Giulio Bottazzi

The price series of Dubai Crude has been replaced with a weighted average of oil exporters provided by OPEC. The former series has been discontinued by the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The time window in plots showing more recent price movements has been updated to 2003. All data come form public sources and can be freely downloaded.

Version 5.4 of the gbutils package has been released. It contains several new programs and a lot of new features. In addition, a couple of nasty bugs has been fixed. If you are already an user, you are urged to switch to the new version. If you never tried it, you will be surprised by the amount of econometrics which can be done from the command line. Check the new project page.

The project The growth of firms and countries: distributional properties and economic determinants has been financed by the Italian Ministry of University and Research. The project is a joint effort of three units. I'm in charge of coordinating the project and, in particular, the research team at the Scuola Sant'Anna. Prof. Davide Fiaschi coordinates the University of Pisa unit and Prof. Enrico Scalas is responsible of the unit at the University of Piemonte Orientale.

Added a new price series to the report, namely the Dubai Crude, particularly relevant for the far east and Chinese market. I have also added a couple of new plots showing the recent divergence between the three main oil price indexes. Data comes form public sources and can be freely downloaded.

The first report produced by the DIME WP 6.8 and authored by Marco Fioretti has been published. The document discuss the advantages of opening to the public the huge amount of information generated by local administrations. It can be downloaded from DIME or LEM lab, or read and commented on line at Marco's blog.

A brief interview by a local TV about the project (in Italian) with Marco Fioretti and me is available here.

See the video on the FINNOV Work Package 4, Performance, here.

Together with Pietro Dindo we are acting as guest editors for a special issue of the Journal of Evolutionary Economics on the evolutionary approach to economic modeling. The issue will contain a selection of the papers presented at the conference hosted by Scuola Sant'Anna the past October.

Structural Change and Economic Dynamics devotes a special issue to empirical analysis of firm dynamics. The call is open and competitive. I'll serve as guest editor together with Angelo Secchi.