Overview
Advances in Applied Microeconomics is an edited collection of conference proceedings compiled by Nicholas Tsounis and Aspasia Vlachvei. The volume gathers peer-reviewed contributions presented at the 2024 International Conference on Applied Economics (ICOAE), held in Belgrade, Republic of Serbia, and appears in the Springer Proceedings in Business and Economics series. Its stated purpose is to present new research and emerging trends in applied economic research, with a particular emphasis on applied microeconomics, and to offer country-specific studies drawn from a wide range of national contexts. The intended audience is researchers, scholars, academics, and policy makers working within applied economics.
The book is organized as a set of independent research papers rather than a single sustained argument. Each contribution stands alone, applying economic reasoning and quantitative methods to a concrete empirical question. The chapters span cultural economics, public administration, finance, forecasting, consumer behaviour, housing, firm performance, education, tourism, and banking, giving the volume a broad, methodologically plural character.
Scope and Contributions
A substantial cluster of chapters addresses cultural economics and the non-profit sector. One study examines the economics and sustainability of Italian performing arts, framed around the challenges facing opera and live performance. A related chapter analyses marketing, fundraising, branding, and social media in Italian museums, with attention to how these activities affect earned income before, during, and after a period of turbulence.
Several papers focus on public administration and public service delivery. One empirical study investigates the training of employees and elected officials in Greek local government, using the municipalities of the regional unit of Pella as a case. Another contribution considers the impact of market concentration on public service delivery, linking industrial-organization concepts to the provision of public goods and services.
Finance and market efficiency form another theme. One chapter assesses market efficiency using the Amman Stock Exchange Weighted Price Index as its evidence base. A further study asks whether exporting firms face higher or lower financial constraints, drawing on Enterprise Survey data. Banking-sector research is represented by a case study of Piraeus Bank that examines the important characteristics of internal audit, their implementation, and strategies to prevent fraud, as viewed through the opinions of bank employees.
Quantitative forecasting and methodology appear in a chapter that forecasts daily outpatient visits at a clinic using a combined method based on neural networks and a SARIMA model, illustrating the volume’s interest in applied econometric and machine-learning techniques.
Management, human resources, and firm behaviour are treated in several chapters. One analyses macro-regional management transformation factors through the prism of human resources. Another examines digital capabilities and firm growth, testing the mediating role of environmental innovation and the moderating role of firm size.
Consumer behaviour and social marketing are addressed in two contributions. One explores the impact of social media on panic buying. The other adopts a multigenerational cohort approach to environmental attitudes, using the New Ecological Paradigm (NEP) scale and examining perceptions of the role of social marketing campaigns.
Housing and youth are the subject of a chapter on Spain’s young people and homeownership, which reconsiders the meaning and feasibility of homeownership for younger generations.
Education and efficiency are examined in a study of the funding and research efficiency of the Greek university system, analysed using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA).
Tourism and sport are covered by a chapter evaluating the efficacy of hosting athletic events for sport tourism development in Europe from a European perspective.
Finally, retailing and artificial intelligence are addressed in a chapter on modelling omnichannel retail marketing driven by artificial intelligence.
Character of the Volume
Taken as a whole, the collection reflects the applied-economics conference format: short, self-contained empirical papers that pair a specific research question with a defined dataset or case setting. The geographical reach of the case studies is wide, encompassing Italy, Greece, Jordan, Spain, and Europe more broadly, consistent with the editors’ claim of country-specific studies from many different countries. Methodologically, the contributions range from survey-based and case-study analysis to index-based market tests, efficiency frontier methods such as DEA, and time-series and neural-network forecasting. The unifying thread is not a single theory but a shared commitment to applying economic tools to practical problems in firms, markets, public institutions, and cultural organizations.
What the collection ultimately documents is the ordinary work of applied microeconomics: framing a bounded question, assembling the relevant evidence, and interpreting results with attention to institutional and sectoral context. Its value to readers is therefore methodological and comparative rather than doctrinal—showing how recurring analytical concerns such as efficiency, constraints, adoption, and behaviour are operationalized across markedly different substantive domains, and how the choice of empirical method follows from the problem at hand rather than from a single theoretical template.
