I propose to show how to translate the economic analysis of institutions developed in the tradition of “worst case” political economy into the lingua franca of robust statistics. An institution will be defined as contingent upon a design theory and the difficulty we consider is the use of the institution by the designer. The technical bridge between institutional robustness and statistical robu...

This paper addresses a methodology for the optimal conceptual design of thermochemical fuel production processes from biomass. A decomposed modelling approach with separate energy-flow, energy-integration and economic models are coupled with a multi-objective optimisation strategy. It is applied to the design of a process that produces synthetic natural gas (SNG) from lignocellulosic materials....

In this work, we attempt to analyze the contribution of innovative activities to firm performance and growth. We examine economic data from some of the economies that were heavily affected by current economic crisis: the countries of southern Europe (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) and Ireland. Following literature, an appropriate econometric model is developed and several indicators are tes...

In this work, we attempt to analyze the contribution of innovative activities to firm performance and growth. We examine economic data from some of the economies that were heavily affected by current economic crisis: the countries of southern Europe (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) and Ireland. Following literature, an appropriate econometric model is developed and several indicators are tes...

By generalizing Hamilton’s model of the US business cycle to a three-regime Markov-switching vector autoregressive model, this paper analyzes regime shifts in the stochastic process of economic growth in the US, Japan and Europe over the last four decades. Empirical evidence is established for the presence of a structural break in the expansionary GDP growth for the US and Japan based on an out...