The identification of the factors that condition a software programmer’s productivity remains a key challenge for both scholars and practitioners. While a number of studies have focused on the impact of one or a few particular factors, the way these factors jointly condition programmer productivity is still unknown. This paper presents a conceptual model aimed at a comprehensive understanding o...

In response to the call for papers, we received a total of 148 submissions from 37 countries, well distributed across the various world regions and the conference topics. With such a large number of papers, the Technical Program Committee was faced with the daunting task of selecting the best papers. After a careful and strenuous review phase with all the papers receiving at least 3 reviews, fo...

This paper uses the Luenberger productivity index to evaluate the productivity changes of Greek Life insurance companies between 1994 and 2003, combining operational and financial variables. It is found that the average annual productivity change was about 19% and was due to technological progress, whereas the impact of efficiency was minimal. It seems that deregulation, established by the Thir...

Triple product correlations (TPC’s) involving strange quark spin are elucidated in b → uūs process within the standard model. They arise when light quark masses are nonzero. As the momenta and spins of constituent quarks are related to that of the parent hadron, the quark masses are, however small, important and relevant in TPC studies. At this level the TPC’s of interest are of the form ~ss · ...

False bad news about population growth, natural resources, and the environment is published widely in the face of contradictory evidence. For example, the world supply of arable land has actually been increasing, the scarcity of natural resources including food and energy has been decreasing, and basic measures of U.S. environmental quality show positive trends. The aggregate data show no long-...

We propose and analyze a two-country model of endogenous innovation cycles. In autarky, innovation fluctuations in the two countries are decoupled. As the trade cost falls and intra-industry trade rises, they become synchronized. This is because globalization leads to the alignment of innovation incentives across firms based in different countries, as they operate in the increasingly global (he...

The problem of how best to find and exploit essential resources, the quality and locations of which are unknown, is common throughout biology. For plants, the need to grow an efficient root system so as to acquire patchily distributed soil nutrients is typically complicated by competition between plants, and by the costs of maintaining the root system. Simple mechanistic models for root growth ...

This paper contributes to the conflicting international evidence on the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on labour productivity (LP) growth. We examine the link between ICT intensity and New Zealand s LP growth in 29 industries over the period 1988–2003, and over relevant sub-periods. After deriving an ICT intensity index to classify industries into more ICT intensive an...