Is the Retail Gasoline Market Local or National?

This paper studies the effect of station density on prices in the retail gasoline market in the Czech Republic. We estimate the impact of the number of competing stations in various driving-distance ranges around each station on prices. We find that station density has a negative effect on prices; the effect decreases with distance and is statistically significant up to six kilometers. This suggests that the retail gasoline market is local rather than national.     

Mountaineering in Cuba: improvement of true accessibility as an opportunity for regional development of communities outside the tourism enclaves

Mass tourism began in the Caribbean during the middle of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, increasing competition and a change in the motivation of tourists now force the authorities who manage these regions to introduce a new tourism offer that is not based directly on either the 3S (Sun, Sand, and Sea) or 3E (Entertainment, Excitement, Education) model. Hiking, trekking, and climbing, defined as mountaineering, might be one of these. This paper examines the potential for mountaineering in Cuba by verifying its accessibility for tourists. The assessment is based on a framework of true accessibility, which consists of two factors: (1) destination accessibility and (2) real access. Our results show that mountaineering in Cuba should be considered to be one of the key contributors to the development, prosperity, and well-being of all stakeholders, and especially for the communities outside the tourism enclaves.     

On the Sources of Inflation in Kenya: A Model‐Based Approach

We develop a semi‐structural new‐Keynesian open‐economy model – with separate food and non‐food inflation dynamics to study the sources of inflation in Kenya in recent years. To do so, we filter international and Kenyan data (on output, inflation and its components, exchange rates and interest rates) through the model to recover a model‐based decomposition of most variables into trends (or potential values) and temporary movements (or gaps) – including for the international and domestic relative price of food. We use the filtration exercise to recover the sequence of domestic and foreign macroeconomic shocks that account for business cycle dynamics in Kenya over the last few years, with a special emphasis on the various factors (international food prices, monetary policy) driving inflation. We find that while imported food price shocks have been an important source of inflation, both in 2008 and more recently, accommodating monetary policy has also played a role, most notably through its effect on the nominal exchange rate. We also discuss the implications of this exercise for the use of model‐based monetary policy analysis in sub‐Saharan African countries.     

Real exchange rates: are they dominated by fundamental factors?

Using Bayesian model averaging, we determine which fundamental pair-wise differences suggested by the literature on optimum currency areas give the best explanation of medium-term variability of bilateral real exchange rates. The intercept in the best specification is statistically insignificant, implying that for a hypothetical pair of economies for which the differences were zero, the bilateral real exchange rate would not move. Thus, the ‘non-fundamental’ element of the medium-term real exchange rate variability is, in our sample at least, negligible on average. In other words, floating exchange rate does not in itself imply, on average, more real exchange rate variability in the medium term than an exchange rate peg.     

Adolescent injuries in relation to economic status: An international perspective

The primary objective of the study was to examine the relationship between patterns in car-to-car crashes involving young drivers and car and driver characteristics and the research design was a national register-based prospective cohort study. Individual records in a cohort born 1970 – 1972 are linked to road-traffic-crash data (1988 – 2000). Subjects' first police-registered two-car crash leading to severe or fatal injury (n = 4875) are identified. Typical crash patterns are highlighted and associations between pattern and both car and individual socio-demographic characteristics are tested. Four crash patterns are highlighted. Male drivers and those with lower educational attainment are over-represented in all patterns. Pattern-based risk levels vary considerably according to car safety level and driver's age at time of injury and socio-economic status. Crash patterns might be considered in young adult driver education systems, bearing in mind the consistent higher risks of male drivers and of drivers with lower educational attainment.     

File sharing as conditional cooperation: evidence from a framed field experiment

In this project, we investigate downloading and sharing behaviour in a novel ‘piracy game’ modelled after standard public good games. We find that willingness to share correlates positively with the sharing by others. By contrast, actual behaviour in the ‘piracy game’ is not correlated with self-reported behaviour.     

The effects of government spending shocks on consumption under optimal stabilization

Economic theory has yet to come up with a general guidance regarding the dynamic effects and welfare implications of shocks to public spending. With the aim to provide a theoretical benchmark, we analyse if a rise in private consumption following an exogenous rise in government spending is a feature of the economy under optimal stabilization in a standard New Keynesian setting augmented for the presence of liquidity-constrained agents and non-separable preferences. Our results provide little evidence in support of a crowding-in effect under ‘timelessly optimal’ policy.     

Strong price of anarchy

A strong equilibrium is a pure Nash equilibrium which is resilient to deviations by coalitions. We define the strong price of anarchy (SPoA) to be the ratio of the worst strong equilibrium to the social optimum. Differently from the Price of Anarchy (defined as the ratio of the worst Nash Equilibrium to the social optimum), it quantifies the loss incurred from the lack of a central designer in settings that allow for coordination.We study the SPoA in two settings, namely job scheduling and network creation. In the job scheduling game we show that for unrelated machines the SPoA can be bounded as a function of the number of machines and the size of the coalition. For the network creation game we show that the SPoA is at most 2. In both cases we show that a strong equilibrium always exists, except for a well defined subset of network creation games.     

Parental background and other-regarding preferences in children

Other-regarding preferences are important for establishing and maintaining cooperative outcomes. In this paper, we study how the formation of other-regarding preferences during childhood is related to parental background. Our subjects, aged 4–12 years, are classified into other-regarding types based on simple binary-choice dictator games. The main finding is that the children of parents with low education are less altruistic, more selfish, and more likely to be weakly spiteful. This link is robust to controlling for a rich set of children’s characteristics and class fixed effects. It also stands out against the overall development of preferences, as we find children to become more altruistic, less selfish, and less likely to be weakly spiteful with increasing age. The results, supported by a complementary analysis of World Values Survey data, suggest an important role of socialization in the formation of other-regarding preferences.     

The Returns to Academic and Vocational Qualifications in Britain

This paper uses data from the 1991 sweep of the National Child Development Study (NCDS) and the 1998 Labour Force Survey (LFS) to provide a comprehensive analysis of the labour market returns to academic and vocational qualifications. The results show that the wage premia from academic qualifications are typically higher than from vocational qualifications. However, this gap is reduced somewhat, when we control for the amount of time taken to acquire different qualifications. This is particularly important for vocational courses, which generally take shorter time periods to complete. In the paper we also investigate how returns vary by gender, subsequent qualifications, and the natural ability of individuals. Finally, by comparing the NCDS results with those from the LFS, we estimate the bias that can result from not controlling for factors such as ability, family background and measurement error. The results reveal that the estimated returns in the NCDS equations controlling for ability, family background and measurement error are similar to the simple OLS estimates obtained with the LFS, which do not control for these factors. This suggests that the biases generally offset one another.