Risk aversion,prudence and temperance: An experiment in gain and loss

We characterize the individual's attitude towards risk, prudence and temperance in the gain and loss domains. We analyze the links between the three features of preferences for a given domain and between domains for each feature of preferences. Consequently, the reflection effect, the mixed risk aversion and the risk apportionment, are key concepts of our study. We also display some determinants for risk aversion, prudence and temperance in each domain. To do this, we conducted a lab experiment with students eliciting risk aversion, prudence and temperance in the two domains, and collected information about each subject's characteristics.     

Reflections from Employers on the Disabled Workforce: Focus Groups with Healthcare,Hospitality and Retail Administrators

Historically, employment rates for people with disabilities have been low. Despite legislation that prohibits the discrimination of this group in work settings, employers are reluctant to hire people with disabilities. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the experiences of employers with workers with disabilities. Three focus groups were conducted with 21 administrators from three business sectors (i.e., healthcare, hospitality, and retail). Content analysis indicated five primary themes: (1) importance of disability employment agencies and disability advocates; (2) persistence of manager bias; (3) lack of promotion opportunities; (4) costs associated with having workers with disabilities; and (5) benefits associated with having workers with disabilities. Implications include the need for intervention studies that address the challenges experienced by individuals with disabilities, particularly during hiring and promoting phases of employment, and educational efforts to inform administrators and managers of the few costs and numerous benefits associated with having workers with disabilities.     

ON THE IMPACT OF HETEROGENEITY ON INDETERMINACY*

Some recent research indicates that the occurrence of indeterminacy in models with externalities may be overstated because these models ignore agents' heterogeneity. We consider a neoclassical two‐sector growth model with technological externalities. Agents are heterogeneous with respect to their shares of the initial stock of capital and in labor endowments. We find that the sign of the effect of inequality on indeterminacy is not pinned down by the standard properties of preferences. However, when the inverse of absolute risk aversion is a convex (respectively concave) function, homogeneity (heterogeneity) tends to neutralize the external effects and eliminate indeterminacy.     

Breakeven inflation rates and their puzzling correlation relationships

It is generally assumed that the two Fisher components of the interest rate – the real interest and the inflation – evolve independently over time, considering that they are driven by unrelated economical events. However, the market pricing of those components deduced from newly-available bond data does not provide conclusive evidence. While studying the price behaviour of inflation-linked (real) bonds beside nominal bonds in the major fixed-income markets, we observe that the Real Bond Yields (RBY) and the yield differentials, the Breakeven Inflation Rates (BEIR), have the propensity to be positively correlated between each other across the various countries, yet are pushed into a negative correlation relationship due to market-related price distortions. As long as those distortions are local, the net result is near-zero correlation within countries; when they become global, as in the heat of the current crisis, the correlations turn negative worldwide. In this article insight is gained by taking an innovative worldwide study approach and thanks to revealing crisis period events.     

Reporting missing data: a study of selected articles published from 2003–2007

Missing data (MD) is prevalent in empirical social science research (Allison, http://books.google.ca/books?id=ZtYArHXjpB8Canddq=missing+dataandprintsec=frontcoverandsource=blandots=ziTBvDHxWbandsig=Uiy83xDbWSO4HeBSth0Q_oZIrQandhl=enandei=q6A7Su25ApnIM-eYlccOandsa=Xandoi=book_resultandct=resultandresnum, 2001; Rubin in J Am Stat Assoc 91:473?C489, 1996). Furthermore, inconsistencies in the reporting and treatment of MD have been documented (Peugh and Enders in Rev Educ Res 74:525?C556, 2004). The goal of the current project was to examine how MD was reported and treated in 68 studies issued from a refereed educational journal. It was observed that a fifth of the quantitative articles reviewed actually treated MD, using mainly deletion methods and only 10% of the explicit articles explained MD. Overall, MD reported or inferred averaged about 33% of cases and was commonly associated with missing subjects. Only three articles provided the actual percentages of MD. The results suggest that there may be a lack of consistency in how MD is reported and treated and that studies may remain deficient in how MD is addressed. The importance of the study was to signal tendencies in reporting and treating MD, to provide tentative explanations for such trends, to propose hypotheses for future empirical studies in the field, and to offer an initial set of practical guidelines for including addressing, explaining, and treating MD in educational research.     

Impact of Environmental Policies in the Hog-Pork Sector on Trade and Market Welfare in North America

The objective of this study is to design a framework to assess trade patterns and market welfare (Marshallian measures of producer and consumer surpluses plus government payments) under various combinations of agricultural, environmental and trade policies. To reach this objective, an environmental model, EPIC, is linked to a model of the North American hog-pork sector. The reduction in Québec inventories, following the implementation of environmental policies, triggers a decrease of Canadian live hog exports to the U.S. and an increase of U.S. pork exports to Canada. Environmental policies are responsible for decreases in welfare. The decrease in welfare is the largest when a moratorium in North America is simulated. Since trade liberalization has a positive impact on welfare, the welfare decrease from a moratorium is somewhat attenuated under free trade conditions.     

Yet another look at temporal aggregation in diffusion models of first-time purchase

This paper gives yet another look at the impact of temporal aggregation on the parameter estimates for the familiar Bass diffusion model. It is shown that aggregation leads to larger values of the innovation parameter p and that it is leads to smaller values of the imitation parameter q, at least in theory. The last finding is in contrast with the results in Technological Forecasting and Social Change [51 (1996) 265]. We use simulation experiments to substantiate our results.     

Inequalities and fluctuations in a dynamic general equilibrium model

   Summary. In the present paper a tractable two-sector neo-classical growth model with heterogeneous agents is considered. The local dynamic properties of the equilibrium path are analyzed in relation with the underlying characteristics of the economy. In particular, the existence of fluctuations is related to the degree of heterogeneity in labor and in capital endowments. When applied to international trade theory, the analysis shows that free trade may distabilize a world economy that is originally stable under the regime of autarky. Received: December 28, 1998; revised version: October 29, 1999     

Corporate motivations for environmental sustainable development: exploring the role of consumers in stakeholder engagement

This paper examines the extent to which the end‐consumer appears to influence corporate behaviour towards reporting specific environmental management activities, through examination of environmental disclosures by the UK FTSE 100 companies. The paper also explores whether proximity to the end‐consumer is associated with particular motivations for environmental management – whether cost‐reducing or reputational benefits, hypothesizing that close‐to‐consumer companies (C2C) will have a greater focus on reputational benefits than their counterparts. The results established that C2C companies were significantly more active in particular environmental measures (climate change and management processes) than their counterparts. They were also more likely to undertake environmental activities for which there was no explicit cost‐reduction benefit, suggesting that reputation with consumers/society may be a particular business motivator for them. These findings are important to policy makers, government and investors in terms of identifying which companies are leading particular aspects of the corporate environmental agenda and understanding the driving forces for it. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Reform in the contract state: Embedded directions in public procurement regulation in South Africa

As South Africa contemplates another episode of public procurement legal reform, we trace the post-apartheid history of such efforts and consider critical issues moving forward. South Africa has over the last few decades followed the international trend of an expanding ‘contract state’. Public procurement is increasingly important to state operational and allocative concerns. South Africa’s public procurement regime is progressively configured into a centrally steered but decentralised organisational form. Inflected through domestic public procurement politics, however, the development of this organisational form has been truncated, with the establishment of only limited central steering capacity producing a public procurement regulatory regime which is weak, fragmented and incoherent, contributing to problems of state incapacity and corruption. In 2013 South Africa’s Minister of Finance announced a major push to reform South Africa’s contract state. The effort aims to better establish, locate and extend public procurement regulatory authority. It has begun to elaborate a centre-led, strategic and increasingly developmental procurement methodology. It is moving towards more flexibility, effectively an attempt to reduce rigidity in rules while building more robust and distributed disciplinary mechanisms, ones which take account of deficits in regulatory capacity and political will. We consider the potentials and pitfalls of these movements and suggest ways to optimise them.