Theoretically, human capital is conclusively believed to be positively related with economic growth. While empirically, the said relationship does not always hold for several reasons. Thus, the current paper presents new results on a set of conditions under which human capital is robustly and...

This paper proposes a new approach of forecasting prospective comparative advantages based on relative prices differences between countries in the context of economic liberalization. An empirical analysis based on the example of Central and East European countries that have already passed the...

Innovations, be they radical new products or technology improvements are widely recognized as a key factor of economic growth. To identify the factors triggering innovative activities is a main concern for economic theory and empirical analysis. As the number of hypotheses is large, the process...

Several approaches for subset recovery and improved forecasting accuracy have been proposed and studied. One way is to apply a regularization strategy and solve the model selection task as a continuous optimization problem. One of the most popular approaches in this research field is given by...

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate. And how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external...

Policy makers constantly face optimal control problems: what controls allow to achieve certain targets in, e.g., GDP growth or inflation? Conventionally this is done by applying certain linear-quadratic optimization algorithms to dynamic econometric models. Several algorithms extend this...

This paper analyzes whether firms conducting internal R&D and acquiring external high-tech equipment experience a complementarity effect. For German CIS data we conduct a complete set of indirect and direct complementarity tests refining the analysis by looking at various types of innovations...

In the past decades the role of profit sharing schemes (PSS) as a way to foster innovation in a principal-agent context, and more generally of innovation in economic growth, have been widely acknowledged and studied. However, surprisingly little has been done to analyze the interactions between...

The diffusion of renewable electricity generating technologies is widely consid- ered as crucial for establishing a sustainable energy system in the future. However, currently the required transition is unlikely to be achieved by market forces alone. For this reason, many countries implement...

We propose a meta-heuristic approach for solving nonlinear dynamic tracking games. In contrast to more "traditional" methods based on linear-quadratic (LQ) techniques, this derivative-free method is very flexible (e.g. to introduce inequality constraints). The meta-heuristic is applied to a...