We endogenize total factor productivity in a neoclassical model with increasing returns to scale. We obtain multiple steady-state equilibria with an arbitrarily small degree of increasing returns to scale. While the most productive …rms operate across all the steady states, in a poverty trap less productive …rms operate as well. This results in lower average …rm productivity and total factor pr...

7 We present a model of structural change due to non-linear Engel-curves for consumer 8 goods. Goods are sequentially introduced starting out as a luxury with high income 9 elasticity and ending up as a necessity with low income elasticity. Although this leads to 10 rising and falling sectoral employment shares, the model exhibits a steady growth path 11 along which the Kaldor facts are satisfi...

Dioscorea opposita Thunb. has been used as health food and herbal medicinal ingredients in traditional Chinese medicine. In this study, the total DNA of D. opposita Thunb. was extracted using an improved cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) method, and the extracted DNA was further used for random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) reaction system by design of the L16 (4(4)) orthogonal diagram. ...

We investigate micro pricing behaviour in groceries (the UK’s most important consumer market) over eight years including the inflationary period of early 2008. We find behaviour sharply distinguished from most previous work, namely that overall basket prices rise but more individual prices fall than rise! This is consistent with retailers obscuring the fact of rising basket prices. We employ a ...

This paper develops a model with multiple market locations in which the quality of intangible assets of firms, provided by management, determines the firms. performance. Despite an ex ante symmetry of potential entrants, the equilibrium assignment of heterogeneous managerial skills to firms tends to be asymmetric. This sorting outcome determines both the goods market structure at single locatio...

The present investigation deals with the study and development of a surface roughness prediction model for the machining of unidirectional glass fiber reinforced plastics (UDGFRP) composite using Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The feed forward back propagation is used. Taguchi method (Orthogonal L16 array) is employed to carry out the experimental work. The process parameters selected for stu...

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of exchange rate uncertainty in determining foreign direct R&D investment into the UK. We estimate an econometric model of FDI in R&D, using a panel of manufacturing industries. Our results suggest that an increase in the volatility of the euro-dollar exchange rate tends to relocate R&D investment from the Euro Area into the UK. A rise in the...

BACKGROUND Bivalves comprise around 30,000 extant species and have received much attention for their importance in ecosystems, aquaculture and evolutionary studies. Despite the increasing application of real-time quantitative reverse transcription PCR (qRT-PCR) in gene expression studies on bivalve species, little research has been conducted on reference gene selection which is critical for rel...

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) biodegradation in contaminated sediment is an attractive remediation technique and its success depends on the optimal condition for the PAH-degrading isolates. The aims of the current study was to isolate and identify PAHs-degrading bacteria from surface sediments of Nayband Bay and to evaluate the efficiency of statistically based experimental design for...

Agriculture significantly contributes to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and there is a need to develop effective mitigation strategies. The efficacy of methods to reduce GHG fluxes from agricultural soils can be affected by a range of interacting management and environmental factors. Uniquely, we used the Taguchi experimental design methodology to rank the relative importance of six fact...