Financing Pay-as-you-go Public Pension Systems: Some Notes in the Light of the Classical-type Theory of Income Distribution

The paper uses a Sraffa-type two-sector model to study how the presence of retired workers interacts with the distribution of the surplus between workers and capitalists (firms). In particular, the paper investigates how the ongoing diminution of the ratio between active and retired workers affects the wage-profits-pensions frontier, which is defined after allowing that a social security tax, which reduces the claims of active workers and capitalists on the surplus of the economy, finances the pensions distributed each year to retired workers. Finally, it is argued that the different impact of defined-benefit and defined-contribution pay-as-you-go pension schemes depends on the actual incidence of payroll taxes.     

Salesperson's listening in buyer–seller service relationships

Research has consistently shown that salesperson's active listening behavior leads to strong sales performance. Yet the influence of management policies on listening has received very limited attention, and prior research linking listening to customer retention has led to mixed findings. This study examines how listening is enhanced through control systems and the influence of listening on customer retention in a service context. Dyadic data from salespeople and their customers show that a behavior-based control system (measured as a second-order construct) positively influences listening and the salesperson's customer orientation totally mediates the influence of listening on customer commitment to the salesperson and loyalty to the service company. Our findings indicate that listening is a necessary but not sufficient condition for assuring relationship development. More specifically, customer orientation is the generative mechanism through which listening is able to influence customer retention. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Creativity and the positive reading of Baumol cost disease

This paper proposes a more positive and useful reading of cost disease. A case is presented for refocussing general attention from the characteristics of cost disease (i.e. widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to its sources. This is a useful exercise because the most important aspect of cost disease is a fundamental intuition: some types of labour provide particular contributions to various production processes that capital and new technologies are not able to replace. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Characteristics of research on green marketing

This paper aims to describe and analyze the main characteristics of articles on green marketing published in the most relevant journals within the period 1993–2003, in order to determine the evolution of this current issue of research over recent years and improve our understanding of this subject. We built up a database with 112 articles on green marketing and we have explored the topic, the methodology and the techniques of analysis, as well as other relevant aspects of the research. In order to complete this analysis, we made a review of articles published in two journals specializing in environmental management: BSE and CSREM. In this way, this paper offers practical help to those who are beginning research on this topic because the results will help us to determine what still needs to be investigated in this topic and hence propose a research agenda for the coming years. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Welfare Impacts of Cross-Country Spillovers in Agricultural Research

The welfare implications of intellectual property protection (IPP) for private sector agricultural research are analyzed, focusing on the realistic cases where countries provide different IPP levels, technology spills over across countries, and the public sector is involved in research. A model is developed to determine who benefits from, and who should pay for, the associated research. The article contains some interesting results on the implications of a harmonization of IPP policies through multilateral agreements or via technology that allows research firms to prevent the copying of plants and animals that express traits that have emerged from their research.     

Do Depositors Punish Banks for Bad Behavior? Market Discipline,Deposit Insurance,and Banking Crises

This paper empirically investigates two issues largely unexplored by the literature on market discipline. We evaluate the interaction between market discipline and deposit insurance and the impact of banking crises on market discipline. We focus on the experiences of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s. We find that depositors discipline banks by withdrawing deposits and by requiring higher interest rates. Deposit insurance does not appear to diminish the extent of market discipline. Aggregate shocks affect deposits and interest rates during crises, regardless of bank fundamentals, and investors' responsiveness to bank risk taking increases in the aftermath of crises.     

Development, democracy, and mass killings

Using a newly assembled dataset spanning from 1820 to 1998, we study the relationship between the occurrence and magnitude of episodes of mass killing and the levels of development and democracy across countries and over time. Mass killings appear to be more likely at intermediate levels of income and less likely at very high levels of democracy. However, the estimated relationship between democracy and probability of mass killings is not linear in the full sample. In the XXth century, discrete improvements in democracy are systematically associated with episodes involving fewer victims.When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant. Whenever men or women are persecuted because of their race, religion, or political views, that place must—at that moment—become the center of the universe. – Elie Wiesel– Nobel Prize acceptance speech, 1986.     

Inflation, Welfare, and Public Goods

In this article we study the welfare effects of monetary policy in a simple overlapping generation economy in which agents voluntarily contribute to a public good. Inflation has two effects at equilibrium: it increases voluntary contributions and it misallocates private consumption across time. We show that the aggregate effect is welfare-improving for "not too large" inflation rates. Moreover, there exists an optimal inflation rate.     

Risk Mapping and Key Risk Indicators in Operational Risk Management

In this article I describe a methodology for the mapping of Operational Risk with the objective of identifying the risks inherent in the different steps of a business process, selecting a set of variables providing an estimate for the likelihood and the severity of operational risk (Key Risk Indicators – KRIs) and designing the most appropriate control activities. I then present two examples of how the methodology described can be applied to map risks and of how a set of relevant KRIs can be identified in the front office of a trading business and in the back office of a lending business. Finally, I discuss how the information conveyed by the KRIs can be organised and summarised in order to provide a comprehensive look at the risk profile of the various business lines. The structured presentation of KRIs covering the business processes of a bank is what we call an Operational Risk Scorecard.     

Farm Type Effects of an EU‐wide Direct Payment Harmonisation

In this study, we analyse how three scenarios involving different levels of harmonisation of common agricultural policy (CAP) decoupled payments in the EU affect the distribution of farm income across regions and farm types. We use the farm type extension of the common agricultural policy impact (CAPRI) model, which captures farm heterogeneity across the EU. The first scenario (NUTS1) assumes uniform per‐hectare payments at the NUTS1 level. The second scenario (MS‐CONV) equalises the per‐hectare rates inside each Member State (MS) and partially harmonises the single payment scheme (SPS) across MS in line with the 2011 Commission proposal. The third scenario simulates a uniform per‐hectare payment at the EU level. Depending on the implementation of the SPS, the NUTS1 flat rate induces a substantial redistribution of payments across farm types and NUTS2 regions, particularly in regions that apply the historical SPS. The MS‐CONV and EU flat‐rate schemes have more significant impacts at the EU‐wide level. In the EU‐15, almost all farms lose payments from MS‐CONV and EU‐wide flat rates, whereas in the EU‐10, almost all farm types gain from these scenarios. Our conservative estimates indicate that the flat‐rate payments could redistribute up to €8.5 billion. Lower land rental costs partially offset the losses of farm income in the EU‐15 from payment redistribution. Land rents drop for all flat‐rate scenarios across most sectors and farm sizes in the EU‐15. In the less productive new MS, the landowners’ rental income is largely unaffected by the introduction of the flat rate.