rising inequality as a cause of the present crisis the article argues that the economic imbalances that caused the present crisis should be thought of as the outcome of the interaction of the effects of financial deregulation with the macroeconomic effects of rising inequality in this sense rising inequality should be regarded as a root cause of the present crisis i identify four channels by which it has contributed to the crisis first rising inequality creates a downwards pressure on aggregate demand since poorer income groups have high marginal propensities to consume second international financial deregulation has allowed countries to run larger current account deficits and for longer time periods thus in reaction to potentially stagnant demand two growth models have emerged a debt led model and an export led model third in the debt led growth models higher inequality has led to higher household debt as working class families have tried to keep up with social consumption norms despite stagnating or falling real wages fourth rising inequality has increased the propensity to speculate as richer households tend to hold riskier financial assets than other groups the rise of hedge funds and of subprime derivatives in particular has been linked to rise of the super rich

macroeconomic policy in a two party system as a repeated game this paper considers the interaction of two parties with different objectives concerning inflation and unemployment and rational and forward looking wage setters if discretionary policies are followed an economic cycle related to the political cycle results in equilibrium this cycle is significantly different from the traditional political business cycle reputational mechanisms due to the repeated interaction of the two parties and the public or commitments to a common policy rule can improve upon the discretionary outcome by reducing or eliminating the magnitude of the economic fluctuations

continuous review inventory models where random lead time depends on lot size and reserved capacity the processing time of large orders is in many industries longer than that of small orders this renders supply lead times in such settings to be increasing in the order size yet that pattern is not re ected in existing inventory control models especially those allowing for random lead times this work aims at rectifying the situation our setting is an order quantity reorder point model with backordering where the shortage penalty is incurred per unit per unit time the processing time of each unit is random the processing time of a lot is correlated with its size for the case where lead time is proportional to the lot size we obtain a closed form solution that is unlike the classical q r model where lead time is independent of lot size no iterations are required here we also analyze a case where the processing time exhibits economies of scale in the lot size finally we consider a situation where a customer can secure shorter processing times by reserving capacity at the supplier s manufacturing facility 2000 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

a retrospective look at the u s productivity growth resurgence it is widely recognized that information technology was critical to the dramatic acceleration of u s labor productivity growth in the mid 1990s this paper traces the evolution of productivity estimates to document how and when this perception emerged early studies concluded that information technology was relatively unimportant only after the massive information technology investment boom of the late 1990s did this investment and underlying productivity increases in the information technology producing sectors come to be identified as important sources of growth although information technology has diminished in significance since the dot com crash of 2000 and observed growth rates have slowed recently we project that private sector productivity growth will average around 2 4 percent per year for the next decade only moderately below the average of the post 1995 period

lot sizing and lead time decisions in production inventory systems traditionally lot sizing decisions in inventory management trade off the cost of placing orders against the cost of holding inventory however when these lot sizes are to be produced in a finite capacity production inventory system the lot size has an important impact on the lead times which in turn determine inventory levels and costs in this paper we study the lot sizing decision in a production inventory setting where lead times are determined by a queueing model that is linked endogenously to the orders placed by the inventory model assuming a continuous review s s inventory policy we develop a procedure to obtain the distribution of lead times and the distribution of inventory levels when lead times are endogenously determined by the inventory model this procedure allows to determine the optimal inventory parameters within the class of s s policies that minimize the expected ordering and inventory related costs over time we numerically show that ignoring the endogeneity of lead times may lead to inappropriate lot sizing decisions and significantly higher costs this cost discrepancy is very outspoken if the lot size based on the economic order quantity deviates significantly from desirable production lot sizes in these cases the endogenous treatment of lead times is of particular importance

integrated single vendor single buyer model with stochastic demand and variable lead time abstract in this paper we consider the single vendor single buyer integrated production inventory problem we relax the assumption of deterministic demand and assume that the lead time is varying lineraly with the lot size the lead time is composed of a lot size dependent run time and constant delay times such as moving waiting and setup times a solution procedure is suggested for solving the proposed model and numerical examples are used to illustrate the benefit of integration a sensitivity analysis is also performed to explore the effect of key parameters on lot size reorder point and expected total cost

technical change sectoral dislocation and barriers to labor mobility factors behind the great recession abstract the global financial and economic crisis which began in late 2007 great recession is the worst international crisis since 1929 great depression and still affects many countries this paper attempts to determine if the theory of extended crises presented by delli gatti et al 2012 is consistent with empirical evidence the analysis is carried out using two approaches the first part of the paper is purely descriptive and is dedicated to a comparison between structural differences and different patterns of development in six countries france germany italy spain uk and us using data on the major world economies klems and stan since 1970 we show that the fundamentals behind the extended crisis theory apply to these economies we focus particularly on italy germany and the us among large economies italy is one of the most affected and still not recovering even though the italian financial sector appeared to have been less exposed to the 2008 shock than other countries the crisis in italy could be directly connected to the failure of the italian economy to move to an economic system based on more skill intensive production in particular in the service sector as in the us the us financial sector was extremely exposed to the 2008 sub prime crisis but us economy recovered much faster than in many european countries germany is the leading european economy generally considered in european public debate as the example to be followed in the last part of the paper the analysis is broadened involving more countries in a panel analysis approach different specifications of panel probit logit models are presented in a first attempt to investigate the roles of both structural features and financial shock in explaining the extent of the crisis in different countries

information access and contributions a signaling model of lobbying interest groups pay monetary contributions to gain access and provide information to a policymaker if their interests are aligned with those of the policymaker s constituency they have costless access and report their private information truthfully if their interests conflict they are forced to pay a strictly positive contribution in order to enhance the credibility of their reports the policymaker bases her policy decision on the competing reports and the size of the contributions accompanying these reports the interest groups contribution decisions are plagued by a free rider problem i derive the implications of this problem for the size and pattern of contributions and for the degree of information aggregation

on the form of transfers to special interests an important question in political economy concerns the form of transfers to special interests the chicago view is that political competition leads politicians to make such transfers efficiently the virginia position is that lack of information on the part of voters leads politicians to favor inefficient sneaky methods of redistribution this paper analyzes the form of transfers in a model of political competition in which politicians have incentives to make transfers to special interests it shows that when voters have imperfect information about both the effects of policy and the predispositions of politicians inefficient methods of redistribution may be employed

celebrating a century of the economic order quantity model in honor of ford whitman harris abstract this writing presents a brief introduction to the papers included in the special issue celebrating a century of the economic order quantity model in honor of ford whitman harris published by the international journal of production economics forty one papers covering an extensive scope of inventory management have been incorporated in this volume from contributing authors from 20 countries located in america asia europe and africa this special issue also provides a basis for new directions in inventory management research

the nature of the firm and peculiarities of the corporation i must thank the independent social research foundation for generous funding of the research on which this paper draws

on the benefits of pooling in production inventory systems we study inventory pooling in systems with symmetric costs where supply lead times are endogenously generated by a finite capacity production system we investigate the sensitivity of the cost advantage of inventory pooling to various system parameters including loading service levels demand and production time variability and structure of the production system the analysis reveals differences in how various parameters affect the cost reduction from pooling and suggests that these differences stem from the manner in which the parameters influence the induced correlation between lead time demands of the demand streams we compare these results with those obtained for pure inventory systems where lead times are exogenous we also compare inventory pooling with several forms of capacity pooling

how many parts to make at once reprinted from factory the magazine of management volume 10 number 2 february 1913 pp 135 136 152 interest on capital tied up in wages material and overhead sets a maximum limit to the quantity of parts which can be profitably manufactured at one time set up costs on the job fix the minimum experience has shown one manager a way to determine the economical size of lots

economic theory and the world of practice a celebration of the s s model it was the question of how best to balance the costs of ordering and of running out of stock against the costs of holding excess inventory that inspired kenneth arrow theodore harris and jacob marschak to introduce the s s model in 1951 in this celebratory article we show how this model not only answered important practical questions but also opened the door to a quite startling range of important and challenging follow up questions many of great practical importance and analytic depth the s s model has become one of the touchstone models of economics opening new vistas of applied economic theory to all who internalize its structure today it is universally applied to solve questions faced in inventory control the core model elements uncertainty and fixed costs of adjustment are ubiquitous which has resulted in its becoming the general purpose economic model of discrete adjustment the s s model has also become a profound source of inspiration for macroeconomists seeking to understand the role that discrete microeconomic adjustments play in macroeconomic fluctuations looking forward we foresee rapid growth in the use of s s modeling to aid households making complex and costly financial decisions such as when and how to terminate a mortgage in the projected era of household operations research new modeling challenges will arise due to enriched feedback from the world of practice

little innovation many jobs an econometric analysis of the italian labour productivity crisis during the past twenty years italy has realized changes in labour legislation leading to a decentralization of wage bargaining and increased flexibility in labour relations both these factors have helped to curb wage growth and to enhance employment growth but have also led to a crisis in italian labour productivity growth our estimates among 3 000 firms show that firms with high shares of flexible workers a high labour turnover and lower costs of labour relative to capital experienced significantly lower rates of labour productivity growth our findings raise doubts about the mainstream call for flexibilisation of european labour markets we argue hat the italian shift towards a low productive and labour intensive growth path is problematic gainst the background of an ageing population

electoral competition and special interest politics have fixed positions on some issues but vary their positions on others in order to attract votes and campaign contributions in this context we examine whether special interest groups are governed by an electoral motive or an influence in their campaign giving and how their contributions affect the equilibrium platforms we show that each party is induced to behave as if it were maximizing a weighted sum of the aggregate welfares of informed voters and members of special interest groups the party that is expected to win a majority of seats caters more to the special interests

the joint economic lot size problem a review abstract this article reviews lot size models which focus on coordinated inventory replenishment decisions between buyer and vendor and their impact on the performance of the supply chain these so called joint economic lot size jels models determine order production and shipment quantities from the perspective of the supply chain with the objective of minimizing total system costs this paper first describes the problem studied introduces the methodology of the review and presents a descriptive analysis of the selected papers subsequently papers are categorized and analyzed with respect to their contribution to the coordination of different echelons in the supply chain finally the review highlights gaps in the existing literature and suggests interesting areas for future research

lead time reduction strategies in a single vendor single buyer integrated inventory model with lot size dependent lead times and stochastic demand this paper studies alternative methods for reducing lead time and their impact on the safety stock and the expected total costs of a q s continuous review inventory control system we focus on a single vendor single buyer integrated inventory model with stochastic demand and variable lot size dependent lead time and assume that lead time consists of production and setup and transportation time as a consequence lead time may be reduced by crashing setup and transportation time by increasing the production rate or by reducing the lot size we illustrate the benefits of reducing lead time in numerical examples and show that lead time reduction is especially beneficial in case of high demand uncertainty further our studies indicate that a mixture of setup time and production time reduction is appropriate to lower expected total costs

structural change in advanced nations a new set of stylised facts we provide new evidence on patterns of structural change in advanced economies reconsidering the stylised facts put forward by kaldor 1963 kuznets 1971 and maddison 1980 since 1980 the services sector has overwhelmingly predominated in the economic activity of the european union japan and the us but there is substantial heterogeneity among services personal finance and business services have low productivity growth and increasing shares in employment and gdp by contrast shares of distribution services are constant and productivity growth is rapid we find that the labour share in value added is declining while the use of ict capital and skilled labour is increasing in all sectors and regions

maximizing political efficiency via electoral cycles an optimal control model abstract the exchange between an elected politician such as a president prime minister or a local governor and interest groups is analyzed as an optimization problem the optimal control model shows the conditions required from regulatory policy and resource investment in order to maximize the politician s utility from the interest group s support given one interest group such a policy includes two time intervals well in advance of the elections the politician in office should invest a constant level of resources while for a certain period close to the elections the politician increases or decreases investment depending on the electoral significance of that interest group this proves that electoral cycles not only empirically exist but also maximize the politician s utility from interest groups support given several interest groups at each point in time the politician should invest in the group that contribute the most for his or her political interests

the textile bill of 1985 the determinants of congressional voting patterns the following tables show the results of the probit analysis for the senate and the house a table including results for different combinations of the independent variables is included in an unpublished appendix available from the authors upon request the results of the probit analysis for the senate are shown in table 1 all the variables except exp had the expected signs however the results indicate that the two other employment variables and party affiliation are the only factors which we can say with confidence influenced a senator s decision to vote for or against this bill the coefficients reported and labeled der of prob measure the derivative of the probability of a yes vote evaluated at the means of the independent variables in question thus for example the coefficient for unemp in the top line of table 1 should be interpreted as indicating that a one percentage point increase in a state s unemployment rate will cause a 5 89 increase in the probability that the senator will vote for the bill the result for dr the party of the senator shows that in general democrats are more apt to vote for protectionist policies than are republicans this is consistant with president reagan s negative stand on the bill and his threat to veto it should it pass the amendment in question passed the senate on 24 october 1985 by a vote of 54 for to 42 against but the bill it was attached to has been postponed indefinitely the house bill which was passed on 10 october 1985 by a vote of 262 for to 159 against was vetoed by reagan on 17 december 1985 the results of the probit analysis for the house of representatives are shown in table 2 state employment data was used for the house as opposed to data for each voting district this was done for three reasons first employment data is usually reported by state or by county since counties are often divided by congressional district boundaries much personal judgement would be necessary to assign employment figures second the most recent county industry employment data is from 1981 while the data used in this analysis is from 1984 third we feel that in general logrolling is prevalent among a state s representatives for this bill the representatives from twenty six states voted as a block and in all but six states one third or less of that state s representatives voted contrary to the majority all of the probabilities are significant at the 05 confidence level representative s voting patterns are influenced by all of the included factors when unionization is added to the equation its coefficient is very small and negative although it is significant at the 05 confidence level one would expect more significance here since there are more degrees of freedom for the house analysis than for that of the senate when the data from the house and senate are pooled the results are similar to those of the house alone the null hypothesis that the data cannot be pooled was tested using a statistic with eight degrees of freedom 9 721 meaning that the null hypothesis is rejected as in the senate the state unemployment rate and the percent employed in textiles are important influences on the representative s vote and democrats in the house are more likely to vote for protectionist bills than republicans however unlike the senate the percent of a representative s campaign contributions that are donated by industry special interest groups has a significant effect on voting patterns although the point estimates for the magnitudes of the influence are very similar in both cases seventy four percent of the house received campaign contributions from these special interest groups while only 54 of the senate received contributions from these same sources this is probably because only one third of the senate was up for reelection during the time period considered while the entire house was in the process of campaigning for reelection exports also play a role in influencing the probability of a yes vote reducing this probability as employment in export industries increases but the magnitude of the coefficient is only 11 of that for textile employment the significance of this variable in the house is probably due to fear of retaliation expressed by both democrats and republicans this variable was not significant in the senate model most likely because the senate version excluded from the 1 import quota growth rate many countries who might have retaliated representatives appear to respond to a wider variety of constituent interests than do senators while senators voting patterns are only significantly influenced by their political affiliation their state s unemployment rate and the importance of textiles to their state the voting behavior of representatives is influenced by these factors as well as the importance of exports to their state and campaign contributions by textile special interest groups these results affirm the validity of the approach used by baldwin and coughlin they differ from baldwin who finds exports are not a significant influence on the house and from coughlin who does not include export employment as an explanitory variable or analyze the differences in voting patterns between the house and the senate

cross country causes and consequences of the crisis an update abstract we update rose and spiegel forthcoming rose and spiegel 2010 and search for simple quantitative models of macroeconomic and financial indicators of the great recession of 2008 09 we use a cross country approach and examine a number of potential causes that have been found to be successful indicators of crisis intensity by other scholars we check a number of different indicators of crisis intensity and a variety of different country samples while countries with higher income and looser credit market regulation seemed to suffer worse crises we find few clear reliable indicators in the pre crisis data of the incidence of the great recession countries with current account surpluses seemed better insulated from slowdowns

financial crisis and global imbalances its labour market origins and the aftermath the objective of this paper is to articulate how the 2007 09 economic crisis is rooted in the uneven income distribution and inequality caused by the current finance led model of growth the process of financialisation that took place in the 1980s in the usa and then in the european union was coupled with labour flexibility wage moderation and soaring profits the flexibility agenda of the labour market and the end of wage increases along with the contraction of indirect wages i e public social expenditure diminished workers purchasing power this was partly compensated with increased borrowing opportunities and the boom of credit consumption all of which helped workers to maintain unstable consumption capacity however in the long term unstable consumption patterns derived from precarious job creation job instability and poor wages have weakened aggregate demand hence labour market issues such as flexibility uneven income distribution poor wages and the financial crisis are two sides of the same coin both have a direct impact on the economic crisis and the current global imbalances copyright the author 2012 published by oxford university press on behalf of the cambridge political economy society all rights reserved oxford university press

mobility constraints productivity trends and extended crises abstract in this paper we propose an interpretation of the current global financial crisis which emphasizes sectoral dislocation following localized technical change in the presence of barriers to labor mobility this tale is reminiscent of a similar tale concerning the great depression in the 30s technical change was localized in agriculture where income fell because rising productivity could not be offset by a shrinking labor force due to the costs of moving out of agriculture for unemployed workers inelastic demand for agricultural output meant that as output increased income declined as individual incomes fell below the level necessary to finance the transition to manufacturing excess labor became trapped in agriculture reducing wages and exacerbating the rise in output shrinking incomes in agriculture reverberated on the other sectors mainly manufacturing causing a large depression nowadays it is manufacturing that plays the role of epicenter of technical change falling incomes in manufacturing yield a lack of demand for goods produced in the rest of the economy namely the service sector this may be the deep rooted cause of the long lasting slump and the painfully slow recovery

public policies pressure groups and dead weight costs abstract this paper presents a model of competition among special interest groups for political influence each active group exerts pressure to affect its taxes and subsidies where activities of different groups are related by the equality between total tax collections and total tax subsidies the dead weight costs and benefits of taxes and subsidies play a major role in our model an increase in the dead weight cost of taxation encourages pressure by taxpayers while an increase in the dead weight costs of subsidies discourages pressure by recipients various applications of the analysis are discussed