The use of visual warnings in social marketing: The case of tobacco

Despite strong interest on the part of tobacco health practitioners, the effect of graphic warnings inserted on cigarette packs is unclear on several levels. First, the most effective themes for such messages have not been clearly identified by researchers. Second, no research has identified the ideal combination of self-efficacy and fear appeal warnings that should be inserted on cigarette packs, according to Protection Motivation Model principles. The exploratory study we conducted with French consumers to test the effectiveness of new graphic warnings proposed by the European Union in 2004 clearly demonstrates that visual messages, as opposed to text warnings, are more effective. This study also enabled us to identify the most effective themes of the European set: health warnings and social messages. Regarding future public health applications, if fear appeals are used, they need to be combined with self-efficacy and cessation support messages since they provoke avoidance reactions.     

Tourism competitiveness index of the Asia-Pacific region through consistency analysis

The world’s economy shifts to a more competitive environment as globalization expands and countries have to adjust by making decisions to improve their competitiveness in all sectors. The Travel and Tourism Report, a useful tool facilitating policy-making and business decisions, allows entities to envision their ranking in the face of the travel and tourism through the creation of a competitiveness index. Focusing on Asia and the Pacific, this paper intends to investigate internal consistency of the constructs based on data analysis techniques such as correlation and reliability, essentials to broader acceptance of the index. The results indicate that high linear association between index and pillars leads ultimately to good level of consistency and highlight the lack of relationship between overall consistency and inter-class consistency. It is suggested to pay close attention to unidimensionality of constructs and inter-relation between variables while building an indicator system as it increases its reliability.     

Attracting responsible employees: Green production as labor market screening

Corporate social responsibility can improve firms’ ability to recruit highly motivated employees. This can secure socially responsible firms’ survival even in a highly competitive environment. We show that if both socially responsible (green) and non-responsible (brown) firms exist in equilibrium, workers with high moral motivation, who shirk less than others, will self-select into the green firms. If unobservable effort is sufficiently important for firm productivity, this can drive every brown firm out of business—even in the case where many workers have no moral motivation whatsoever.     

The Fear of Exclusion: Individual Effort when Group Formation is Endogenous*

To secure their membership in a popular group, individuals may contribute more to the group's local public good than they would if group formation were exogenous. Those in the most unpopular group do not have this incentive to contribute. This may result in substantial differences in individual effort level between groups. Our model thus provides one explanation for the existence of group‐specific behavioral norms. A principal will prefer exogenous or endogenous group formation depending on whether he prefers high or low levels of the local public good. We analyze two stylized examples: social interaction in schools, and multiple‐task teamwork.     

Xenophobia and the Size of the Public Sector in France: A Politico-economic Analysis

Anti-immigrant feeling (xenophobia) among voters was a key factor in the second-place victory of Jean Le Pen's National Front Party in the 2002 French national election. Here, we study the effect of anti-immigrant sentiment on the equilibrium position of political parties on the economic issue, which we take to be the size of the public sector. We model political competition among three parties (Left, Right, and Extreme Right) on a two-dimensional policy space (public sector size, immigration issue) using the PUNE model. We calibrate the model to French data for the election years 1988 and 2002, and show that politics have changed significantly over this period, from being centered primarily on economic issues, to non-economic issues such as immigration and security/law-and-order. We estimate that in 2002, the effect of voter xenophobia was to reduce the voters' choice of public-sector size between 11% and 28% of one standard deviation of the population's distribution of public-sector size ideal points, from what it would have been, absent xenophobia.     

Firms’ Compliance to Environmental Regulation: Is There Really a Paradox?

It has often been claimed that firms’ compliance to environmental regulations is higher than predicted by standard theory, a result labeled the “Harrington paradox” in the literature. Enforcement data from Norway presented here appears, at first glance, to confirm this “stylized fact”: firms are inspected less than once a year, detected violators are seldom fined, but still, serious violations seem relatively rare. However, at a closer look, the pattern seems less paradoxical: enforcement of minor violations is lax, but such violations do flourish; serious violations, on the other hand, are subject to credible threats of harsh punishment, and such violations are more uncommon. This seems quite consistent with predictions from standard theory. We argue that the empirical existence of the Harrington paradox is not well documented in the international literature. The claim that firms’ compliance with environmental regulations is generally higher than predicted by standard theory should thus be regarded as a hypothesis rather than an established fact.     

A live experiment on approval voting

This paper presents a large-scale experiment on the Approval Voting rule that took place during the 2002 French presidential election. We describe the experiment and its main results. The findings are as follows: (i) Such an experiment is feasible, and very well accepted by voters. (ii) The principle of approval voting is easily understood and accepted. (iii) Within the observed political context, compared to the official first-round vote, approval voting modifies the overall ranking of candidates. (iv) The candidates Le Pen and Chirac, more than the others, were able to convert approval votes into official first-round votes. JEL Classification C93, D70, D72     

Estimation of consistent multi-country FEERs

Most studies on equilibrium exchange rates focus on a limited number of G7 countries. But in a situation of world imbalances, emerging countries can no longer be excluded. The study of all equilibrium exchange rates is delicate. First, the trade model has to be balanced at the aggregate level. This paper suggests a method to achieve world balance both in volume and in value. Second, the N − 1 bilateral exchange rates cannot ensure that the N areas will reach their macroeconomic equilibrium simultaneously. This paper examines the existing solutions to solve the N − 1 problem and proposes an alternative which minimizes the distance to the current-account targets. Finally, in order to compare the relevance of the different methodologies, FEERs are calculated for 19 industrialized and developing countries. The results, which are taking into account the modification on output gap assessment induced by the 2008–2009 crisis, lead for the year 2010 to a USD closed to its equilibrium, a RMB undervalued by around 35% in real effective terms and to a EUR/USD parity equals to 1.47.