.[A couple of other guys think so, too.]"It is clear that much additional work will be required before a complete understanding occurs" ....  .[This is a lousy paper, but so are all the others on this miserable topic.]"Thanks are due to Joe Blotz for assistance with the experiment and to George Frink for valuable assistance" .

Chapters 2, 3, and 4 ask simple questions of the enlargement process, considering simulations of likely convergence paths for accession countries in a Real Business Cycle framework (Chapter 1), an estimation of costs of structural reforms in an accession country (Chapter 2), finding out how intra-EU trade will be affected by the presence of possibly more favourable conditions in newer countries (Chapter 3) and the influence of productivity differentials on the exchange rates of four accession countries....  As an example, the inclusion or exclusion of Turkey into the EU will have to be considered in a political economy framework before standard RBC models can be force-fitted onto some large panel dataset and estimated to oblivion, if we are to gain some insight into how these systems behave when coupled through a common currency.Given the well documented political struggles that took place to move the Euro from an idea to a reality, might have drawn some consideration from one of the authors.

The idea is to gauge the position of the profession by asking the people who invented large swathes of the theory their motivations for doings what they did, when they did it, and how they did it....  Looking at the path integral method as an undergraduate, you can see how he came up with it (if, in fairness, I didn't really understand it), how startlingly original he was in doing his physics, because that's how he lived his life---he followed different paths as he felt he needed to, and arrived at different destinations thatn others because of his personality.

AbstractThe Goodwin growth model is a particular dynamical system exhibiting limit cycle behaviour.  I wish to add a measure of search and selection into the basic model by adapting one of the parameters of the model to be affected by an operator, such that the search process itself is a function of the relative slackness of the labour market summarised by the Phillips curve relationship modelled within the Goodwin model, and a new operator defined below, following Kauffman (1993) NK model of search and selection along fitness landscapes.

Design, Setting, and Participants: Retrospective analysis of quality assurance data from 37 patients that presented to the emergency department (ED) of an academic, tertiary care hospital with ‘positive’ ED ultrasounds of the RUQ from June 1, 2005 to February 30, 2006....  Secondary outcomes were the hypothetical cost-savings achieved with singular use of ED ultrasound, without additional radiographic modalities, to identify and diagnose cholecystitis as extrapolated to the hospital, state, and national level.

"Something for everyone in this week's data on housing from the Census Bureau. Pessimists will note the alarming 6% plunge […]

"...economics is not evidence-based in selecting its theoretical paradigms. Economic policy initiatives are often taken without all the empirical pre-testing […]