Who do you care about? Scientists’ personality traits and perceived impact on beneficiaries

We investigate the roots of scientists' perceptions of the impact of their work by examining stable psychological characteristics such as personality traits. An analysis of personality traits highlights the effects of policies related to gender equality, allocation of research time and skills acquisition. It improves our understanding of the conflicts related to scientists’ perceptions of the impact of their research on beneficiaries. For example, conscientiousness increases the perceived impact on clinical beneficiaries, but reduces the perceived impact on industrial beneficiaries. Organizational scientific freedom increases the effects of personality traits on perceived impact on beneficiaries such that scientists affiliated to a university are less likely than colleagues working in other research settings to perceive the simultaneous impact of their work on both industrial and clinical beneficiaries.     

The death of development theory: From Friedrich von Hayek to the Washington consensus

Abstract

Development strategies followed by many countries in the 20th century bestowed a relevant role to the State. During the 1970s, it all reversed, and free markets became paramount to efficiency. F. von Hayek and the Mount Pelerin Society led the way to eliminate the State as a significant economic player, while P.T. Bauer extended such ideas to development economics, which would eventually give way to the Washington Consensus. Beyond actual results of such policies, it is surprising to see the appeal of Bauer’s theoretical approach, considering that it is constructed disregarding both empirical evidence, as well as the abundant discussion on development that was taking place contemporarily. This article explores the theoretical process of such reversal in development economics theory.     

VIX futures term structure and the expectations hypothesis

Tests of the expectations hypothesis reveal that the slope of the VIX futures term structure predicts the direction but not the magnitude of the evolution of the short-end of the curve, but predicts neither the direction nor the magnitude of short-term changes in the long-end of the curve. Relative value seeking spread trades, constructed to exploit such violations, deliver excess returns with annualized Sharpe ratios equal or greater than those of volatility-writing strategies deployed by VIX ETN's for a majority of the 32 spread trade combinations tested. I demonstrate that profits from beta-neutral variations of the spread trades, which are not compensation for taking on equity downside risk by design, are propagated by inflows of capital into VIX futures markets, after controlling for factors that measure changes in the availability of hedge fund capital, risk appetite, and momentum. At the heart of profits, and by extension the term structure anomalies, is a disproportionally elevated basis propagated by long VIX demand that enters the futures market through ETN channels.     

Alienation in corporate America: Fact or fable?

Using NORC annual survey data, the authors selected 21 questions describing respondent attitudes toward job, life in general, and financial status. Respondents were catigorized as management, white collar, blue collar, and those not affiliated with business organizations. Attitudes were compared across the four occupational groups. Little dissatisfaction was found in any but the blue collar group. Management as a group, and men as well as women managers showed high levels of satisfaction, with few significant differences found in responses by men and women. This study does not support the earlier finding of widespread alienation in business firms.Charles B. Sannders is Professor of Business Administration at the University of Connecticut. He has written numerous articles which have been published in various management journals.Hugh M. O'Neill and Oscar W. Jensen are Assistant Professors of Business Administration at the University of Connecticut and the Fairfield University, respectively. Both have written several articles, published in management journals.     

Innovation Economy,Productive Public Expenditure and Economic Growth

Multidisciplinary innovation is the main engine of growth for an increasing number of economies. Innovation requires the participation of and interaction between all economic agents. It also requires public spending on education, research and infrastructures. Our main goal is to emphasize the government's role in a growing innovation economy. Developing a non‐scale, idea‐based, one‐sector growth model with complementarities and productive public expenditure, we analyse theoretically the growth effects of an increase in productive public expenditure, which we find positive in the short, medium and long run.     

Two-dimensional mapping of Asia Pacific destinations combining tourism and economic indicators

The present study aims to cluster five Asia Pacific destinations (Cambodia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore) with respect to other countries according to the evolution of the main tourism and economic indicators over the period between 2000 and 2014. By assigning a numerical value to each country corresponding to its position, we summarize all the information into two components (“tourism expenditure and profitability of tourism activity” and “tourism development and economic growth”) using different multivariate techniques for dimensionality reduction. By means of perceptual maps, we find that the five Asia Pacific destinations can be clustered into three different groups: Hong Kong and Singapore, which are the most mature markets; Indonesia and the Philippines, with moderate growth rates in most variables; and Cambodia, with top positions in all variables, showing a huge potential in terms of growth and tourism development and the challenges derived therefrom.     

Real options with unknown-date events

The real options literature has provided new insights on how to manage irreversible capital investments whose payoffs are uncertain. Two of the most important predictions from such theory are: (i) greater risk delays a firm’s investment timing, and (ii) greater risk increases the option value of waiting. This paper challenges such conclusions in a setting in which the relevant random variable is the arrival time of an unfavorable event. In particular, we model situations in which a firm must choose the time at which to invest in a project whose profit grows at a known rate until a random date is reached and decays thereafter, which may be representative of stochastic product or industry life cycles. This is a novel framework in which a firm can update its beliefs about the profitability of an investment opportunity by simply waiting to invest. Thus, a wait-and-see approach allows the firm to capitalize on favorable market evolutions and avoid adverse ones to some extent. Our framework is simple and does not require using stochastic calculus, which allows for an economic interpretation of optimal investment policies for the cases of one-time and sequential investments.     

The nonobserved economy in the European Union

To better understand the share of the nonobserved economy (NOE) in the European Union, especially on the PIIGS, we estimate, through the multiple indicators multiple causes model, the path between 1980 and 2013. The model includes (i) the tax burden (disaggregated into direct and indirect taxes), a proxy of regulation burden, the unemployment rate and self-employment as causes of the NOE economy; (ii) the GDP and the labour force participation ratio as indicators of the NOE economy. In particular, the estimated weight of NOE as a percentage of official GDP was always higher in the PIIGS group.     

Scientific policy and free riders

This paper presents econometric evidence of the effects of knowledge capital and institutions on technology transfer funding. A model is proposed and fitted for 31 research units on agricultural, forestry, and food sciences in Catalonia, Spain from 1990 to 1996. We find a strong impact of knowledge capital and institutional variables on technology transfer funding. Considering administrative costs strengthens the main points of the model and in some cases greatly changes the results. In particular, we reject the hypothesis that administrative costs do not matter. We also find evidence of the existence of free-rider strategies and that increasing returns-to-scale economies exist when bidding for technology transfer funding.An earlier draft of this paper was completed while the author was a visiting scholar at Iowa State University. The author is grateful to Wallace Huffman, Todd Sandler, and Simon Vicary for comments. Financial support was provided by the Interministerial Commission for Science and Technology project, SEC96-2300, and the Interdepartmental Commission for Research and Technological Innovation project, SGR97-333.