Theodore Tsekeris - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Theodore Tsekeris
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2019
The merging of transport and virtual technologies that began in the 1990s has been radically tran... more The merging of transport and virtual technologies that began in the 1990s has been radically transforming the concept of mobility in contemporary societies. Driven not only by the increased level of movement of people, things, and ideas, the introduction of virtual technologies in transport paved the way for new types of mobility patterns where bodies combine with information. Most commonly associated with the production of augmented realities that blend real surroundings, the origins of the applicative use of virtual technologies can be traced to VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), which appeared in 1994 and was quickly adopted by the transport sector. The presence and use of virtual technologies has since greatly expanded, with the inclusion of various digital tools (user‐interface software) and devices (smartphones, tablets, virtual reality headsets) capable of enhancing the perception and experience of movement in the physical environment. This has had profound social implications in multiple spheres of everyday life spanning the organization of public and private services, retail, media, tourism, sports, education, and urbanism.
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology
Energies
This paper develops a supply and uses a model to estimate the direct and indirect contribution of... more This paper develops a supply and uses a model to estimate the direct and indirect contribution of costs to the formation of energy prices. The model is implemented into the Greek economy based on data from the supply and use tables. The findings of the analysis indicate that the main component of energy prices are profits, mainly distributed to the energy sector itself, and imports, which mostly concern Mining and quarrying products and Coke and refined petroleum products imported from non-EU countries. As far as the contribution of the energy sector to the price formation of the other industries of the Greek economy is concerned, it is found that the energy sector mainly contributes to the price formation of industrial sectors. The results imply that the containment of energy prices should be principally based on an income policy that would limit excessive profits within the energy sector and an import substitution policy towards the exploitation of domestic mining and quarrying pr...
Sustainability
This paper investigates the impact that urban sprawl and land use patterns have on freight transp... more This paper investigates the impact that urban sprawl and land use patterns have on freight transport costs at the regional level in Europe. A unique dataset is employed, which distinguishes various aspects of freight transport costs across EU regions. The measurement of sprawl metrics is based on the European soil sealing (artificial land cover) data concerning the land uptake for buildings and related infrastructure, as well as land use data originating from the Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey of Eurostat. The econometric analysis indicates that both the increased scale and compact development of land for urban settlement and specific (industrial, services/residential) activities can significantly reduce average road freight transport costs. The increased land use mixture and the share of industrial activity also have a negative impact on road freight transport costs. The results highlight the importance of integrated spatial/land use planning policies to manage freight transport ...
Several agent-based simulation models have been developed to facilitate the more accurate and rea... more Several agent-based simulation models have been developed to facilitate the more accurate and realistic modeling of the transport behavior of passengers and firms, under a variety of policy scenarios. In these models, changes in transport cost are not typically associated with decisions about the relocation of economic activities in space. Besides, agent-based models have found application into studying location choice problems of households and firms, usually at the level of a city or region, and regarding fixed transport costs. This paper describes a spatial economic agent-based model (ABM), consistent with the principles of new economic geography (NEG), which allows the discrete-time evolutionary simulation of complex interactions of household and firm location and transport decisions. In contrast with the current approaches, it considers a multi-regional (multi-urban) setting to enable a more realistic representation of decisions related to commuting, migration and household and...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
Contents Abstract______________________________________________________________iii 1. Introductio... more Contents Abstract______________________________________________________________iii 1. Introduction: On Greek collective identity and the instituting imaginary_______1 2. Methodological issues________________________________________________3
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2010
The Macedonia naming dispute has been an important issue in Greek affairs. It constitutes both an... more The Macedonia naming dispute has been an important issue in Greek affairs. It constitutes both an irresolvable, decades-old international problem and a significant, yet undertheorised, analytical topic. In this context, our aim is to critically explore, highlight and discuss the deep-seated and pervasive patterns, representations, attitudes, beliefs, ideas and norms within the Greek social imaginary, as these emerged on Twitter in real-time, during the mass “Macedonia rally” on February 4, 2018. More specifically, drawing on the dialectical interaction between Twitter posts, sociopolitical behaviours and interpretative analytic frames linked to interdisciplinary theoretical discourses, we attempt to understand and interrogate the intellectual structures, value system and operational categories of a large number of Greek groups on the ‘Twittersphere’. Based on the assumption that, in the last instance, the rigid refusal of the majority of the Greek people to accept a ‘composite name’...
Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2016
Since 2009, shortly after the global economic crisis of 2008, Greece has entered into a deep rece... more Since 2009, shortly after the global economic crisis of 2008, Greece has entered into a deep recession phase. The multifaceted presence of austerity is experienced in an increasing number of sectors of the country. The Greek transportation sector is not immune to this state of affairs. The ongoing crisis had a significant impact on its economic (investment, employment, exports-imports turnover) as well as its operational (transportation intensity, throughput, performance) aspects and capabilities. In this paper, a detailed mapping of these impacts is laid out, correlating transport-related characteristics, trends and estimations with the respective economic ones. Specifically, the paper presents analyses of the Greek passenger and freight transportation, following a data-driven approach over several areas. Findings show a substantial decrease of activities overall. Paradoxically, however, austerity can also be said to offer opportunities, such as the development of innovative, cost-...
Government, the private sector, and society at large need to appreciate the war on an insidious a... more Government, the private sector, and society at large need to appreciate the war on an insidious and cancerous phenomenon that requires concerted, strategic and comprehensive arrangements and initiatives to be implemented if we are to actually arrest and then reverse its current proliferation: Corruption. This cannot occur if government and society do not move beyond the various one and two dimensional approaches that are advocated by various anti-corruption proponents. Hence, a sociological dissection of corruption needs to establish the reasons that lead to an environment becoming characterised by loss of ethical standards, the compelling need for individuals to satisfy their own personal financial and material interests, the opportunities to do so, and the absence of sufficient deterrents not to do so. These processes are instrumental in raising the levels of corrupt behaviour to a point where a broad culture of corruption develops, or to the severe detriment of an entire country....
European Planning Studies, 2020
ABSTRACT This paper provides an original empirical analysis of the European regional production n... more ABSTRACT This paper provides an original empirical analysis of the European regional production network, making use of the interregional world input-output database. Similar to the concept of key sectors, a network analysis of key regions and key region-sectors of the EU in the global value chains (GVC) is carried out, taking into account both direct and indirect linkages. Additionally, a clustering analysis is performed to indicate the existence of highly interconnected groups of regions and the polarized structure of the European value chain network. The analysis is extended to quantify implications of Brexit, showing the relative vulnerability of the most internationalized regions and the differentiated sectoral impact according to the geographical origin, as London would mostly affect (tourism and financial) services, whereas the rest of the UK regions would mainly affect manufacturing activities. The findings suggest the considerable heterogeneity of European value chains as a result of varying levels of urban hierarchy, trade specialization between and within countries as well as sectoral concentration of regional economies. The empirical findings can provide valuable policy insights for supporting coordinated economic strategies to enhance regional competitiveness, development and cohesion, and reduce trade imbalances and spatial inequalities in the EU.
Research in Transportation Economics, 2017
This paper examines the role of domestic transport on regional export trade in Greece. It aims to... more This paper examines the role of domestic transport on regional export trade in Greece. It aims to understand how changes in the transport conditions of a region can affect its own and neighboring regions' ability to improve foreign trade. The proposed dynamic spatial panel model extends previous ones in the scant related literature, by accounting for spillover effects and own time lagged responses of export flows to changes in variables related, among others, to network distance and accessibility. The results suggest a considerable number of indirect (spatially lagged) effects that are significant for the regional export trade, including those of highway corridors. Agglomeration economies positively affect manufacturing exports by ship and truck in the own prefecture, while manufacturing specialization has a significant impact on maritime transport. It is also shown that failure to account for long-run responses can significantly underestimate the effect of changes in the distance to major transport facilities on export volume. Especially the enhancement of interregional accessibility and market potential has a major impact on the agricultural exports by road. The findings have implications for the coordination of regional investment policies and the planning of the mainland transport system in connection with the location of logistics hubs.
Journal of Public Transportation, 2008
Transportation Research Record, 2006
A methodology is presented for forecasting traffic volatility in urban arterial networks with rea... more A methodology is presented for forecasting traffic volatility in urban arterial networks with real-time traffic flow information. This methodology provides a generalization of the standard modeling approach, in which both the mean, modeled by an autoregressive moving average process, and the variance, modeled by an autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic process, are time-varying. The statistical analysis and forecasting performance of the proposed model are investigated with real-time traffic detector data from a real urban arterial network. The results indicate the potential of the proposed model to improve the accuracy of predicted traffic volatility across different lengths of forecasting horizon in comparison with the standard generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic methodology.
Transportation Research Record, 2004
The problem of updating dynamic origin-destination (O-D) matrices by exploiting a long-term time ... more The problem of updating dynamic origin-destination (O-D) matrices by exploiting a long-term time series of link traffic counts in large-scale transportation networks without the need for surveys or census data is investigated. Different time-recursive mechanisms for analysis of these data to enhance the performance of the models currently used to synthesize within-day dynamic O-D matrices are suggested. The efficiency of the proposed procedure is investigated with respect to different formulations and related solution algorithms (based on entropy maximization and generalized least-squares). The impacts of different assumptions on model performance are also examined. These include the length of the time scale in which the flow information is updated and the selection of the weekday for which the flow information is collected. The results of the statistical analysis and the model performance measures demonstrate that the proposed time-recursive procedure for an information updating period of 2 years can produce an improved prior O-D matrix that may significantly enhance the subsequent updating of dynamic O-D matrices corresponding to a series of days of the week.
Transition Studies Review, 2011
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2019
The merging of transport and virtual technologies that began in the 1990s has been radically tran... more The merging of transport and virtual technologies that began in the 1990s has been radically transforming the concept of mobility in contemporary societies. Driven not only by the increased level of movement of people, things, and ideas, the introduction of virtual technologies in transport paved the way for new types of mobility patterns where bodies combine with information. Most commonly associated with the production of augmented realities that blend real surroundings, the origins of the applicative use of virtual technologies can be traced to VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), which appeared in 1994 and was quickly adopted by the transport sector. The presence and use of virtual technologies has since greatly expanded, with the inclusion of various digital tools (user‐interface software) and devices (smartphones, tablets, virtual reality headsets) capable of enhancing the perception and experience of movement in the physical environment. This has had profound social implications in multiple spheres of everyday life spanning the organization of public and private services, retail, media, tourism, sports, education, and urbanism.
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology
Energies
This paper develops a supply and uses a model to estimate the direct and indirect contribution of... more This paper develops a supply and uses a model to estimate the direct and indirect contribution of costs to the formation of energy prices. The model is implemented into the Greek economy based on data from the supply and use tables. The findings of the analysis indicate that the main component of energy prices are profits, mainly distributed to the energy sector itself, and imports, which mostly concern Mining and quarrying products and Coke and refined petroleum products imported from non-EU countries. As far as the contribution of the energy sector to the price formation of the other industries of the Greek economy is concerned, it is found that the energy sector mainly contributes to the price formation of industrial sectors. The results imply that the containment of energy prices should be principally based on an income policy that would limit excessive profits within the energy sector and an import substitution policy towards the exploitation of domestic mining and quarrying pr...
Sustainability
This paper investigates the impact that urban sprawl and land use patterns have on freight transp... more This paper investigates the impact that urban sprawl and land use patterns have on freight transport costs at the regional level in Europe. A unique dataset is employed, which distinguishes various aspects of freight transport costs across EU regions. The measurement of sprawl metrics is based on the European soil sealing (artificial land cover) data concerning the land uptake for buildings and related infrastructure, as well as land use data originating from the Land Use/Cover Area frame Survey of Eurostat. The econometric analysis indicates that both the increased scale and compact development of land for urban settlement and specific (industrial, services/residential) activities can significantly reduce average road freight transport costs. The increased land use mixture and the share of industrial activity also have a negative impact on road freight transport costs. The results highlight the importance of integrated spatial/land use planning policies to manage freight transport ...
Several agent-based simulation models have been developed to facilitate the more accurate and rea... more Several agent-based simulation models have been developed to facilitate the more accurate and realistic modeling of the transport behavior of passengers and firms, under a variety of policy scenarios. In these models, changes in transport cost are not typically associated with decisions about the relocation of economic activities in space. Besides, agent-based models have found application into studying location choice problems of households and firms, usually at the level of a city or region, and regarding fixed transport costs. This paper describes a spatial economic agent-based model (ABM), consistent with the principles of new economic geography (NEG), which allows the discrete-time evolutionary simulation of complex interactions of household and firm location and transport decisions. In contrast with the current approaches, it considers a multi-regional (multi-urban) setting to enable a more realistic representation of decisions related to commuting, migration and household and...
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2019
Contents Abstract______________________________________________________________iii 1. Introductio... more Contents Abstract______________________________________________________________iii 1. Introduction: On Greek collective identity and the instituting imaginary_______1 2. Methodological issues________________________________________________3
The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2010
The Macedonia naming dispute has been an important issue in Greek affairs. It constitutes both an... more The Macedonia naming dispute has been an important issue in Greek affairs. It constitutes both an irresolvable, decades-old international problem and a significant, yet undertheorised, analytical topic. In this context, our aim is to critically explore, highlight and discuss the deep-seated and pervasive patterns, representations, attitudes, beliefs, ideas and norms within the Greek social imaginary, as these emerged on Twitter in real-time, during the mass “Macedonia rally” on February 4, 2018. More specifically, drawing on the dialectical interaction between Twitter posts, sociopolitical behaviours and interpretative analytic frames linked to interdisciplinary theoretical discourses, we attempt to understand and interrogate the intellectual structures, value system and operational categories of a large number of Greek groups on the ‘Twittersphere’. Based on the assumption that, in the last instance, the rigid refusal of the majority of the Greek people to accept a ‘composite name’...
Tema. Journal of Land Use, Mobility and Environment, 2016
Since 2009, shortly after the global economic crisis of 2008, Greece has entered into a deep rece... more Since 2009, shortly after the global economic crisis of 2008, Greece has entered into a deep recession phase. The multifaceted presence of austerity is experienced in an increasing number of sectors of the country. The Greek transportation sector is not immune to this state of affairs. The ongoing crisis had a significant impact on its economic (investment, employment, exports-imports turnover) as well as its operational (transportation intensity, throughput, performance) aspects and capabilities. In this paper, a detailed mapping of these impacts is laid out, correlating transport-related characteristics, trends and estimations with the respective economic ones. Specifically, the paper presents analyses of the Greek passenger and freight transportation, following a data-driven approach over several areas. Findings show a substantial decrease of activities overall. Paradoxically, however, austerity can also be said to offer opportunities, such as the development of innovative, cost-...
Government, the private sector, and society at large need to appreciate the war on an insidious a... more Government, the private sector, and society at large need to appreciate the war on an insidious and cancerous phenomenon that requires concerted, strategic and comprehensive arrangements and initiatives to be implemented if we are to actually arrest and then reverse its current proliferation: Corruption. This cannot occur if government and society do not move beyond the various one and two dimensional approaches that are advocated by various anti-corruption proponents. Hence, a sociological dissection of corruption needs to establish the reasons that lead to an environment becoming characterised by loss of ethical standards, the compelling need for individuals to satisfy their own personal financial and material interests, the opportunities to do so, and the absence of sufficient deterrents not to do so. These processes are instrumental in raising the levels of corrupt behaviour to a point where a broad culture of corruption develops, or to the severe detriment of an entire country....
European Planning Studies, 2020
ABSTRACT This paper provides an original empirical analysis of the European regional production n... more ABSTRACT This paper provides an original empirical analysis of the European regional production network, making use of the interregional world input-output database. Similar to the concept of key sectors, a network analysis of key regions and key region-sectors of the EU in the global value chains (GVC) is carried out, taking into account both direct and indirect linkages. Additionally, a clustering analysis is performed to indicate the existence of highly interconnected groups of regions and the polarized structure of the European value chain network. The analysis is extended to quantify implications of Brexit, showing the relative vulnerability of the most internationalized regions and the differentiated sectoral impact according to the geographical origin, as London would mostly affect (tourism and financial) services, whereas the rest of the UK regions would mainly affect manufacturing activities. The findings suggest the considerable heterogeneity of European value chains as a result of varying levels of urban hierarchy, trade specialization between and within countries as well as sectoral concentration of regional economies. The empirical findings can provide valuable policy insights for supporting coordinated economic strategies to enhance regional competitiveness, development and cohesion, and reduce trade imbalances and spatial inequalities in the EU.
Research in Transportation Economics, 2017
This paper examines the role of domestic transport on regional export trade in Greece. It aims to... more This paper examines the role of domestic transport on regional export trade in Greece. It aims to understand how changes in the transport conditions of a region can affect its own and neighboring regions' ability to improve foreign trade. The proposed dynamic spatial panel model extends previous ones in the scant related literature, by accounting for spillover effects and own time lagged responses of export flows to changes in variables related, among others, to network distance and accessibility. The results suggest a considerable number of indirect (spatially lagged) effects that are significant for the regional export trade, including those of highway corridors. Agglomeration economies positively affect manufacturing exports by ship and truck in the own prefecture, while manufacturing specialization has a significant impact on maritime transport. It is also shown that failure to account for long-run responses can significantly underestimate the effect of changes in the distance to major transport facilities on export volume. Especially the enhancement of interregional accessibility and market potential has a major impact on the agricultural exports by road. The findings have implications for the coordination of regional investment policies and the planning of the mainland transport system in connection with the location of logistics hubs.
Journal of Public Transportation, 2008
Transportation Research Record, 2006
A methodology is presented for forecasting traffic volatility in urban arterial networks with rea... more A methodology is presented for forecasting traffic volatility in urban arterial networks with real-time traffic flow information. This methodology provides a generalization of the standard modeling approach, in which both the mean, modeled by an autoregressive moving average process, and the variance, modeled by an autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic process, are time-varying. The statistical analysis and forecasting performance of the proposed model are investigated with real-time traffic detector data from a real urban arterial network. The results indicate the potential of the proposed model to improve the accuracy of predicted traffic volatility across different lengths of forecasting horizon in comparison with the standard generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic methodology.
Transportation Research Record, 2004
The problem of updating dynamic origin-destination (O-D) matrices by exploiting a long-term time ... more The problem of updating dynamic origin-destination (O-D) matrices by exploiting a long-term time series of link traffic counts in large-scale transportation networks without the need for surveys or census data is investigated. Different time-recursive mechanisms for analysis of these data to enhance the performance of the models currently used to synthesize within-day dynamic O-D matrices are suggested. The efficiency of the proposed procedure is investigated with respect to different formulations and related solution algorithms (based on entropy maximization and generalized least-squares). The impacts of different assumptions on model performance are also examined. These include the length of the time scale in which the flow information is updated and the selection of the weekday for which the flow information is collected. The results of the statistical analysis and the model performance measures demonstrate that the proposed time-recursive procedure for an information updating period of 2 years can produce an improved prior O-D matrix that may significantly enhance the subsequent updating of dynamic O-D matrices corresponding to a series of days of the week.
Transition Studies Review, 2011
ABSTRACT The present study starts from the premise that, for human communities, it is difficult t... more ABSTRACT
The present study starts from the premise that, for human communities, it is difficult to penetrate each other, so that even the globally diffused communication infrastructure is not enough to create an effective common life. This grounds our assumptions about the way the Greek young interviewees, aged between 18 and 32, belonging to main political orientations (centre right, centre left, radical left, and extreme right), are perceiving themselves and their transnational sociopolitical environment, especially Europe and the powerful foreign institutions in the era of financial crisis. We first focus on the question of collective identity, on how the sense of we-ness (the self-perception of the Greek citizens as a human group) is represented in the consciousness and attitudes of the young interviewees of different ideological orientations. A theoretical starting point pertains to the assumption that the collective identity does involve imagining or representing things; but the imaginary it involves is an instituting social imaginary in the sense of an implicit cognitive infrastructure of the Greek society, which originates in the past and shapes the image Greeks have about the world, their values, their common reality. The main research objective is to make intelligible how the young interviewees perceive the diverse facets of their collective identity, how the Greek instituting social imaginary and the imaginary significations it produces (values, ideas, habits, and so on) are expressed in their individual imaginary, what it means for them as responsible citizens, how they frame religion and the ancient Greek past, whether they feel represented by the representatives they have supported, how they perceive the powerful foreign institutions, the European Union and their relationship to the Greek society.
Keywords: Greek Crisis, Youth, Social Media, Collective Identity, Social Imaginary