Re-creation tourism: de-extinction and its implications for nature-based recreation

Recent rapid developments in biotechnology and genomics mean that ‘de-extinction’ – the resurrection of extinct species – is now a real possibility. The opportunity to see living examples of long-dead creatures has important implications (benefits and risks) for nature-based tourism. This paper introduces the topic of de-extinction, briefly discusses how it relates to tourism and indicates areas for further research.     

A cross-category investigation into the effects of nine-ending pricing on brand choice

Retailers largely adopt nine-ending prices and these prices have attracted greater attention from researchers in marketing. Despite this increased interest, very few empirical studies have tried to quantify the effects of nine-ending prices on consumer actual behaviors. Those who have studied the behavioral effects of nine-ending prices have produced mixed findings. In this article, we investigated the cross-category effects of nine-ending pricing on consumer brand choice at the SKU level. We distinguished between different types of nine-ending while controlling for the rounded prices and other marketing-mix variables. We conducted our analysis on over 11,000 SKUs in 102 product categories of two (2) grocery retailers. We find that the effects of 99 ending prices on the SKU's category choice are larger in concentrated and promotional categories but smaller in expensive categories. However, their influence on purchase quantity is larger in expensive categories but smaller in concentrated categories.     

Why are governmental R&D and private R&D complements?

It is well known that government R&D and private R&D have a complementary relationship. However, no previous study has provided an explanation for why that complementary relationship exists. This paper argues that infratechnology is the critical link between governmental and private R&D and that the observed complementarity is the result of technical complementarity at the production level between funding, infratechnology, and knowledge sharing. A theoritical framework based on this argument is developed and examined empirically for supporting evidence. Evidence of technical complementary is found as well as evidence that governmental R&D stimulates the sharing of knowledge.     

Rational expectations and monopolistic trades

We argue that the use of rational expectations in monopolistic markets, as typically done, is overly restrictive because the rationale of this approach is not met in those markets. In a model that encompasses a general equilibrium framework, we consider a monopolist (a producer) with subjective beliefs that endogenously hedges against fluctuations in input prices in a complete market. We introduce a notion of entropy of beliefs, and we characterize long-run optimal rational investments with this entropy. For irrational beliefs, we show that long-run profits are a decreasing function of this entropy. However, long-run profits always remain positive as long as the entropy remains finite despite the Market Selection Hypothesis that would predict long-run 0-profit.     

Transatlantic Differences in Labour Markets: Changes in Wage and Non-Employment Structures in the 1980s and the 1990s

Abstract. Rising wage inequality in the United States and Britain and rising continental European unemployment have led to a popular view in the economics profession that these two phenomena are related to negative relative demand shocks against the unskilled, combined with flexible wages in the Anglo-Saxon countries, but wage rigidities in continental Europe ('Krugman hypothesis'). This paper tests this hypothesis based on seven large person-level data sets for the 1980s and the 1990s. I use a more sophisticated categorization of low-skilled workers than previous studies, which exhibits differences between German workers with and without apprenticeship training, particularly in the 1980s. I find evidence for the Krugman hypothesis when Germany is compared with the United States. However, supply changes differ considerably between countries, with Britain experiencing enormous increases in skill supply explaining the relatively constant British skill premium in the 1990s.     

The Predictive Power of the French Market Volatility Index: A Multi Horizons Study

The main purpose of this paper is to examine empirically the time series properties of the French Market Volatility Index (VX1). We also examine the VX1's ability to forecast future realized market volatility and finds a strong relationship. More importantly, we show how the index can be used to generate volatility forecasts over different horizons and that these forecasts are reasonably accurate predictors of future realized volatility.     

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Were Money Wages Always Rigid? A Look at the Reliability of Survey Evidence on Changes in Wage Rates

In recent years, the once conventional view that nominal wage rates were much more flexible before the Great Depression than after has been challenged. This challenge has been reinforced by several recent studies that are based on monthly wage data gathered by state labor bureaus. The surveys used by the state labor bureaus in gathering the data appear to have been biased toward the finding that wages have not changed. Hence inferences drawn from the data collected in these surveys are not reliable.     

Institutional Investment,Asset Illiquidity and Post‐Crash Housing Market Dynamics

We examine institutional investors’ entry into the equity side of the single‐family detached housing market using an asset illiquidity framework. We find that institutional investors purchased owner‐occupied houses after the real estate crisis for approximately 6.3–11.8% less than owner‐occupiers. The large discount was in addition to distressed sale and cash purchase discounts which, when combined, highlight the low liquidation value for owner‐occupied housing. The results suggest that asset illiquidity is an important cost of leverage in the owner‐occupied housing market.     

Predicting Stock Market Movements in the United States: The Role of Presidential Approval Ratings*

In this paper we analyze whether presidential approval ratings can predict the S&P 500 returns over the monthly period of July 1941 to April 2018, using a dynamic conditional correlation multivariate generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (DCC‐MGARCH) model. Our results show that standard linear Granger causality test fail to detect any evidence of predictability. However, the linear model is found to be misspecified due to structural breaks and nonlinearity, and hence, the result of no causality from presidential approval ratings to stock returns cannot be considered reliable. When we use the DCC‐MGARCH model, which is robust to such misspecifications, in 69% of the sample period, approval ratings in fact do strongly predict the S&P 500 stock return. Moreover, using the DCC‐MGARCH model we find that presidential approval rating is also a strong predictor of the realized volatility of S&P 500. Overall, our results highlight that presidential approval ratings is helpful in predicting stock return and volatility, when one accounts for nonlinearity and regime changes through a robust time‐varying model.