Discussion of institutional changes made by the German government in response to the emergence of the first cases of BSE in Germany in 2000. Due to the establishment of a large-scale private sector quality assurance scheme, regulation moved away from publicly mandated food safety regulations...

Location-based clusters and virtual cluster configurations have received significant attention from policymakers due to their potential implications on productivity, innovation and regional growth. This paper presents a short review of studies that have analyzed clustering activity in the food...

In time series macroeconometric models, the first difference in the logarithm of a variable is routinely used to represent the rate of change of that variable. It is often overlooked that the assumed approximation is accurate only if the rates of change are small. Models of hyper-inflation are a...

A way to test the relevance of endogenous growth theory is to test this existence of the relationship between innovation and total factor productivity at the country level. More recently this approach has been extended to take account of externalities induced by innovation activities from...

In most liberalised electricity retail markets, incumbent firms still hold the majority of residential consumers. This situation focused the attention of regulatory institutions and energy economists on the determinants of consumers switching decisions. Fewer studies have, however, been devoted...

Economists have long recognized that in free markets, incentives to innovate will be diluted unless some factors grant innovators with a temporary monopoly. Patenting is the most cited factor in the economic literature. This survey concentrates on another factor that confers innovators with...

In the Gauss-Markov regression model, one can always update the least square estimate of the slope vector, given new observations at the values of the explanatory variables. The updated estimate is often considered as a time-varying state of an auto-regressive system in Kalman filtering and...

The three-tier inclining block tariff (‘‘IBT’’) issued by the Chinese government in 2010 is focusing attention of energy economists, among whom Lin and Jiang (2012. Designation and influence of household increasing block electricity tariffs in China. Energy Policy 42, 164–173) who...