Cost plays a prominent decision making role in the life of an individual and organisation because it is a central focus of daily financial activities. In any financial engagement, usually for a reward, the costs that are incidental to the engagement could be broadly analysed into material,...

Convergence across regional economies has spurred one of the most debatable issues in contemporary research in economics. In this paper we seek to address the question of whether, during the period 1995-2004 the NUTS-2 regions of EU-26 exhibited a tendency to converge in terms of agricultural...

This paper tests for long-run output convergence between a sample of eight Latin American countries and over the study period 1900-2003. The key contribution of this paper is in terms of the econometric methodology where non-stationarity of log real per capita income differentials is tested...

Most of Business Excellence – Total Quality models provide a static view and processing of Total Quality issues. This paper proposes a system of Business Excellence taking into consideration: current European practices of Total Quality and competitiveness, a modular, open architecture like...

Deriving a functional form for a series of prices over time is difficult. It is common to assume some linearly estimable form for prediction purposes. While this can produce accurate short run forecasts it fails to identify longer trends and patterns that may exist in financial data....

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the effects of economic integration among countries on firms investment decisions when such decisions are taken strategically. It is shown that, in this context, the traditional "tariff jumping" argument is not always applicable and that localisation...

Die Entwicklung des privaten Verbrauchs ist eine entscheidende Größe bei der Erstellung makroökonomischer Prognosen im Rahmen der Volkswirtschaftlichen Gesamtrechnungen. Als erklärende Variable für die Konsumentwicklung spielt damit auch die Ersparnisbildung der Haushalte eine zentrale...

Die EEG-Umlage, die Stromverbraucher für die Förderung von Strom aus erneuerbaren Energien zahlen müssen, wird im Jahr 2013 stark steigen. Dadurch erhöht sich der Anteil der Ausgaben für Strom an den Konsumausgaben privater Haushalte von durchschnittlich rund 2,3 Prozent im Jahr 2011 und...

We report the result of experiments designed to assess the effect of initial endowments on willingness to pay values elicited from multi-unit Vickrey auctions. Comparing bids from an “endow and upgrade” approach with the “full bidding” approach, we find that the direction of the...

This study estimates the impact of migrants’ remittances on households’ spending decisions in Ecuador. Applying both parametric and semiparametric techniques, we find strong evidence that remittances enhance expenditures on education, health, and housing, but decrease expenditures on food....