete set of technologies. This simple framework yields non-existence of equilibrium, existence of multiple equilibria and equilibria in which ex-ante identical ̄rms choose di®erent technologies as possible outcomes. I provide a full characterization of th...

JEL Classification: K42, L13, O17.