Throughout human history the theme of positive changes following adversity is found in literature, religions, and philosophies. Most notable is Nietzsche’s famous dictum, “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” It was an idea also common to the existential and humanistic traditions of psychology of the mid-twentieth century. Viktor Frankl wrote about the will to meaning following his experien...

It is now evident in the literature that the information and communication technology (ICT) has a positive and significant impact on the productivity and economic growth. Most studies in this area, however, are limited to the developed countries. Given different regulations and economic conditions, and also an increasing trend in allocating resources to ICT in developing countries, it is import...

Technical progress in U.S. agriculture is evaluated using a new measure of productivity growth, flexible technical change. This measure allows for nonconstant returns to scale, market structures other than perfect competition, and time-varying coefficients. An integral part of the procedure is the estimation of the production function by Flexible Least Squares. Flexible technical change results...

in this study, total factor productivity growth of iran’s pulses (including irrigated pea, dry pea, irrigated lentil, dry lentil, irrigated soybean, dry soybean and irrigated bean) during of farming years 1989-1990 though 2007-2008 had been analyzed, using nonparametric malmquist approach. so, amounts of inputs usages include seeds, fertilizers, dung, poison, herbicide, labor, water and acreage...

A number of studies have found that foreign direct investment (FDI) can have positive impacts on productivity. However, while FDI has clearly positive impacts on technology transfers, its effects on resource use within firms is less clear and, in principle, efficiency losses might offset some of the productivity gains associated with improved technologies. In this paper, we study the impacts of...

One robust result from many small-scale experiments has been that plant community productivity often increases with increasing plant diversity. Most frequently, resource-based or competitive interactions are thought to drive this positive diversity-productivity relationship. Here, we ask whether suppression of plant productivity by soil fungal pathogens might also drive a positive diversity-pro...