Usually, current Financial Crisis of 2008 is compared to the Great Depression of 1929. But there are some evidences that our current financial crisis has much more similarities and analogies to the crisis initiated by the panic in 1907. A brief analysis of both crises is presented. This analysis...

This work aims to analyse the dynamics of macroeconomic fluctuations in Cameroon and to determine the resulting business and growth cycles turning point chronology. The construction of a reference turning point chronology poses some problems related to the choice of the methods to be used. In...

The discipline of operations management is rarely studied with an eye on public policies. Yet, it is glaring to even the casual observer that public infrastructure is very different in different countries. How does public infrastructure affect private sector inventory levels? I develop as a...

This paper deals with the impact of poor business environment on Total Factor Productivity (TFP), output and investment of manufacturing firms in Senegal. A benchmark study coupled with results from the World Bank Enterprise Survey narrowed down the list of relevant constraints to doing business...

The formation of the European Union (EU) is the one of the biggest political – economic events of the last 50 years. The aim of this study is to develop EU economy functioning system dynamic model. Main research method is system dynamics. General scheme of EU economy system dynamic model is...

How important are local country conditions to firms' operations performance, as revealed in their inventory levels? Under a “flat world” hypothesis, differences in firms' inventory levels are explained more by differences among industries and firms themselves, rather than differences among...

Sebastian de la Fuente is the sixth largest supermarket chain in the Basque region of Spain. It has a novel dataset of 108,605 observations on 3,745 SKUs, collected for almost 2 1/2 years. I find the bullwhip effect in the data: at least 80% of the SKUs have a bigger variance in supplies than...

Most traditional explanations for the decreasing aggregate output volatility - so-called "Great Moderation" - fail to accommodate, or even directly contradict, another aspect of empirical data: the average sales volatility for publicly-traded US firms has been increasing during the same period....

How different are retailers' inventory levels around the world? Specifically, are retailers' inventories constant across countries, converging, or at least co-integrating? These might be viewed as various forms of global determinism. To see which of these forms hold, I use a novel dataset...

This paper estimates the price-marginal cost markup for US manufacturing using a new methodology. Most existing techniques of estimating the markup are a variant on Hall's (1988) framework involving the manipulation of the Solow Residual. However this paper argues that this notion is based on...