Sensitive Survey Questions: Measuring Attitudes Regarding Female Genital Cutting Through a List Experiment

Potential bias in survey responses is higher if sensitive outcomes are measured. This study analyses attitudes towards female genital cutting (FGC) in Ethiopia. A list experiment is designed to elicit truthful answers about FGC support and compares these outcomes with the answers given to a direct question. Our results confirm that the average bias is substantial as answers to direct questions underestimate the FGC support by about 10 percentage points. Moreover, our results provide suggestive but not statistically significant evidence that this bias is more pronounced among uneducated women and women targeted by an NGO intervention (not randomly assigned).     

The effect of entrepreneurship education in schools on entrepreneurial outcomes: a systematic review

Management Review Quarterly - This study systematically reviewed 21 quantitative and qualitative articles on the effect of entrepreneurship education in schools. We reviewed short-term effects,...     

Masterful Meisters? Voluntary Certification and Quality in the German Crafts Sector

Voluntary certification systems potentially reduce search costs in markets with imperfect information. Service markets with many heterogeneous firms – such as the crafts market – are prone to information imperfections and can therefore potentially benefit from such informational mechanisms. We examine if the Meister qualification in the German crafts sector improves service quality as perceived by consumers. We find a significant and positive relationship between the Meister title and consumer ratings and conclude that the certificate is a credible sign of quality.     

How to Become Central in an Informal Social Network: An Investigation of the Antecedents to Network Centrality in an Environmental SCM Initiative

Environmental supply chain management (SCM) initiatives often evolve as informal, grassroots efforts that are driven by policy entrepreneurs at lower management levels in an organization. These individuals usually are not in positions of power or authority to convince others to support the initiative. They thus rely on central positions in informal networks to gain access to and influence over other employees to be better able to sell these initiatives. This study examines how individuals arrive at positions of centrality within the networks surrounding environmental SCM initiatives. Linking social network theory and social capital theory with findings from the organizational behavior and environmental arena, the study investigates how an individual's proactive personality and commitment profile—affective, normative, and continuance commitment—might affect network centrality through the mediating role of championing behavior. Investigating the implementation of an environmental SCM initiative at a multinational enterprise, the authors identified a 90‐actor social network surrounding the initiative. The results provide evidence that championing behavior fully mediates the relationship between commitment and network centrality and to a lesser extent between proactive personality and network centrality. These findings suggest that championing behavior can enable an actor to become more central in social networks. Further, the results indicate that in an environmental SCM context, engendering the right type of commitment is a much more important driver of championing behavior than the proactive personalities of individual actors. This finding suggests that even employees who do not have proactive personalities can champion environmental initiatives and become central within the informal networks that surround these initiatives, if they strongly desire to support the initiative and believe that the initiative will lead to positive change.     

THE ROLE OF INVENTORIES AND SPECULATIVE TRADING IN THE GLOBAL MARKET FOR CRUDE OIL

We develop a structural model of the global market for crude oil that for the first time explicitly allows for shocks to the speculative demand for oil as well as shocks to flow demand and flow supply. The speculative component of the real price of oil is identified with the help of data on oil inventories. Our estimates rule out explanations of the 2003–2008 oil price surge based on unexpectedly diminishing oil supplies and based on speculative trading. Instead, this surge was caused by unexpected increases in world oil consumption driven by the global business cycle. There is evidence, however, that speculative demand shifts played an important role during earlier oil price shock episodes including 1979, 1986 and 1990. Our analysis implies that additional regulation of oil markets would not have prevented the 2003–2008 oil price surge. We also show that, even after accounting for the role of inventories in smoothing oil consumption, our estimate of the short‐run price elasticity of oil demand is much higher than traditional estimates from dynamic models that do not account for for the endogeneity of the price of oil. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inside the Crystal Ball: New Approaches to Predicting the Gasoline Price at the Pump

Appropriate real‐time forecasting models for the US retail price of gasoline yield substantial reductions in the mean‐squared prediction error (MSPE) at horizons up to 2 years as well as substantial increases in directional accuracy. Even greater MSPE reductions are possible by constructing a pooled forecast that assigns equal weight to five of the most successful forecasting models. Pooled forecasts have lower MSPE than the US Energy Information Administration gasoline price forecasts and the gasoline price expectations in the Michigan Survey of Consumers. We also show that as much as 39% of the decline in gas prices between June and December 2014 was predictable. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Taylor principle in a medium-scale macroeconomic model

We consider a medium-scale New-Keynesian model which combines features that have been shown to explain fairly well postwar U.S. business cycles. Our main result demonstrates that the determinacy properties of forward-looking interest rate rules resemble, at least qualitatively, the corresponding outcomes under current-looking rules. We explain how and why the empiri-cally relevant features of our model generate this novel result.     

Internal And External Adjustment To New Technologies

Schumpeterian creative destruction occurs not only at the industry level, but also with each firm trying to maintain or improve its position in the technology race. Based on a rich data set on more than 4,000 German business units, this paper shows that the simultaneous occurrence of hiring and separations is more likely in firms with the most advanced technologies in use than in units more distant from the technological frontier. This positive relation between technological advance and creative destruction documented also by churning and ‘excess job reallocation equations - holds particularly in recovery years, while it is weak during a recession. The explanation provided for this finding in the paper is that firms can also improve technologies by upgrading machinery and/or retraining workers, and these ‘implementation’ costs arc likely to be lower during economic downturns.     

Can below-replacement fertility be desirable?

In this paper, we challenge the widespread notion that replacement level fertility is the most desirable level of fertility both for countries currently above and below this level. We discuss possible alternative criteria for choosing one fertility level over another. In accordance with earlier studies, we focus on age dependency as the sole criterion. But we do so by relaxing the strong assumption that all individuals of a given age are equal in terms of their economic contribution to society and introduce education as probably the most relevant observable source of population heterogeneity. Our criterion variable is the education-weighted support ratio and we perform thousands of alternative simulations for different constant levels of fertility, starting from empirically given populations. If education is assumed to present a cost at young age and results in higher productivity during working age, then for most countries the desirable long-term total fertility rate turns out to be well below replacement level.