Integrating ecosystem services into conservation assessments: A review

A call has been made for conservation planners to include ecosystem services into their assessments of conservation priority areas. The need to develop an integrated approach to meeting different conservation objectives and a shift in focus towards human wellbeing are some of the motivations behind this call. There is currently no widely accepted approach to planning for ecosystem services. This study contributes towards the development of this approach through a review of conservation assessments and the extent to which they include ecosystem services. Of the 476 conservation assessments identified by a set of search terms on the Web of Science, 100 were randomly selected for this review. Of these only seven had included ecosystem services, while another 13 had referred to ecosystem services as a rationale for conservation without including them in the assessment. The majority of assessments were based on biodiversity pattern data while 19 used data on ecological processes. A total of 11 of these 19 assessments used processes, which could be linked to services. Ecosystem services have witnessed an increase in attention received in conservation assessments since the year 2000, however trends were not apparent beyond this date. In order to assess which types of ecosystem services and how they have been accounted for in conservation assessments, we extended our review to include an additional nine conservation assessments which included ecosystem services. The majority included cultural ecosystem services, followed by regulatory, provisioning and supporting services respectively. We conclude with an analysis of the constraints and opportunities for the integration of ecosystem services into conservation assessments and highlight the urgent need for an appropriate framework for planning for ecosystem services.     

Does accessibility to local public employment agencies matter? Answers from a French quasi-experiment

We question whether accessibility to local public employment agencies impacts exits from unemployment. We deal with the potential endogeneity of the residential location of jobseekers by using the unanticipated creation of a new agency in the French region of Lyon as a quasi-natural experiment. We use exhaustive and geo-located individual data on jobseekers and local public employment agencies. Contrary to past evidence based on aggregated data, we find no evidence that jobseekers with improved accessibility to the local public employment services experience an improvement of their probability of exiting unemployment. We however find evidence of transitory organizational effects. These findings strongly question the costly strategy of a fine distribution of local public employment agencies across the territory while suggesting that institutional issues are key.     

Exploring purchasing integration in product development

With increasing outsourcing and the growing importance of product innovation as a means for creating competitive advantage, the integration of purchasing and product development processes has become a key issue for many firms. Although, consequently, the integration of purchasing and suppliers in product development has attracted growing attention from practitioners and researchers, most research on the topic remains limited to the context of single development projects. The integration with long-term issues such as technological alignment between supplier and manufacturer is often neglected. This limited conception and the lack of a coherent definition of what purchasing integration in product involvement is form a major impediment to the advancement of knowledge in this field. Therefore, this article develops a framework encompassing various activities across different management levels, which embody the alignment and integration of purchasing and product development processes.     

Replicating portfolio approach to capital calculation

The replicating portfolio (RP) approach to the calculation of capital for life insurance portfolios is an industry standard. The RP is obtained from projecting the terminal loss of discounted asset–liability cash flows on a set of factors generated by a family of financial instruments that can be efficiently simulated. We provide the mathematical foundations and a novel dynamic and path-dependent RP approach for real-world and risk-neutral sampling. We show that our RP approach yields asymptotically consistent capital estimators if the chaotic representation property holds. We illustrate the tractability of the RP approach by three numerical examples.     

Mean–variance and mean–semivariance portfolio selection: a multivariate nonparametric approach

While univariate nonparametric estimation methods have been developed for estimating returns in mean-downside risk portfolio optimization, the problem of handling possible cross-correlations in a vector of asset returns has not been addressed in portfolio selection. We present a novel multivariate nonparametric portfolio optimization procedure using kernel-based estimators of the conditional mean and the conditional median. The method accounts for the covariance structure information from the full set of returns. We also provide two computational algorithms to implement the estimators. Via the analysis of 24 French stock market returns, we evaluate the in-sample and out-of-sample performance of both portfolio selection algorithms against optimal portfolios selected by classical and univariate nonparametric methods for three highly different time periods and different levels of expected return. By allowing for cross-correlations among returns, our results suggest that the proposed multivariate nonparametric method is a useful extension of standard univariate nonparametric portfolio selection approaches.     

Geographic distribution of suicide and railway suicide in Belgium, 2008–2013: a principal component analysis

This study investigated the geographic distribution of suicide and railway suicide in Belgium over 2008--2013 on local (i.e., district or arrondissement) level. There were differences in the regional distribution of suicide and railway suicides in Belgium over the study period. Principal component analysis identified three groups of correlations among population variables and socio-economic indicators, such as population density, unemployment, and age group distribution, on two components that helped explaining the variance of railway suicide at a local (arrondissement) level. This information is of particular importance to prevent suicides in high-risk areas on the Belgian railway network.     

The characteristic function of rough Heston models

It has been recently shown that rough volatility models, where the volatility is driven by a fractional Brownian motion with small Hurst parameter, provide very relevant dynamics in order to reproduce the behavior of both historical and implied volatilities. However, due to the non‐Markovian nature of the fractional Brownian motion, they raise new issues when it comes to derivatives pricing. Using an original link between nearly unstable Hawkes processes and fractional volatility models, we compute the characteristic function of the log‐price in rough Heston models. In the classical Heston model, the characteristic function is expressed in terms of the solution of a Riccati equation. Here, we show that rough Heston models exhibit quite a similar structure, the Riccati equation being replaced by a fractional Riccati equation.     

No‐arbitrage implies power‐law market impact and rough volatility

Market impact is the link between the volume of a (large) order and the price move during and after the execution of this order. We show that in a quite general framework, under no‐arbitrage assumption, the market impact function can only be of power‐law type. Furthermore, we prove this implies that the macroscopic price is diffusive with rough volatility, with a one‐to‐one correspondence between the exponent of the impact function and the Hurst parameter of the volatility. Hence, we simply explain the universal rough behavior of the volatility as a consequence of the no‐arbitrage property. From a mathematical viewpoint, our study relies, in particular, on new results about hyper‐rough stochastic Volterra equations.     

(Not So) Easy Come, (Still) Easy Go? Footloose Multinationals Revisited

The central question of this paper is to test whether multinational firms (MNFs) are more likely to exit the local market than domestic firms. Using firm‐level data for Belgium, we estimate a random effects probit model taking into account the endogeneity of firm size, total factor productivity (TFP) and sunk costs in firm exit. Our results highlight two features of the ‘footloose’ nature of MNFs. First, controlling for firm and sector characteristics, the exit probability of MNFs is larger than that of domestic firms. Second, MNFs have a lower sensitivity to TFP and size than do domestic firms. This means that an improvement in economic performance on the local market will not prevent a multinational from closing its local plant as much as it would for a domestic firm.     

Agent-Based Reallocation Problem on Social Networks

Resource reallocation problems aim to determine an allocation maximizing a given objective function. Numerous applications are based on the assumption of restricted contacts between entities but, up to now, studies have been based on unrealistic contexts. Indeed, most of the time, agents are omniscient and/or have complete communication abilities, which are not plausible assumptions in many applications. A solution does not only consist in an optimal allocation, but in a sequence of transactions changing an initial allocation into an optimal solution. We show that the individual rationality does not allow the achievement of socially optimal allocations, and we propose a more suitable criterion: the sociability. Our method provides a sequence of transactions leading to an optimal allocation, with any restriction on agents’ communication abilities. Provided solutions can be viewed as emergent phenomena.