An integrated approach to the empirical application of dynamic optimization programming models, for students and researchers. This book is an effective, concise text for students and researchers that combines the tools of dynamic programming with numerical techniques and simulation-based econometric methods. Doing so, it bridges the traditional gap between theoretical and empirical research and offers an integrated framework for studying applied problems in macroeconomics and microeconomics. In part I the authors first review the formal theory of dynamic optimization; they then present the numerical tools and econometric techniques necessary to evaluate the theoretical models. In language accessible to a reader with a limited background in econometrics, they explain most of the methods used in applied dynamic research today, from the estimation of probability in a coin flip to a complicated nonlinear stochastic structural model. These econometric techniques provide the final link between the dynamic programming problem and data. Part II is devoted to the application of dynamic programming to specific areas of applied economics, including the study of business cycles, consumption, and investment behavior. In each instance the authors present the specific optimization problem as a dynamic programming problem, characterize the optimal policy functions, estimate the parameters, and use models for policy evaluation. The original contribution of Dynamic Economics: Quantitative Methods and Applications lies in the integrated approach to the empirical application of dynamic optimization programming models. This integration shows that empirical applications actually complement the underlying theory of optimization, while dynamic programming problems provide needed structure for estimation and policy evaluation.

This insightful book offers a new way of looking at the arts, culture and the creative industries from the perspective of evolutionary economics. The creative industries are key drivers of modern economies. While economic analysis has traditionally advanced a market-failure model of arts and culture, this book argues for an evolutionary market dynamics or innovation-based approach. Jason Potts explores theoretical and conceptual aspects of an evolutionary economic approach to the study of the creative economy. Topics include creative businesses and labour markets, social networks, innovation processes and systems, institutions, and the role of creative industries in market dynamics and economic growth.

The general equilibrium approach, Black asserts, can be used to explain most of the economy's behavior. It can explain business cycles and growth without using sticky prices, irrationality, economies of scale, or imperfect competition. It can explain the volatility of consumption, output, sales, investment, and inventories with axiomatic utility and constant-returns-to-scale production. It can explain temporary layoffs, job changes with and without intervening unemployment, and the behavior of vacancies. It can explain lower wages in part-time jobs, wages that increase rapidly with time on the job, and the forces that cause migration from poor to rich countries. Although the general equilibrium approach cannot be tested in conventional ways, it can be used to generate examples that explain stylized facts - generalized observations from the real world - that have preoccupied macroeconomists for the last decade. Black contrasts his interpretation of these facts with conventional views. Finally, he reviews a substantial body of literature on these topics.

The text examines how companies cope with the pressures which are unleashed by recessions. It is based on a large scale survey undertaken in the spring of 1993 which involved the participation of more than 600 leading UK companies. The questionnaire data was combined with a long enough time-series of data on the financial performance of most of the companies to enable us to trace effects left over from the recession in the early 1980s. The main issues examined in the book are: what makes companies vulnerable to recessionary pressures? How do companies typically respond to these pressures? How have recessionary pressures been transmitted back into labour markets and what kinds of institutional changes have they induced? Finally, do recessionary pressures stimulate innovative activity?

A proposal that the notion of specificity -- the idea that factors of production are not interchangeable -- can provide a unified framework to analyze and understand a wide variety of macroeconomic phenomena stemming from the transactional environment and microeconomic restructuring. The core mechanism that drives economic growth in modern market economies is massive microeconomic restructuring and factor reallocation -- the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" by which new technologies replace the old. At the microeconomic level, restructuring is characterized by countless decisions to create and destroy production arrangements. The efficiency of these decisions depends in large part on the existence of sound institutions that provide a proper transactional environment. In this groundbreaking book, Ricardo Caballero proposes a unified framework to analyze and understand a wide variety of macroeconomic phenomena stemming from limitations, especially institutional, that hinder these adjustments. Caballero argues that macroeconomic models need to be made more "structural" in a precise sense and can not be maintained on the assumption that decisions are fully flexible. What is needed, he proposes, is the notion of specificity -- the idea that factors of production are not freely interchangeable. Many of the major macroeconomic developments of recent decades, he argues, fit naturally into this perspective, including the transition problems of Eastern Europe, the heavy weight of labor regulations in Western Europe, the emerging market crises of the 1990s, the prolonged expansion of the U.S. economy, and Japan's stagnation following the collapse of its real estate bubble. After describing the basic arguments of the book and developing models to illustrate two different kinds of specificity (relationship specificity and technological specificity), Caballero analyzes a variety of aspects of inefficient restructuring and revisits perennial business cycle patterns such as the cyclical behavior of unemployment, investment, and wages. Finally, he looks at the endogenous response of political institutions and technology to opportunistic exploitation of relationship specificity. Economists working on macroeconomics, development, growth, labor, and productivity issues will find Caballero's conceptual framework applicable to phenomena in their fields.

This is the sixth in a series of annuals from the National Bureau of EconomicResearch that are designed to stimulate research on problems in applied economics, to bring frontiertheoretical developments to a wider audience, and to accelerate the interaction between analyticaland empirical research in macroeconomics.Olivier Blanchard and Stanley Fischer are both Professorsof Economics at MIT.Contents: Pitfalls and Opportunities: What Macroeconomists Should Know aboutUnit Roots, John Y. Campbell and Pierre Perron. Markups and the Business Cycle, Julio Rotemberg andMichael Woodford. Privatization in Eastern Europe: Incentives and the Economics of Transition, JeanTirole. The EMS, the EMU, and the Transition to a Common Currency, Kenneth A. Froot and Kenneth S.Rogoff. Growth, Macroeconomics, and Development, Stanley S. Fischer. Recessions as Reorganizations,Robert E. Hall.

This book provides a set of principles for fostering innovation in people (workers and consumers), in firms and in government, taking an in-depth look at the scope of innovation and how it is changing, as well as where and how it is occurring.