New submission

Finally, I decided that I shouldn't wait anymore for feedback on polishing my second essay from my dissertation. Since I haven't made huge modifications since it became a working paper in Kiel, basically these 8 months were close to wasted. Instead, I could have been better off by just submitting it; at least, by now, I would have got some referee reports and probably accommodate them. Hence, I decided not to wait anymore. I opted for an outlet that is specialized in Economic Comparisons and especially ones involving transition and developing countries. I really see a good match with my work and I hope I will be able to publish it there. Moreover, Journal of Comparative Economics has a pretty good impact factor: 0.69-1.12, pending on the reference, and some prestigious scholars in the editorial board:D. Berkowitz (Pittsburgh), G. Roland (UC Berkley), A. Banerjee (MIT), S. Djankov (World Bank), W. Easterly (NYU), S. Johnson (MIT).

Getting Keen on Social Network Analysis

Social network analysis views social relationships in terms of nodes and ties. Nodes are the individual actors within the networks, and ties are the relationships between the actors. There can be many kinds of ties between the nodes. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families up to the level of nations, and play a critical role in determining the way problems are solved, organizations are run, and the degree to which individuals succeed in achieving their goals.

Diffusion of innovations theory explores social networks and their role in influencing the spread of new ideas and practices. Change agents and opinion leaders often play major roles in spurring the adoption of innovations, although factors inherent to the innovations also play a role.
But besides all this wiki stuff, now we can also do network regressions which seems a lot better than all the previous measures (Betweeness, Centrality etc.) that resemble more with descriptive statistics. To me that is exciting and I have to look more into it soon.
Some Resources: http://group10.sustainapedianw.org/?cat=36; http://www.insna.org/; http://www.analytictech.com/networks/; http://lrs.ed.uiuc.edu/tse-portal/analysis/social-network-analysis/

Job Market
Yes, it already is that time of the year. Yesterday's PhD student looking for a nice summer and long break becomes today's sturdy candidate for an academic position and tomorrow's colleague. For some it might come naturally and obviously but for others might be different. While I look forward to finish my PhD and move to the next stage of my life, I still miss a couple of weeks that could make a difference on how one settles everything into place.

The Excitement of Something New

These couple of months I had to come up with an idea for a third essay of my dissertation. While aiming for something very different and more micro oriented, I still wanted to keep the focus of my thesis on the international aspects of innovation and technology transfer and especially on developing countries. And yes, after a couple of weeks and meetings with my advisor, I am happy to say that I found something nice. The basic idea is to look at alliances in the global the tire industry between different firms and see who is providing technology, to whom and why. There are about 350 firms globally, all producing tires in various countries of the world. Every year about 50 to 70 such technological agreements occur usually between firms from developed and developing countries, but not always.Moreover, the tire industry, although a mature one, has a good pace of technological innovation and high competition, which make it even more interesting.

The busiest time ever

Well, after all the travel and presentations, now comes the heavy stuff. October and November are the months when one graduate student in Economics who's going to be on the market this year needs to do the lion's share of the work: read & collect the relevant job adds from AEA's JOE, ERN, AMA and whatever they think is a fit for them, polish the job market paper, publish "it" or "them" if one is lucky enough to have more finished project, write nice CVs and letters for your future possible employers and keep working on your dissertation. Although is challenging and (sometimes) even fun, these days are quite crazy for me, working at least 15hrs per days in trying to accommodate all of the above. It would be also desirable to get some nice results in terms of job perspectives but one can only hope so, since competition is going to be tough this year. However, "Semper Spes!"

Importing Excel To LaTeX

It might seem trivial to you, but importing Excel tables is not that easy to do in LaTeX. I have used this program Xcel2Latex that basically generates an add-on in Excel which allows you to export the table as a TXT file that I recognized by your TEX editor. Although migration works fairly well in this manner, it is desirable to keep the table as simple as possible (less merged cells etc) and work with it under LaTeX afterwards.
Happy Tabulating!