Absurd advertisements are frequently used to attract consumers’ attention. This article suggests that such ads may be a double-edged sword. Absurdity evokes both positive ef-fects (resolving schema incongruence) and negative effects (cognitive overload), resulting in a curvilinear overall...

The principal focus in the substantial literature on impediments to economic development has been on the inadequacies of policies and governance. However, successful economic development requires effectiveness of markets and incentives for investment, which in turn require trust. This paper...

This study examines the Granger causality between electricity consumption and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Pakistan using annual data covering the period 1971 to 2007. Augmented Dickey-Fuller test and Phillips-Perron test reveal that both the series, after logarithmic transformation, are...

This paper investigates the identification, the determinacy and the stability of ad hoc, "quasi-optimal" and optimal policy rules augmented with financial stability indicators (such as asset prices deviations from their fundamental values) and minimizing the volatility of the policy interest...

Divergent macro-economic developments within a currency area can lead to undesired distortions. That is why in the Eurozone much attention was drawn to the homogeneity of the currency area. However, at the beginning the Eurozone seemed to be too heterogeneous for a common currency. So many hopes...

Studies in the social capital literature have documented two stylised facts: first, a decline in measures of social participation has occurred in many OECD countries. Second, and more recently, the success of social networking sites (SNSs) has resulted in a steep rise in online social...

Recently, the number of state interventions and of firm subsidies has largely increased. However, the possible outcome of such interventions is rather am-biguous. This paper investigates the impact of firm subsidies granted by Ger-man regional policy. The long experiences made with regional...

With restricted-use data from the U.S. Census Bureau, I conduct an analysis of the macro- and micro-economic determinants of marrying. Based on observations across a broad segment of calendar years (from 1978 to 2010), I examine the measures of the national unemployment rate for males, national...

This work aims to compare the Keynesian theory, namely by the Verdoorn Law, the neoclassical theory, by the absolute convergence, and the geographic concentration, by the Rybczynski equation, explanations about the different manufactured industry of the Portuguese regions (NUTs II), for the...

In this paper we study the problem of determining a production schedule for an order of n jobs on a single machine which is subject to stochastic machine failures. To avoid long downtime of the machine caused by unexpected failures, preventive maintenance should be planned as well. If a failure...