An important economic policy issue is to ascertain when and if technical change (TC) is driving measured growth in productivity. Was this the case for Japan during the late 1980s when a massive financial bubble was being formed? This paper addresses this question, after first further developing methods needed for this purpose. The movement of firms’ TC is of particular policy interest to Japan ...

The euphoria of technology In an earlier commentary (Kong, 1999), I raised the issue of distance from the c̀entre' as a barrier to a researcher's participation in the academic circuit, despite the advent of technology and the possibilities it brings of decreasing relative distance. In this commentary, I wish to focus on what technology may and may not do for teaching and learning, and thus to ba...

We develop performance approximations that can help manage the pace of play in golf. In previous work we developed a stochastic model of successive groups of golfers playing on an 18-hole golf course and derived expressions for the capacity (maximum possible throughput) of each hole and the golf course as a whole. That model captures the realistic feature that, on most holes, more than one grou...

the New York–New Jersey region plunged 51 percent— a drop that far exceeded the 8.4 percent decline in manufacturing jobs nationwide. Some areas within the region were especially hard hit by the employment losses: New York City shed more than two-thirds of its manufacturing jobs, while neighboring northern New Jersey lost 55 percent. Inflation-adjusted, or real, income from manufacturing also f...

Ionic liquid (IL) N-methyl pyrrolidone dihydrogen phosphate ([Hnmp]H2PO4) was synthesized and its structure was characterized with FT-IR spectroscopy and 1H NMR. The denitrogenation performance of the ionic liquid was investigated using Fushun shale diesel oil that included 0.52 w% basic nitrogen as feedstock. Experiment results showed that under the operating conditions with temperature of 30 ...

This work is based on the Cyprus Survey of Consumer Finances (CySCF) and focuses on one hand on the composition of household assets in Cyprus based on the 2002 Cyprus Survey of Consumer Finances (CySCF2002) and on the other on the distributional changes between the 1999 and the 2002 CySCFs. From 1999 to 2002 there has been a radical increase of household participation in direct stockholding. Th...

Economic and social development is usually slow and stable. So has been the evolution of cooperative enterprises in general. Every now and then there exist, however, times of change; revolutionary phases in the evolutionary process. These are the times when history is broken and new history is made. I call these phases the ’times of strategic change’, which means in this presentation changes in...

The Financial Times recently reported that the largest brewer in England was about to fall into Belgian hands. Bass Brewing was being acquired by Belgium’s Interbrew for the princely sum of $3.45 billion. With this transfer of ownership, 220 years of brewing under British ownership was about to come to an end. As a result, half of the British beer industry was now going to be in foreign hands, ...

Executive Summary In response to a recommendation from a 2001-02 salary equity committee report and a mandate from the Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity (EOD), in order comply with relevant federal requirements, a salary-equity analysis focused on gender and minority status in full-time faculty on the tenured or clinical track was conducted using 2004-05 data. This report presents the m...