The Political Economist

This week my colleagues and I from Oraclum were focused on predicting the outcome of the forthcoming Croatian general election. We did the same thing last year and were not expecting to do Croatian elections again, at least until the local elections in 2017. However, the new government - formed after almost 2 months of post-election negotiations - survived in office for only 6 months. Last year there was no relative winner as the two main coalitions, led by the conservative HDZ and the social-democrat SDP both came tied with 56 seats (76 needed to form government). The biggest surprise was a centrist party MOST which grabbed 19 seats making it the kingmaker party, with a number of smaller parties entering Parliament as well. The new election is to be held this Sunday, and so we ran our unique BASON Survey ( Bayesian Adjusted Social Network Survey ) over the past week to feel the vibe of the voters and make our election prediction. A little bit about the survey before we share ...

I haven't posted any book reviews for a while now. It's not that I haven't been reading the books, it's just that I failed to find the time to write the reviews. So now, in the next three, four blog posts, I will be writing a series of reviews about 8 or so books (with more to come in the following months). I will start with Cesar Hidalgo's Why Information Grows for today's single book review (it's a big one, since this is an exciting new theory), and then I move on to 4 economic history books (in two separate posts), and close with three inequality/cronyism books. After all of that, in September I will continue with my standard ramblings about economic stagnation, the role of technology and the third industrial revolution, inequality and social mobility, the endless austerity vs stimulus debates, etc. Enjoy!  Hidalgo, Cesar (20 15) Why Information Grows. The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies . Basic Books Cesar Hidalgo , a physicist from MI...

A paper of mine (co-authored with Boris Podobnik and H. Eugene Stanley ) got published in PLOS ONE ! Since PLOS is an open-access journal you can read the whole paper here . It is primarily a theoretical paper focused on designing a model of corruption networks in democracies. The intuition for the model was a growing disparity between public sector and private sector wages and how this corresponds with greater corruption. This is, naturally, only a correlation, but it served as a motivation to search deeper and uncover how corrupt networks can sustain themselves within a democratic environment.  There were three main findings/contributions in the paper: The greater the public sector wage premium (higher public sector wages than private sector wages) in a given country, the greater the possibility of corruption We design and propose a new reward-to-risk ratio for labor economics (taking into account the relative riskiness of working in each sector) Democracy does not ...