This paper describes the origins of the logistic function, its adoption in bio-assay, and its wider acceptance in statistics. Its roots spread far back to the early 19th century; the survival of the term logistic and the wide application of the device have been determined decisively by the...

Identification of the entrepreneur's economic function has engaged economists for more than 200 years. In this paper we address the issue of entrepreneurship in two distinct ways: a) as it has historically developed within the field of economics and b) as it develops in the transitional context....

We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a...

In this paper we argue that authorities aid cooperation by means of direct coordination or the enforcement of re-commitment devices such as contract laws.Credible threats of violence allow this role. In a local interaction model, an authority forms if mutually connected individuals with...

Today’s global world is characterized not only by a high volume of international trade and foreign investment relative to national income, but also by a changed composition of that trade towards a greater fraction of trade in inputs and capital goods and outsourcing of production.. Emphasized...

Actual portfolios contain fewer stocks than are implied by standard financial analysis that balances the costs of diversification against the benefits in terms of the standard deviation of the returns. Suppose a safety first investor cares about downside risk and recognizes the heavy

Risk managers use portfolios to diversify away the unpriced risk of individual securities. In this article we compare the benefits of portfolio diversification for downside risk in case returns are normally distributed with the case of fat-tailed distributed returns. The downside risk of a...

This paper examines the pricing of public debt in a quantitative macroeconomic model with government default risk. Default may occur due to a fiscal policy that does not preclude a Ponzi game. When a build-up of public debt makes this outcome inevitable, households stop lending such that the...

Nobel laureates in economics make their most important and creative contributions

Science is a winner-take-all profession in which only few contributions get excessive attention and the large majority of papers remains receives scant or no attention. This so-called ‘waste’ together with all the competitive strategies of scientists seeking attention is part and parcel of...