Public Employment and the Business Cycle*

We add a public employment sector to the basic search and matching model in order to study the business cycle impact of public wage and employment policies. The government is assumed to follow exogenous rules for public wages and employment calibrated to match some cyclical features of US policies. These features include a positive public wage premium and mildly procyclical public wages and employment. We find that the presence of the public sector increases the volatility of employment and output.     

Pseudocontinuous functions and existence of Nash equilibria

In topological spaces, we introduce a new class of functions (pseudocontinuous functions) and we present some characterizations and properties. In particular, we show that any preference relation endowed of utility functions is continuous if and only if any utility is pseudocontinuous. A maximum theorem is proved for such a class of functions and connections with similar results are investigated. Finally, the existence of Nash equilibria for games with pseudocontinuous payoffs is obtained.     

国外生态社区能源及技术开发对我国的启示

生态社区是一种兴起于西方国家的,以构建人与自然的平衡关系为目的的聚居单元。其在社会、文化及环境等各方面的努力,使其成为构建理想人居的重要模式,对其研究将有益于我国和谐居住区的建设。本文通过对国外生态社区成功案例的研究,深入分析了生态社区在开发可再生能源、运用生态技术方面的先进经验,并探究其成功经验在我国实施的可行性和必要性。     

Mapping Corporate Responsibility and Sustainable Supply Chains: an Exploratory Perspective

Corporate responsibility (CR) in general, and sustainable supply chain management in particular, have been a growing concern for companies and researchers over the past decade. However, in scholarly work, sustainability has often been dealt with in a generic fashion or from an anecdotal point of view. Further, research works examining CR on the one hand and sustainable supply chains on the other have been conducted separately. We undertake the multiple factor analysis of a CR rating database (Innovest) which reports longitudinal scores for both the social and environmental performance of 1198 companies in different countries and distinct industries, to demonstrate a strong relationship between CR and a sustainable supply chain. Our findings from exploratory analysis also illustrate the role of country of origin and industry in shaping CR behaviour, highlighting isomorphic as well as allomorphic trends for CR trough time. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Can gender quotas break down negative stereotypes? Evidence from changes in electoral rules

In this paper, we analyze the effect of gender quotas on women's involvement in political activity by using a rich data set providing information on all Italian local administrators who were elected from 1985 to 2007. Gender quotas were introduced by law in Italy in 1993 and were in force until 1995. Because of the short period covered by the reform, some municipalities never voted under the gender quota regime. This allows us to identify a treatment and a control group and to estimate the effects of gender quotas by using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. Our estimates show that women's representation in politics after the reform increased significantly more in municipalities that were affected by the reform than in municipalities that were not affected. This result also holds true if we exclude from our analysis elections which took place during the period in which the reform was in force. Moreover, the higher women's representation in “gender quota municipalities” is not related to the advantages that women who were elected during the reform have obtained from incumbency and does not seem to be driven by differences in temporal trends between Southern and Northern regions. These findings suggest that affirmative actions can be of use in breaking down stereotypes against women.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Notes and Comments:</Emphasis> Profitability in a multiple strategy market

The link between martingales and arbitrage is well-known in financial theory: arbitrage is not available if and only if there exists an equivalent measure such that the discounted prices are martingales with respect to this measure (MME). As a consequence, under MME, any previsible (non-anticipative) strategy cannot have secure (without risk) profit. Moreover, a careful reading of a bootstrap proof of the first fundamental theorem of asset pricing (see Schachermeier (1992)) underlines the fact that, if there is no possibility of arbitrage during any unit interval, then no arbitrage is allowed with any finite temporal horizon strategy. Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): Primary: 60G48; Secondary: 60G40, 60G07 Journal of Economic Literature Classification: C50, C72, D84     

Technology shocks, structural breaks and the effects on the business cycle

It is shown that time-series of US productivity and hours are apparently affected by a structural break in the late 60s. Moreover, the importance of technology shocks over the business cycle has sharply decreased after the break.     

SOCIAL COMPARISON AND SUBJECTIVE WELL‐BEING: DOES THE HEALTH OF OTHERS MATTER?

The importance of social comparison in shaping individual utility has been widely documented by subjective well‐being literature. So far, income and unemployment have been the main dimensions considered in social comparison. This paper aims to investigate whether subjective well‐being is influenced by inter‐personal comparison with respect to health. Thus, we study the effects of the health of others and relative health hypotheses on two measures of subjective well‐being: happiness and subjective health. Using data from the Italian Health Conditions survey, we show that a high incidence of chronic conditions and disability among reference groups negatively affects both happiness and subjective health. Such effects are stronger among people in the same condition. These results, robust to different econometric specifications and estimation techniques, suggest the presence of some sympathy in individual preferences with respect to health and reveal that other people's health status serves as a benchmark to assess one's own health condition.     

Nutrient consumption and household income in rural Mexico

We estimate the income elasticity for a variety of macro- and micronutrients using a sample of poor rural households in Mexico. The nutrient-income elasticity is estimated using both parametric and semiparametric methods. A special focus is placed on the nonlinearity of the relationship between nutrient intake and income and on measurement error and endogeneity issues. One major finding is that income elasticity for calories is close to zero when we control for measurement error issues. For some nutrients, namely fats, vitamin A and C, calcium, and heme iron, we find a sizeable positive income elasticity robust to the choice of the estimator and percentiles at which it is evaluated. These nutrients are also those for which we find the largest deficiency in our sample. In addition, we find that for the poorest households in our sample, the deficiency of total energy, protein, and zinc is not accompanied by a positive income elasticity.     

Investing for the old age: pensions, children and savings

In the last century, most countries have experienced both an increase in pension spending and a decline in fertility. We argue that the interplay of pension generosity and development of capital markets is crucial to understand fertility decisions. Since children have traditionally represented for parents a form of retirement saving, particularly in economies with limited or nonexistent capital markets, an exogenous increase of pension spending provides a saving technology alternative to children, thus relaxing financial (saving) constraints and reducing fertility. We build a simple two-period OLG model to show that an increase in pensions is associated with a larger decrease in fertility in countries in which individuals have less access to financial markets. Cross-country regression analysis supports our result: an interaction between various measures of pension generosity and a proxy for the development of financial markets consistently enters the regressions positively and significantly, suggesting that in economies with limited financial markets, children represent a (if not the only) way for parents to save for old age, and that increases in pensions amount effectively to relaxing these constraints.