Whether or not the marginal product of capital (MPK) differs across countries is a question that keeps coming up in discussions of comparative economic development and patterns of capital flows. Using easily accessible macroeconomic data we find that MPKs are remarkably similar across countries. Hence, there is no prima facie support for the view that international credit frictions play a major...

Recent literature has addressed how product creation amplifies economic fluctuations via the love of variety. Yet, empirical evidence on variety effects is sparse. The current paper demonstrates that decreasing returns in variety-level production technology, which leads to increasing marginal costs, similarly amplify business cycles. Product scope expansions reduce costs and firms have an incen...

Customised product design is attracting increasing attention. However, consumers can be overwhelmed by the variety of products. To confront this challenge, paper presents a two-step recommendation approach for customised First, an adaptive specification process captures customer requirements in accelerated manner presenting most informative attribute to specify. Then, maximal marginal relevance...

In this paper, I develop a duopoly location model of differentiated products in which consumers’ product preferences vary positively with product prices. The level of preference price-dependence (“PPD”) is allowed to vary across consumers. I find that equilibrium prices increase with the PPD level of the marginal, or “just indifferent,” consumer, but are not influenced by the PPD levels of othe...

The marginal maximum a posteriori probability (MAP) estimation problem, which calculates the mode of the marginal posterior distribution of a subset of variables with the remaining variables marginalized, is an important inference problem in many models, such as those with hidden variables or uncertain parameters. Unfortunately, marginal MAP can be NP-hard even on trees, and has attracted less ...