Random stuff: Zipf's law / Rank size distribution of cities (Do-it-yourself info included!)

Zipf

When researchers analyze data sometimes remarkable patterns are found. One of these patterns is Zipf's Law, named after linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950). He found that the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Specifically, he found that the most frequent word, will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc. 

Thus he found that the most occuring word 'the' accounts for 7 percent of all word occurences (69.971 out of 1 million), the second most occuring word 'of' account for 3.5 percent of all word occurences etc.

Article: is there a nutrion-based poverty trap?

In this post I would like to direct the reader to a interesting article of Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, found here. It starts with the notion that their may be 1 billion hungry people in the world, which may lead to a nutrion-based poverty trap. However, is this really true?

Article: why are there still so few women at the top?

a gender difference in competitiveness ?

In the last decades the position of women has become more and more equal to men. However, at the top, men still dominate. Betrand and Hallock found in 2001 that only 2.5 percent of the top positions are held by women. Reseachers have tried to explain this by discrimination (demand side explanation)  or difference in preferences, i.e. the role of the women in the family etc. (supply side explanation). However in recent years a third explanation is suggested, one that is not often heard in the public debate. Namely, the finding that men and women differ in their competitiveness.

How-to: Solve the Cournot duopoly model (part 1)

In this blog post I will explain the Cournot oligopoly model. If you have followed a basic micro economics course you are most likely already familiar with it. The Cournot model is part of a range of oligopoly models that try to capture the strategic interaction between firms that arises if there is only a limited amount of competition (in the sense that there are only a small number of sellers of a product).

I have divided this blog post up in to three parts. Part 1 will setup the model, Part 2 will solve the model, Part 3 will generalize the model and compare the outcomes to a monopoly. At the end you should have a good understand of the Cournot model and its implications.

Warning: long post will follow!

How-to: Solve the Cournot duopoly model (part 2)

In part 1 the model was setup we will now continue with solving it.

How-to: Solve the Cournot duopoly model (part 3)

In part 1 we had the model setup, in part 2 we have solved the model. Now in part 3 we will generalize the model.

How-to: write math in blogger

This first blogpost will be special. Obviously because it is the first but also because it will not be about economics. It is, however, about the first problem I needed to solve before starting this blog. Namely, how can you write math equations in blogger? Economics uses quite a bit of math, and not be able to write it would have meant the end of my blog before it ever came into existence. I will mostly provide links to other pages as they do a fine job about explaining what to do.