Job exit of men: new job destination versus unemployment destination

Job exit of men over the age of forty is described and analysed using monthly observations derived from the 1988-89 UK Retirement Survey. A competing risks model is described and estimated. The results show that tenure and age determine transitions from a job to a new one, whereas those transitions from a job to unemployment are also determined by business cycle variables.     

International research on vegetable improvement in East and Southern Africa: adoption,impact, and returns

There is a lack of evidence for impact at scale of vegetable research and development, although the importance of vegetables for human nutrition and smallholder incomes is generally understood. We therefore study adoption and impact of improved tomato and African eggplant varieties developed through international agricultural research, released by national agricultural research and extension systems, and supplied to farmers by private seed companies in East and Southern Africa from 1990 to 2014. The study finds that in 2014, varieties developed by the World Vegetable Center accounted for 50% of tomato and 98% of African eggplant commercial seed production in East and Southern Africa. For Tanzania alone, investment in crop improvement generated economic gains of US$ 255 million for tomato and US$ 5 million for African eggplant up to 2014. The internal rate of return is 26% for tomato and 12% for African eggplant, though we project the latter to increase to 26% by 2024 as the variety was released only in 2007. These findings support the view that agricultural policy and investment reoriented towards contemporary nutritional challenges will give high returns to investment.     

Long-run income and price elasticities of demand for Colombian nontraditional exports: a multivariate cointegration framework

A long run income and price elasticities of demand is estimated for Colombian nontraditional exports through a multivariate cointegration analysis. Based on the combination of cointegration and exogeneity concepts and the inclusion of the complete dynamic system, the paper shows the existence of a long-run relationship among nontraditional exports, relative price and foreign demand, and higher long-run elasticities than those provided by the long-run cointegration vector coefficients that are usually reported in the trade literature.     

Consumer Bankruptcy in the United States: A Study of Alleged Abuse and of Local Legal Culture

This paper describes certain central aspects of the operation of the consumer bankruptcy system in the United States. It combines government data with the investigators' empirical data from two large studies done over a decade to explore two types of questions. The first area of investigation relates specifically to bankruptcy policy. The object is to identify the categories of persons principally served by the consumer bankruptcy system and to determine if suggestions of widespread abuse of that system by debtors are well-founded. The paper reports that the system is used primarily by the middle-class. It also reports that there is no evidence of widespread abuse. The second area of investigation is explanation of differences in the operation of the system in different regions of the country, differences that have persisted over twenty years despite major changes in legal rules and economic conditions. The paper argues that these differences are not explicable in terms of formal legal rules or a simple economic model and that a better explanation of the data is that the differences are the product of a "local legal culture" in each region.     

CSR Information Disclosure on the Web: A Context-Based Approach Analysing the Influence of Country of Origin and Industry Sector

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a much-discussed subject in the business world. The Internet has become one of the main tools for CSR information disclosure, allowing companies to publicise more information less expensively and faster than ever before. As a result, corporations are increasingly concerned with communicating ethically and responsibly to the diversity of stakeholders through the web. This paper addresses the main question as whether CSR information disclosure on corporate websites is influenced by country of origin and/or industry sector. Analysing the websites of 127 corporations from emerging countries, such as Brazil, Chile, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand and South Africa, it becomes evident that both country of origin and industry sector have a significant influence over CSR information disclosure on the web (CSRIDOW). Based on the data studied, country of origin has a stronger influence over CSRIDOW than industry sector.

Selling two environmental services: In-kind payments for bird habitat and watershed protection in Los Negros, Bolivia

Marketing several environmental services from a single area can help access diverse sources of funding and make conservation a more competitive land use. In Bolivia's Los Negros valley (Department of Santa Cruz), bordering the Amboró National Park, 46 farmers are currently paid to protect 2774 ha of a watershed containing the threatened cloud-forest habitat of 11 species of migratory birds. In this payment for environmental services (PES) scheme, annual contracts prohibit tree cutting, hunting and forest clearing on enrolled lands. Farmer-landowners as service providers submit to independent yearly monitoring, and are sanctioned for non-compliance. Facilitated by a local NGO, Fundación Natura Bolivia, one service buyer is an international conservation donor (the US Fish and Wildlife Service) interested in biodiversity conservation. The second service users are downstream irrigators who likely benefit from stabilized dry-season water flows if upstream cloud forests are successfully protected. Individual irrigators have been reluctant to pay, but the Los Negros municipal government has on their behalf contributed ~ US$4500 to the scheme. The negotiated payment mode is annual quid pro quo in-kind compensations in return for forest protection. Predominantly, payments are made as “contingent project implementation”, transferring beehives supplemented by apicultural training. With regard to service provision, environment committees and education programs have increased awareness in downstream communities of the probable water-supply reduction effect of continued upstream deforestation. External donors have funded subsequent studies providing basic economic, hydrological and biodiversity data, and covered PES start-up (~ US$40,000) and running transaction costs (~ US$3000 per year over the last three years). The greatest challenges in the development of the PES mechanism have been the slow process of building trust between service buyers and providers, and in achieving clear service-provision additionality.     

Consumption, (dis)aggregate wealth,and asset returns

In this work, I show, from the consumer's budget constraint, that the residuals of the trend relationship among consumption, financial wealth, housing wealth and labor income (summarized by the variable cday) should predict better U.S. and U.K. quarterly stock market returns than a variable like cay from Lettau and Ludvigson (2001), which considers aggregate wealth instead.I find that the superior forecasting power of cday is due to: (i) its ability to track the changes in the composition of asset wealth; and (ii) the faster rate of convergence of the coefficients to the “long-run equilibrium” parameters.In addition, the results suggest that, while financial wealth shocks are mainly transitory, fluctuations in housing wealth are very persistent. Moreover, they highlight that expectations about future returns are “synchronized” across countries.     

Ride service outsourcing for profit maximization

Transportation service subcontracting is becoming an effective means of business for many leading carriers to maintain their market dominance and profitability. This research is based on an outsourcing practice in one of the few largest limousine fleet companies in the US, whose (mostly advance) demand for services often exceeds its capacity. We develop a model for ride service outsourcing. A column generation method is proposed. The outsourcing decision is made simultaneously with pre-scheduling of in-house ride services as well as staffing. Test with services data indicates that the developed method dramatically improves the carrier’s outsourcing decision.     

How to rescue the environment： The uncommon idea

Successful solution to any environmental problem implies working with Knightian uncertainty that explicitly deals with decision making under conditions of unstructured randomness. Nature did not endow us with clear set of laws. A ＂wild＂ type of randomness that we will never discern due to its unstable properties makes the assignment of corresponding probabilities impossible. For that reason, the consideration of general economical factors within cost/benefit analysis must fail. So, instead of governmental imervention and cup and trade scheme, we propose direct financial market out of certificates on environmental improvements. They could be applied unaided by a model specification. The approach is based on Principal-Agent method. We propose to fill a huge gap in what is called Free Market Environmentalism （FME）, and make the proposal of financial market property rights for situations when ＂property＂ rights can not be set.