Nonlinear adjustment in US bond yields: An empirical model with conditional heteroskedasticity

Starting from the work by Campbell and Shiller (Campbell, J.Y. and Shiller, R.J. (1987). Cointegration and tests of present value models. Journal of Political Economy, 95(5):1062–1088.), empirical analysis of interest rates has been conducted in the framework of cointegration. However, parts of this approach have been questioned recently, as the adjustment mechanism may not follow a simple linear rule; another line of criticism points out that stationarity of the spreads is difficult to maintain empirically.     

Inequality,financialization, and economic decline

The objective of this article is to argue that the labor productivity slowdown experienced in recent years by several advanced countries can be explained, following a Kaldorian-Classical approach, by a weak gross domestic product (GDP) performance and by a decline in the wage share. Moreover, drawing inspiration from recent post Keynesian literature, the authors identify the ongoing worsening in income equality and the increase in the degree of financialization as other major explanatory factors of sluggish productivity. The article will provide a brief literature review concerning nonmainstream attempts to endogenize labor productivity, beginning from the famous Verdoorn-Kaldor law (Verdoorn, 1949 Verdoorn, P.J. “Fattori che Regolano lo Sviluppo della Produttività del Lavoro.” L’Industria, 1949, 1, March, 3–10. [Google Scholar]) and the Kaldor technical progress function (Kaldor, 1961 Kaldor, N. “Capital, Accumulation and Economic Growth.” In F.A. Lutz and D.C. Hague (eds.), The Theory of Capital. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1961, 177–222.[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and including Sylos Labini’s productivity equation (Sylos Labini, 1984 Sylos Labini, P. The Forces of Economic Growth and Decline. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. [Google Scholar], 1999 —. “The Employment Issues: Investment, Flexibility and the Competition of Developing Countries.” BNL Quarterly Review, 1999, 52 (10), 257–280. [Google Scholar]). The authors will then discuss how labor flexibility and shareholder value orientation, one of the main aspects of financialization, can negatively affect equality and labor productivity. Finally, they propose an extended version of the Sylos Labini’s equation, where productivity growth is claimed to depend positively on GDP rate of growth and the wage share, and negatively on income inequality and financialization. They submit to empirical scrutiny their extended productivity equation; the results of their estimations provide support to their theoretical argument.     

Strategic foresight in corporate organizations: Handling the effect and response uncertainty of technology and social drivers of change

Today many companies in many industries put a lot of efforts into monitoring and investigating emerging drivers of change in their business environment, particularly in relation to new technologies and events in the social, economic, political and ecological landscapes which surround their industry. So far scholars in the literature on foresight and future studies focused on the techniques and practices for analysing the “state” uncertainty about the likely path of evolution of emerging drivers of change. Anyway, less attention was devoted to the “effect” uncertainty about the impact of drivers of change on the competitive position of the firm and to the “response” uncertainty about how to take advantage of these drivers. These are the main issues we take into account, through a field research on firms that, notwithstanding they were able to properly assess the likely evolution (state uncertainty) of relevant drivers of change in their industry, either were successful or dramatically failed in handling the effect and response uncertainty of these drivers. Moreover, we carried out multiple case studies of some large companies that have established an organizational unit dedicated to strategic foresight. Overall, the results of our research may contribute to improve the effectiveness of strategic foresight and to increase its value added to the planning process of corporate firms, while providing helpful insight to public organizations that promote foresight exercises for enhancing the competitiveness of local firms.     

An integrated production–distribution model for the dynamic location and allocation problem with safety stock optimization

The design and management of a multi-stage production–distribution system is one of the most critical problems in logistics and in facility management. Companies need to be able to evaluate and design different configurations for their logistic networks as quickly as possible. This means coordinating the entire supply chain effectively in order to minimize costs and simultaneously optimize facilities location, the allocation of customer demand to production/distribution centers, the inbound and outbound transportation activities, the product flows between production and/or warehousing facilities, the reverse logistics activities, etc.Full optimization of supply chain is achieved by integrating strategic, tactical, and operational decision-making in terms of the design, management, and control of activities. The cost-based and mixed-integer programming model presented in this study has been developed to support management in making the following decisions: the number of facilities (e.g. warehousing systems, distribution centers), the choice of their locations and the assignment of customer demand to them, and also incorporate tactical decisions regarding inventory control, production rates, and service-level determination in a stochastic environment. This paper presents an original model for the dynamic location–allocation problem with control of customer service level and safety stock optimization. An experimental analysis identifies the most critical factors affecting the logistics cost, and to finish, an industrial application is illustrated demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed optimization approach.     

Incorporating Discontinuous Preferences into the Analysis of Discrete Choice Experiments

Data from a discrete choice experiment on improvements of rural landscape attributes are used to investigate the implications of discontinuous preferences on willingness to pay estimates. Using a multinomial error component logit model, we explore differences in scale and unexplained variance between respondents with discontinuous and continuous preferences and condition taste intensities on whether or not each attribute was considered by the respondent during the evaluation of alternatives. Results suggest that significant improvements in model performance can be achieved when discontinuous preferences are accommodated in the econometric specification, and that the magnitude and robustness of the willingness to pay estimates are sensitive to discontinuous preferences.     

Central government accounting harmonization in EU member states: will EPSAS be enough?

A highly controversial topic in the EU is the need for harmonized accrual-based standards to improve the quality of public accounts and reduce differences (adjustments) between the micro-(governmental accounting) and macro- (national accounting) levels. This paper shows that a set of high-quality accounting standards, like the future EPSAS, are not going to be sufficient to overcome the present lack of harmonization. The authors explain why this is the case having researched accounting data from 28 EU member states.     

Cost thresholds,cut-offs and sensitivities in stated choice analysis: Identification and implications

Within the discrete choice literature, there is growing recognition that some respondents do not process all attributes when evaluating their choice outcomes. Worryingly, the cost attribute is often among those attributes that are likely to be ignored by respondents. We use probabilistic decision process models (similar in form to latent class models, but where we define the classes to describe specific heuristics) to facilitate situations where respondents adopt cost thresholds and cut-offs. We further develop this model to address the potential confounding between preference heterogeneity and processing heterogeneity by simultaneously allowing for a segmentation of respondents based on their sensitivities to cost. Results, based on an empirical dataset on the existence value of rare fish species in Ireland, provide further confirmation that a share of respondents did not attended to cost. Importantly, however, when heterogeneity to cost levels is accounted for the inferred incidence of complete non-attendance is markedly lower, to the extent that when cost thresholds and cut-offs are also accommodated it almost disappears. This modelling approach leads to significant gains in model fit and has important implications for welfare analysis.     

THE DIVERSITY OF ACCRUAL POLICIES IN LOCAL GOVERNMENT FINANCIAL REPORTING: AN EXAMINATION OF INFRASTRUCTURE,ART AND HERITAGE ASSETS IN GERMANY,ITALY AND THE UK

This paper examines the norms and practices for infrastructure, art and heritage assets in six cities, across three European countries, to determine how the national norms of accrual accounting compared with each other, and with IPSAS, and how the practices in each city compared with the norms. We identify significant diversity between actual practices and the norms imposed by national policy‐makers or set by IPSAS. Given that a longstanding concern of the literature has been on whether these kinds of assets should be included in governmental balance sheets and operating statements at all, it is striking how often the question was settled in practice by excluding art and heritage assets, even when this meant non‐compliance with national norms. In our three countries, it is clear that comparability of the financial statements between countries was not a concern of policy‐makers, and comparability between cities within each country not a concern of preparers.