The Small Business Capital Market Behavior in Athens Stock Exchange

Financing small and medium enterprises (SMEs), especially business investments and growth, is a composite and particular complicated affair in the Greek entrepreneurial reality. This paper examines the significance of secondary capital markets, as an alternative source of financing small-medium enterprises’ new entrepreneurial plans. Cointegration technique is applied to test the relationship between the secondary capital market and the dominant sectors in Athens Stock Exchange (ASE). Causality tests are also used to provide evidence on the existence of interdependence between the cointegrated series. The results indicate that there is significant uni-directional causality between primary and secondary capital market in Greece, enhancing us to suggest valuable policy implications.      

“I don’t think Turkish used here is normal”: language attitudes of Turkish university students towards Cypriot Turkish

As a significant factor in social relationships, language attitudes of students are important to explore when building a school culture of tolerance. This study examines the language attitudes of university students from Turkey towards Cypriot Turkish (CT) and Standard Turkish. A mixed methods approach was adopted where 94 Turkish university students studying in the northern part of Cyprus where the two varieties are spoken, responded to a questionnaire in the first phase. The results of the analysis of this survey showed that the participants had somewhat negative attitudes towards CT. In the second phase of the study, where three focus groups were conducted, the findings of the first phase were confirmed. Intertwined with discourses of class, the participants specifically referred to “correctness” and “intelligibility” as important issues for their evaluations of CT and its speakers. CT was also perceived as an important marker of Turkish Cypriotness by the participants and was projected to be lower than any other variety of Turkish spoken in Turkey.

     

Objective methods for graphical structural learning

Graphical models are used for expressing conditional independence relationships among variables by the means of graphs, whose structure is typically unknown and must be inferred by the data at hand. We propose a theoretically sound Objective Bayes procedure for graphical model selection. Our method is based on the Expected-Posterior Prior and on the Power-Expected-Posterior Prior. We use as input of the proposed methodology a default improper prior and suggest computationally efficient approximations of Bayes factors and posterior odds. In a variety of simulated scenarios with varying number of nodes and sample sizes, we show that our method is highly competitive with, or better than, current benchmarks. We also discuss an application to protein-signaling data, which wieldy confirms existing results in the scientific literature.     

Wage mobility in Europe. A comparative analysis using restricted multinomial logit regression

The paper investigates cross-country differences in wage mobility in Europe using the European Community Household Panel. We examine the impact of specific wage-setting institutions, such as the collective bargaining and the trade union density, the employment protection regulation and the welfare state regime on wage mobility. We apply a log-linear approach that is very much similar to a restricted multinomial logit model and much more flexible than the standard probit approach that is typically applied in the research on wage mobility. It is shown that the macro-economic context and the aforementioned specific institutions explain a substantial part of the cross-country variation that is larger than the part that regime type explains. The findings also confirm the existence of an inverse U-shape pattern of wage mobility, showing a great deal of low-wage and high-wage persistence in all countries.     

Sensitivity of consumption to income and to government purchases: some specification and estimation issues

The paper derives a nonlinear error-correction model (ECM) for consumption and shows that existing models that are based on quadratic utility, combine permanent income and current-income consumption, and nest (or could nest) the hypothesis of substitutability between private consumption and government purchases are special cases of the ECM. The importance of some econometric issues that have not received proper attention in the literature is demonstrated by estimating the models using US aggregate quarterly data, 1953:1-1992:4. The evidence suggests that the ECM produces more reliable estimates than do the existing restrictive models.     

New market socialism: a case for rejuvenation or inspired alchemy?

The aim of this paper is to examine the relative merits anddrawbacks of two recent models of market socialism proposedby Bardhan and Roemer. This is done, first, by putting thesemodels into the perspective of the history of economic thought.Thus, after presenting the basic elements of the early Langemodel as well as the Austrian and ‘new information economics’critiques, the necessary comparisons and contrasts are madeto see what new light these new models bring into this debate.In addition, the internal consistency and coherence of thesemodels is checked in terms of their own proclaimed goals. Last,a more radical methodological critique is provided.     

An empirical comparison of continuous-time models of implied volatility indices

We explore the ability of alternative popular continuous-time diffusion and jump-diffusion processes to capture the dynamics of implied volatility indices over time. The performance of the various models is assessed under both econometric and financial metrics. To this end, data are employed from major European and American implied volatility indices and the rapidly growing CBOE volatility futures market. We find that the addition of jumps is necessary to capture the evolution of implied volatility indices under both metrics. Mean reversion is of second-order importance though. The results are consistent across the various metrics, markets, and construction methodologies.     

Entrepreneurship and survival dynamics of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants

Many studies have explored the determinants of entering into entrepreneurship and the differences in self-employment rates across racial and ethnic groups. However, very little is known about the survival in entrepreneurship of immigrants to the U.S. and their descendants.We adopt a modeling framework based on duration analysis, which takes into account both the fact that the stock of entrepreneurs initially observed represents a selected sample and the inability of observing in the data the exit time for some spells. Unlike previous studies, we find a lower survival probability in entrepreneurship for Mexican and other Hispanic immigrants, which does not carry on to their U.S.-born descendants. We also find that these two immigrant groups tend to enter entrepreneurship from unemployment or inactivity and they are more likely to exit towards employment in the wage sector, suggesting that entrepreneurship represents for them an intermediate step from non-employment to paid employment.