Ivan Savin

Autonomous University of Barcelona | UAB · Institute of Environmental Sciences and Technologies (ICTA)

This entry gives a definition of agent-based models (ABMs), a type of modelling that derives complex aggregate phenomena from describing interaction of multiple and heterogenous individual agents. I identify the features that make ABMs uniquely attractive and widely applied in different disciplines, such as incorporation of boundedly rational behav...

Ambitious climate mitigation policies face social and political resistance. One reason is that existing policies insufficiently capture the diversity of relevant insights from the social sciences about potential policy outcomes. We argue that agent‐based models can serve as a powerful tool for integration of elements from different disciplines. Hav...

The phenomenon of fast-growing companies exhibiting sustained growth and creating disproportionally many new jobs, so-called "gazelles", has been widely analyzed in the literature. The criteria defining "gazelles", however, lack a consensus, while it cannot be ruled out that superior performance of these companies is just good luck. We use large fi...

Using multinational input-output data, we analyze how the productivity of countries adjusted for participation in global value chains affects their output growth in manufacturing sectors. Based on parametric and non-parametric methods, we find that value-chain linkages are critical to the productivity-growth nexus and help to explain crosscountry d...

A review article in WIREs Climate Change by Lilliestam Patt and Bersalli (2021) on the effect of carbon pricing on technological change concluded that there is no evidence for it. We published a short commentary with eight criticisms in Environmental and Resource Economics (van den Bergh and Savin, 2021), followed by a response of Lilliestam et al....

We investigate the role of technological improvement and market share reallocation in determining global changes in sectoral labor productivity. Contrary to previous work that neglects dependencies between suppliers in global value chains, we account for input linkages that impact both channels of productivity improvement. Using sector-level data f...

Climate change has revived the debate on growth-versus-environment. In line with this, recently it has been proposed to shift the target focus in "IPCC scenarios" from emissions to post-growth. We argue that this confounds ends and means, since reduction of growth may be an outcome of good climate policies but should not be a goal in itself. In fac...

The addresses of national leaders can affect their public support and spur changes in the country's economy. To date, very few studies exist establishing these relationships, and no research has been done on the addresses from Vladimir Putin. In this paper we fill this knowledge gap by analysing the nationwide phone-ins of Putin, a special annual f...

Over the past decades, the process of knowledge generation has accelerated, producing a lot of scientific publications, which makes reviewing even a relatively narrow subject area very demanding, if not impossible. However, recent text data mining tools can assist researchers in conducting such analysis in an objective and time-efficient way. We co...

It remains unclear how COVID-19 has affected public engagement with the climate crisis. According to the finite-pool-of-worry hypothesis, concern about climate change should have decreased after the pandemic, in turn reducing climate-policy acceptance. Here we test these and several other conjectures by using survey data from 1172 Spanish participa...

Beliefs about other people's opinions on climate change influence one's own opinion. Such beliefs can, however, suffer from biases in perception. Using two nationally representative surveys, we examine this issue in a new context, namely of carbon-tax acceptance in Spain. We find that the more one expects the tax to be accepted by others, the more...

Public support for stringent climate policies is currently weak. We develop a model to study the dynamics of public support for climate policies. It comprises three interconnected modules: one calculates policy impacts; a second translates these into policy support mediated by social inuence; and a third represents the regulator adapting policy str...

We revisit the debate on the role of technological improvement and market share reallocation in determining aggregate productivity gains. Contrary to previous work that neglects dependencies between suppliers in global value chains, we explicitly account for input linkages that impact both channels of productivity improvement. Using sector-level da...

Relevance. Economic growth can be achieved in two different ways: through technological improvements and reallocation of market shares from less to more productive units. Despite the significant research literature on innovation in Russia, the literature on market selection, especially at the sectoral level, is relatively scarce. This is the resear...

While China has become an important source of aid and other official funding for Africa, its coordination with other development partners remains limited, and its contribution to development has been questioned. Despite different development models represented by China and traditional donors, recent studies demonstrated that funding from the two ha...

Since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis many have opinionated on how it may affect society's response to 20 climate change. Two key questions here are how COVID-19 is expected to influence climate action by 21 citizens and by the government. We answer these by applying topic modelling to textual responses from a 22 survey of Spanish citizens. The id...

To foresee global economic trends, one needs to understand the present startup companies that soon may become new market leaders. In this paper we explore textual descriptions of more than 250 thousand startups in the Crunchbase database. We analyze the 2009-2019 period by using topic modelling. We propose a novel classification of startup companie...

The model of replicator dynamics as an evolutionary theory of competition between firms in economics is widely used. I describe how to test this model based on empirical data, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of these tests. Furthermore, I describe ways on how to improve the model of replicator dynamics taking into account global value c...

Public acceptability of carbon taxation depends on its revenue use. Which single or mixed revenue use is most appropriate, and which perceptions of policy effectiveness and fairness explain this, remains unclear. It is, moreover, uncertain how people's prior knowledge about carbon taxation affects policy acceptability. We conducted a survey experim...

Taking robotic patents between 1977 and 2017 and building upon the topic modeling technique, we extract their latent topics, analyze how important these topics are over time, and how they are related to each other looking at how often they are recombined in the same patents. This allows us to dierentiate between more and less important technologica...

There is an ongoing discussion about the effectiveness of carbon pricing, with a strong division between optimists and pessimists. A recent review study by Lilliestam, Patt and Bersalli (2020) of the impact of carbon pricing on low-carbon innovation and deep carbonization concludes that there is no evidence for such an impact. We evaluate this stud...

One can distinguish active (machines) from inactive (infrastructure) capital. Active capital consumes useful energy (or exergy) to do thermodynamic work that muscles and brains usually do. We use data for ten large economies and find that exergy performs just as well as, and hence can replace, labor in a Cobb-Douglas production function. This resul...

Climate policies can be applied either upstream, where fossil fuels are extracted, or downstream, where emissions are generated. Specific policy instruments can be defined for either level, and can take the form of a price signal such as through a tax, or a quantity limit such as through direct regulation or a permit market. In this study, we prese...

The literature has documented two patterns of knowledge exchange: free sharing of knowledge and barter exchange. The former has been coined as collective invention , while the latter is observed in the form of R&D alliance. This study, for the first time, compares these two modes of cooperation in creating and diffusing new knowledge. Doing so, we...

Scopus за период 1995-2021 гг. Разработанный инструмент позволяет определять ос-новные направления научных исследований, выявлять передовые коллективы научных работников по отдельным направлениям, а также анализировать взаимосвязи научных коллективов. Представлены результаты распределения публикаций по времени, девяти основным темам, расчет метрик...

We analyse 465 articles published in EIST from June 2011 until June 2021 to identify topics addressed in the journal. We find eight main topics and assess how their shares changed over time as well as how many citations they received. The topics with the largest shares in all publications are “Theory of socio-technical transitions” and “Urban regim...

Segmentation of survey respondents is a common tool in environmental communication as it helps to understand opinions of people and to deliver targeted messages. Prior research has segmented people based on their opinions about the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability. This involved an evaluation of 16 statements, w...

Studies on socioeconomic impacts of climate and energy policies tend to focus on income and expenditure effects. For analyses that go beyond monetary dimensions, time-diary data have proven to be useful. Here we investigate how work time relates to leisure activity structures and associated energy use for different types of employees. To this end,...

For scale-intensive industries and science-based industries in Germany, we investigate the question whether firms combining internal R&D and acquisition of capital with embodied technology demonstrate better product and process innovation performance than companies using only one of those innovation strategies. Our approach comprises both indirect...

The idea that market selection promotes survival and expansion of the "fittest" producers is a key principle underlying theories of competition. Yet, despite its intuitive appeal, the hypothesis that companies with superior productivity also exhibit higher growth lacks empirical support. One reason for this is that companies are not "islands" that...

We assess evidence from theoretical-modelling, empirical and experimental studies on how interactions between instruments of climate policy affect overall emissions reduction. Such interactions take the form of negative, zero or positive synergistic effects. The considered instruments comprise performance and technical standards, carbon pricing, ad...

The invasive wasp-mimicking Tiger Longicorn Beetle, Xylotrechus chinensis, a potentially lethal pest of mulberry trees (Moraceae: Morus sp.), was first reported in Europe in 2018, although its colonization and establishment were estimated to have occurred during the year 2012 or earlier. In Catalonia the infestation spread from four towns and 44.1...

This article is devoted to the model of replicator dynamics as an evolutionary theory of competition between firms in economics. We describe in detail how to test this model based on empirical data, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of these methods. The results of testing the replicator dynamics model serve as a measure of the intensity...

We analyze the effectiveness of environmental policy when consumers are subject to social influence. To this end, we build a model of consumption decisions driven by socially-embedded preferences formed under the influence of peers in a social network. This setting gives rise to a social multiplier of environmental policy. In an application to clim...

A price on emissions can be achieved through an emission tax or permit trading. The advantages and drawbacks of either instrument are debated. We present an agent-based model to compare their performance under bounded rationality and dynamic markets. It describes firms that face uncertainty about future demand and prices; use heuristic rules to dec...

The debate about the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability triggers a range of associations. Here we analyze open-ended textual responses of citizens and scientists concerning their associations with the terms "economic growth" and "green growth". We derive from the responses a number of topics and examine how associ...

We consider the optimal control problem of a small nonlinear econometric model under parameter uncertainty and passive learning (open-loop feedback). Traditionally, this type of problems has been approached by applying linear-quadratic optimization algorithms. However, the literature demonstrated that those methods are very sensitive to the choice...

Carbon taxes evoke a variety of public responses, often with negative implications for policy support, implementation and stringency. Here we use topic modelling to analyze associations of Spanish citizens with a policy proposal to introduce a carbon tax. This involves asking two key questions, to elicit (1) citizens' associations with a carbon tax...

In this study we compare the impacts of official finance coming from the largest donors of African countries on bilateral trade flows between the donor and the recipient. Applying a gravity model approach, we distinguish between development finance and other official flows. We find that official finance from all the donors stimulates export of good...

Agent‐based models (ABMs) have recently seen much application to the field of climate mitigation policies. They offer a more realistic description of micro behavior than traditional climate policy models by allowing for agent heterogeneity, bounded rationality and nonmarket interactions over social networks. This enables the analysis of a broader s...

Using sanctions as a means of coercion do not always work efficiently. Ruling elites have an ability to shift loadings on less protected country population despite the risk of social unrest. In this research, we focus on relationships arising from redistribution of national income due to the imposition of sanctions. The aim of this paper is to perf...

Цель данной статьи состоит в том, чтобы оценить эффективность конкурентного отбора на основе данных по промышленным предприятиям России за период с 2006 по 2017 годы и провести сравнение с результатами для ряда зарубежных стран. С этой целью мы проводим декомпозицию агрегированной производительности труда на уровне отрасли, чтобы определить вклад о...

Invasive species are costly for human health, the environment and the economy while their burden is expected to rise. With limited budgets to address biological invasions, effective resource allocation is important. In the past decade, multiple frameworks have emerged to support this budgeting, but it is not clear if current strategies are consiste...

The speed and extent of diffusion of behaviors in social networks depends on network structure and individual preferences. The contribution of the present study is twofold. First, we introduce weighted interactions between potential adopters that depend on the similarity in their preferences and moderate the strength of social reinforcement. The re...

The evolution of opinions in the long-standing debate on growth-versus-environment may affect support for important sustainability policies, in areas such as biodiversity loss, climate change, deforestation and freshwater scarcity. In order to understand this evolution, we develop a model describing the dynamics of four distinct opinions as identif...

It this article we analyze the strength of market selection for a wide range of industries in the Urals Federal District (UFD) and compare it with the results for several foreign ountries. The empirical analysis is based on the Ruslana database provided by Bureau van Dijk (BvD) for the period from 2006 to 2015. For the first stage of the analysis,...

It this article we analyze the strength of market selection for a wide range of industries in the Urals Federal District (UFD) and compare it with the results for several foreign countries. The empirical analysis is based on the Ruslana database provided by Bureau van Dijk (BvD) for the period from 2006 to 2015. For the first stage of the analysis,...

This paper considers the optimal control problem of a small nonlinear econo-metric model under parameter uncertainty and passive learning (open-loop feedback). Traditionally, this type of problems has been approached by applying linear-quadratic optimization algorithms. However, the literature demonstrated that those methods are very sensitive to t...

The debate about the relationship between economic growth and environmental sustainability involves many dimensions as well as much diversity in terminology. While it is often summarized in terms of dichotomous pro- and anti-growth positions, several studies indicate that additional views exist, and that these may differ between experts and the gen...

The pure model of replicator dynamics provides important insights in the evolution of markets, but has not met with much empirical support. This paper extends the model to the case of firms vertically integrated into value chains. Through an extended analytical model and numerical simulations we show that i) by taking value chains into account, the...

We analyze the medium- and long-run effects caused by an inflow of capital into a labor-abundant country. For that purpose, we incorporate directed technical change into a Heckscher-Ohlin model with a continuum of goods. This provides a comprehensive theory explaining the dynamics of comparative advantage based on differences in effective factor en...

We propose a new method for solving nonlinear dynamic tracking games using a meta-heuristic approach. In contrast to 'traditional' methods based on linear-quadratic (LQ) techniques, this derivative-free method is very flexible with regard to the objective function specification. The proposed method is applied to a three-player dynamic game and test...

We address the emergence of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs), the process which has been largely neglected in the literature on technological change. We do this from a novel network-based perspective emphasizing the relations between technologies and how combinations of those technologies form final goods. Transforming GPT emergence into a quest...

Linear-quadratic (LQ) optimization is a fairly standard technique in the optimal control framework. LQ is very well researched, and there are many extensions for more sophisticated scenarios like nonlinear models. Conventionally, the quadratic objective function is taken as a prerequisite for calculating derivative-based solutions of optimal contro...

In this study we explore effects of two distinct tax policies on innovation in a pure knowledge economy: an ‘IP box’ incentive and a (hypothetical) tax incentive on compensation earned by agents from profit sharing schemes (PSS). In contrast to the conventional assumption that firms decide on whether to innovate or not, we focus on a bottom-up inno...

The diffusion of renewable electricity technologies is widely considered as crucial for establishing a sustainable energy system in the future. However, the required transition is unlikely to be achieved by market forces alone. For this reason, many countries implement various policy instruments to support this process, also by re-distributing rela...

Policy makers constantly face optimal control problems: what controls allow them to achieve certain targets in, e.g., GDP growth or inflation? Conventionally this is done by applying certain linear-quadratic optimization algorithms to dynamic econometric models. Several algorithms extend this baseline framework to nonlinear stochastic problems. How...

This paper extends the existing literature on strategic R&D alliances by presenting a model of innovation networks with endogenous absorptive capacity. The networks emerge as a result of dynamic cooperation between firms occupying different locations in the knowledge space. Partner selection is driven by absorptive capacity which is itself influenc...

We study a model explaining the dynamics in water coverage that accounts for financial performances of utilities. Our dataset covers 25 Sub-Saharan countries from 1996 to 2012. Results suggest that access to water depends upon financial results, but this relationship is not linear: we find important access increases for relatively low levels of cap...

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate? And, once the decision to cooperate is made, how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external knowledge. A...

Cooperation can benefit and hurt firms at the same time. An important question then is: when is it better to cooperate. And how can an appropriate partner be selected? In this paper we present a model of inter-firm cooperation driven by cognitive distance, appropriability conditions and external knowledge. Absorptive capacity of firms develops as a...

Optimal control of dynamic econometric models has a wide variety of applications including economic policy relevant issues. There are several algorithms extending the basic case of a linear-quadratic optimization and taking nonlinearity and stochastics into account, but being still limited in a variety of ways, e.g., symmetry of the objective funct...

This study presents a first comparative analysis of Lasso-type (Lasso, adaptive Lasso, elastic net) and heuristic subset selection methods. Although the Lasso has shown success in many situations, it has some limitations. In particular, inconsistent results are obtained for pairwise strongly correlated predictors. An alternative to the Lasso is con...

This paper extends the existing literature on strategic R&D alliances by presenting a model of innovation networks with endogenous absorptive capacity. The networks emerge as a result of bilateral cooperation over time between firms occupying different locations in the knowledge space. Social capital is ignored, and firms ally purely on the basis o...

Several approaches for subset recovery and improved forecasting accuracy have been proposed and studied. One way is to apply a regularization strategy and solve the model selection task as a continuous optimization problem. One of the most popular approaches in this research field is given by Lasso–type methods. An alternative approach is based on...

Innovations, be they radical new products or technology improvements are widely recognized as a key factor of economic growth. To identify the factors triggering innovative activities is a main concern for economic theory and empirical analysis. As the number of hypotheses is large, the process of model selection becomes a crucial part of the empir...

Business tendency survey indicators are widely recognized as a key instrument for business cycle forecasting. Their leading indicator property is assessed with regard to forecasting industrial production in Russia and Germany. For this purpose, vector autoregressive (VAR) models are specified and estimated to construct forecasts. As the potential n...