The Bank of Spain Chair in Computational Economics at the Economics Department of the University Jaume I of Castellon (Spain), headed by Professor Thomas Lux, is seeking to fill two positions for Doctoral Students.

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Recently I have discovered an online education system Coursera. While browsing through the available courses I noticed one named "Social and Economic Networks: Models and Analysis". Sadly it was already six weeks into the eight week program, so I was not able to formally complete it. Yet the knowledge I have obtained by viewing videos of this course enabled me to prepare couple of posts for this website.

During the next couple of posts I will consider some of the well-known network models. I'll start in this text from the Erdos-Renyi network formation model, and later will continue with the Watts-Strogatz model ("small world" networks) and the Barabasi-Albert model ("scale-free" networks).

Following our previous papers about economic convergence of Baltic and Visegrad countries and long-term development forecasting, we want to review the latest Eurostat data about Europe and OECD economies in purchasing power standards (PPS). There are at least three reasons for that. First of all, we look for the best way to compare GDPs between countries. Secondly, we seek appropriate and the most reliable data to model international macroeconomic convergence processes. Finally, we want to draw your attention at the latest Eurostat data, which stresses extremely strong growth of Baltic countries.

Economic development of the European Union member states is a live international macroeconomic experiment. Theoretical analysis and possible modeling of these processes is a real challenge to all analysts and theorists. EU experience would be much more useful if the running economic processes were understood from the macroeconomic theory point of view. Noticed laws would be handful, solving issues of the EU economy in the future. In our opinion, observed regularities follow especially stable trends. The observed regularities of macroeconomic trends could be useful to forecast long-term economic development in the manner of natural sciences. This could be done in much larger extent, than, for example, in the weather long term forecasting. In a previous article "The phenomenon of economic growth of Baltic countries" we used World Bank data to point on a particular universality of economic growth in different regions. There we partly revise the data by adding Scandinavian countries to already reviewed Baltic and Visegrad regions. In the first graph we plot GDPs in USD, current prices, of these EU members’ and Norway from 1995 to 2012. The same data is show in three different ways to stress various growth trends.

On the 1st of July video course Competitive Strategy was started on the Coursera website. The aim of this course is to provide elementary background on the game theory and also to allow to understand how this theory can be useful in practice.

Course is taught by prof. Tobias Kretschmer from LMU Munich.

Feel free to try!

If one would start speaking about the dragon kings and black swans, many people would think that the one is talking about the fairy tales. But these terms are used then speaking about the events in the financial markets! Black swans are rare, but observable in the nature. Dragon kings are only observed in the fairy tales. So we would be amused if we would see the black swan with our own eyes, yet if we would see the dragon king we would be completely shocked. In nature these kinds of event are extremely rare and improbable, while in the financial markets we see these kind of events frequently enough. Below you can find a talk by Didier Sornette (taken from ted.com, some of the related info is available from blog.ted.com), who talks about these kind of events, their impact and possibilities to predict.