Economics Insights @ CBS

The perturbation generation rule of Suri (Ref. 1) is extended to cases where random variables are not generated by inversion. Conditions are given for the use of other methods. Infinitesimal perturbation analysis is shown to be compatible with common random number techniques in cases where finite-difference approximations are not.

We estimate labor demand equations derived from a (restricted variable) cost function in which "experience" on a technology (proxied by the mean age of the capital stock) enters "non-neutrally." Our specification of the underlying cost function is based on the hypothesis that highly educated workers have a comparative advantage with respect to the adjustment to and implementation of new technologies.

An analysis of the environments of leading manufacturing firms operating in the United States and in Australia produced a series of hypothesized differences in the strategies, organization structures, and market environments of firms in the two countries. Parallel hypotheses about differences between domestic Australian firms and subsidiaries of foreign multinationals operating in Australia were also developed. The hypotheses were by and large supported when tested on data obtained from leading corporations in the two countries.

A nonstationary Markov chain is weakly ergodic if the dependence on the state distribution on the starting state vanishes as time tends to infinity. A chain is strongly ergodic if it is weakly ergodic and converges in distribution. In this paper we show that the two ergodicity concepts are equivalent for finite chains under rather general (and widely verifiable) conditions. We discuss applications to probabalistic analyses of general search methods for combinatorial optimization problems (simulated annealing).