Instructional Manipulation Checks: A longitudinal analysis with implications for MTurk

Instructional Manipulation Checks (IMCs) assess respondent behavior by, for example, asking participants not to answer a trick question. We find IMCs can be used to detect problematic response behavior in longitudinal surveys. This is important because a Latent Class Analysis based on IMC-failure in the two reported studies reveals that between 9% and 12% of respondents can be labelled Inattentive Stayers at the first survey-wave and between 13% and 17% at the third wave. The tendency of Inattentive Stayers to remain in the panel is particularly relevant for online panel services such as MTurk, with workers participating in many surveys over longer time-periods. We find IMC-failure to be mitigated by a warning to respondents that their attention will be checked early in the survey, but not by repeated exposure to IMCs, or a timer leaving questions on the screen longer. Respondent personality also plays a role in IMC-failure, which implies persistency of undesirable respondent behavior.     

Origins of regional divergence: economic growth in socialist Yugoslavia†

Relative to western Europe, we know very little about the determinants of economic growth at the regional level within socialist Europe. This is somewhat unusual, given that socialist policy-makers have put great emphasis on equitable regional development. This article analyses the regional patterns of growth and divergence in socialist Yugoslavia. New estimates of output and inputs are constructed, and an analysis of output growth, factor accumulation, structural modernization, and productivity is provided. Two novel empirical findings are uncovered. The first is that the sources of growth across the regions were fundamentally different. Total factor productivity was a much more important source of growth in the richer regions than it was in the poorer ones. The second finding is that the source of the regional income divergence lies in the failure of the less developed regions to converge towards the employment rates and total factor productivities of the more developed regions. These failures are interpreted, at least partially, as symptoms of the governing objective and the soft budget constraint of the labour-managed firms that operated in Yugoslavia. It is argued that Yugoslavia's development model was less suited to the pre-conditions that prevailed in the less developed parts of the country.     

Indirect taxation with shadow cost of public funds in mixed oligopoly

We adopt a mixed oligopoly model, where a state-owned welfare-maximizing public firm competes with a profit-maximizing private firm, to compare the welfare effects of the specific and ad valorem tax in the presence of the shadow cost of public funds. Following the assumption of most previous literature that total output is constant under specific and ad valorem taxation, we find that, when the shadow cost of public funds exists, the tax policy must be adjusted according to the privatization level of the public firm; if the privatization level is low (medium, high), the government needs to adopt ad valorem (specific, ad valorem) tax. Moreover, the private firm will earn a higher (lower) profit under ad valorem tax than under specific tax, if the public firm is not fully privatized and the shadow cost of public funds is high (low).     

Cover's universal portfolio,stochastic portfolio theory,and the numéraire portfolio

Cover's celebrated theorem states that the long‐run yield of a properly chosen “universal” portfolio is almost as good as that of the best retrospectively chosen constant rebalanced portfolio. The “universality” refers to the fact that this result is model‐free, that is, not dependent on an underlying stochastic process. We extend Cover's theorem to the setting of stochastic portfolio theory: the market portfolio is taken as the numéraire, and the rebalancing rule need not be constant anymore but may depend on the current state of the stock market. By fixing a stochastic model of the stock market this model‐free result is complemented by a comparison with the numéraire portfolio. Roughly speaking, under appropriate assumptions the asymptotic growth rate coincides for the three approaches mentioned in the title of this paper. We present results in both discrete and continuous time.     

Does technology licensing matter for privatization?

In mixed oligopolies, technology licensing from a cost‐efficient firm to a cost‐inefficient firm has been widely observed. This paper examines the relationship between privatization and licensing (by public or private firms) with the consideration of either a domestic or a foreign private firm. We find that (a) in the case of a domestic private firm, public licensing facilitates privatization, but private licensing hinders privatization; (b) in the case of a foreign private firm, both public and private licensing facilitate privatization. Our results yield important policy implications on privatization.     

The Political Economy of Policy Vacuums: The European Commission on Demographic Change

ABSTRACT

Supranational organisations can only confront politico-economic issues that are recognised as important. Typically, issues gain recognition either when they provide an external shock to the system, shaking political actors into action, or when they are framed as important in policy networks concerned with developing the appropriate scientific approach. Ideally political and scientific actors align in creating pressures to recognise the issue as salient and to mobilise organisational responses. Issues differ in their capacity to be driven by both political and scientific pressures, creating crisis management, technocratic, and reform agenda outcomes. Here we explore a further variation, where pressures around an issue are insufficient, creating a policy vacuum. We examine one such policy vacuum in Europe: demographic change. This issue belongs to no particular Directorate-General in the European Commission, but is subject to policy frames from DG EMPL and DG ECFIN. Without sufficient political and scientific pressures, no particular policy position is occupied and advocated despite recognition of the issue’s importance. We discuss the role of policy vacuums and the need for their identification in political economy research.     

The Theory of Planned Behavior in the Context of a Food and Drink Event: A Case Study

The present case study seeks to contribute to the culinary event management literature, investigating key motivators among participants to the Derbyshire Food and Drink Fair, United Kingdom. A questionnaire, which was partly based on predictors related to the theory of planned behavior was designed and distributed; 308 usable responses were collected. The validity and impact of attitude toward the behavior, perceived behavioral control, and subjective norms on behavioral intention was confirmed. Additionally, several motivators, such as “commitment and perceived importance,” “consumption and entertainment,” “attendance and discovery,” and “joining others” were identified as key factors. Finally, statistically significant differences were noticed among various participating groups, namely, in terms of age, gender, or distance traveled to the event. The findings have important implications for event managers and organizers, in terms of promotion, and addressing the needs and wants of various segments of food festival attendees.     

Middle Ground: Uniting City,Farm, and Nature with Diverse Agroecosystems

Farming, including family farming, is now dominated by vertically controlled operations that deplete the soil, pollute water, and produce food designed more to satisfy marketing requirements than human nutritional needs. Agricultural practices today are a result of abdicating control over our lives to a thoroughly industrialized culture, in which institutions are governed by the single criterion of efficiency‐‐finding least‐cost solutions. Standardization is a major part of that process. But living systems cannot be standardized. They require diversity and some degree of redundancy to adapt to changing environmental conditions. In the cultural contest between the machine and the garden, the machine has definitely won, but if we do not make room for the garden again, our victory will be our own funeral. New Agrarianism seeks to encourage diversity of species on each farm and across farms within entire landscapes. But farmers cannot carry out the restoration of ecologically‐oriented agriculture on their own. They need support from cities: 1) in the form of markets to sell locally‐grown produce at prices that will support their work, 2) in a new understanding of ecosystems that focuses on inhabited spaces and not just wilderness, and 3) in an orientation that questions whether efficiency should be the paramount value of our culture. Finally, the transition to more biologically‐diverse human settlements can come about only if economic incentives are modified to remove the unrelenting pressure on farmers to expand their operations or go out of business.