In this paper I apply the Bread and Peace model of voting in US presidential elections to analyze the sources of George W. Bush’s narrow re-election victory in 2004. The aggregate election outcome is readily explained by the model’s objectively measured political-economic fundamentals – no...

I estimate the effects of national symbols and globalization on the well-being of 88 countries. I find that conventional determinants of production affect national well-being, measured as human development index (HDI). The effects on HDI of national symbols like national flag colors are...

Becker’s analysis of crime and punishment has initiated a series of theoretical and empirical works investigating the determinants of crime. However, there is a dearth of literature in the context of developing countries. This paper is an attempt to address this deficiency. The paper...

This note makes general statements about standard models of the diffusion of innovations. Its premise is a familiar idea that innovations are socially-learned changes that spread like wildfires across diverse populations. However, the rate at which innovations spread is subject to the forces of...

In this paper, we introduce a new approximation for the null distribution of the likelihood ratio test for the general case. We compare the the critical values obtained by the new approximation to the values which are obtained by the exact distribution for the cases k=1, 2 to test the accuracy...

Both political and security future of the Balkans highly depend on the conditions in a newly created state of Kosovo. Bearing in mind the ethnic Albanian leadership declared unilateral independence in February 2008 and without providing the Serbian minority with durable solution, this paper aims...

Implementing Decision Support System (DSS) for the management by budgets has become one of the top priorities for the vast majority of today’s organizations. This system represents a powerful tool for planning and controlling in the managerial activity. The new technologies for Business...

Estimating the manufacturing cost is a critical task with high importance to industrial firms. The cost estimating can drive bidding strategies, management of resources, production policies and other issues crucial to the economic success of the company. Essentially, cost estimation should be...

Serbs and Albanians have inhabited Kosovo for centuries. For Serbs, Kosovo is the core of the medieval Serbian kingdom. For Albanians, Kosovo is the cradle of their struggle for independence. With both parties feeling entitled to the territory of the province, the threat of conflict was never...

This exploratory paper estimates the effects on well-being of two very important institutional symbols of 59 countries in 2007: national flags and constitutions. The results indicate that well-being responds positively to investment in material things as well as the existence of flags. However,...