Economics Research Works
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- ItemBurst of Fall, A Painting by Alma Thomas(2019-01) Almon, Clopper"Burst of Fall" is a 1968 painting by the Alma W. Thomas, and African-American woman painter of the Washington Color school. This brief note describes the circumstances of its origin and of its initial purchase. It includes as jpg image of the painting.
- ItemThe Gwx Story(www.CreateSpace.com, 2017) Almon, ClopperThis is the story in tutorial form of the creation of a program, Gwx, for building economic models, both macroeconomic and multisectoral. The program closely resembles the G7 program. Like G7, it is written in C++ but it is built with free, open-source, cross-platform tools. There are many books about how to use some specific computer program but few about what was going on in the mind of the designer and programmer as the project evolved, as problems emerged and were solve. This is such a book. The program, Gwx, is designed to be used with the author's book, The Craft of Economic Modeling.
- ItemThe Craft of Economic Modeling(www.CreateSpace.com, 2017) Almon, ClopperThis book is a practical guide to building economic models, both macroeconomic and multisectoral. It uses free software available from the Internet together with regularly updated databanks including the quarterly national accounts of the United States. It does NOT deal with some recent fads in economic model building, such as Real Business Cycles, Computable General Equilibriium models, nor DSGE models, all of which are, in the author's opinion, "alternative reality" models at best.
- ItemInforum Models: Origin, Evolution, and By-ways Avoided(Institute of Economic Forecasting, Russian Academy of Sciences, 2015) Almon, ClopperInforum models combine input-output tables with econometric analysis in dynamic models in which the investment in each industry depends upon the growth of output in that industry. They have been built and used in a number of countries including the USA, Russia, Germany, Poland, Latvia, Austria, Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, South Africa, Mexico, Colombia, China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam and perhaps others. They make extensive use of econometrics and input-output analysis to describe the functioning of an economy not only at a macroeconomic level but also at the level of individual products and industries. This paper records – somewhat autobiographically on the part of the author -- the beginnings of these models, outlines their evolution, defends them and other econometric models against the sweeping Lucas critique, and mentions some of the fads in economics and modeling which have been avoided for good reason.
- ItemPath Curves and Plant Buds: an Introduction to the Work of Lawrence Edwards(International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, 1979-07) Almon, ClopperLawrence Edwards has shown that many flowering plants have buds with an outline in the form of a path curve, the curve that a point follows under repeated projective transformation of the plane into itself. Edwards, however, did not give a formula for these curves nor did he fit the curves by the standard method of least squares. This paper gives an elementary exposition of the method used by Edwards, shows its relation to projective geometry, and then uses homogeneous coordinates, linear differential equations and characteristic values and vectors of a matrix to derive the formula for path curves. This formula is then used to fit path curves by least squares to data provided by Edwards for the buds of 150 plants. Most buds are fit very closely.