Networks and geography in the economics of knowledge flows

This paper reviews the literature dealing with the economic geography of knowledge flows by summarising the most relevant problems and open questions that, according to the authors’ view, have been dealt in the past and should be dealt in the future by network analysis in order to model, understand and measure the structure and dynamics of knowledge flows. The interaction between “networks” and “geography” elements within a theoretical, methodological and empirical perspective is discussed throughout the paper by making reference to previous works by the authors and to the established literature. Thus, these references, far from being complete and exhaustive, are instrumental to the achievement of the paper’s goal: to demonstrate that “networks” and “geography” are the necessary ingredients for every study of the innovative process at any level of analysis, from individual agent to institution/organization, from the regional to the national and international level.     

Social Distance,Respondent Cooperation and Item Nonresponse in Sex Survey

This paper examines the ways in which the number of item nonresponses is determined by social distance and/or interview rapport, with a focus on responses of “refusal” and “don’t know”, implying the respondent’s lack of willingness and ability to provide substantive responses to sensitive questions. The data analyzed were from 39 self- administered questions concerning sexual attitudes and behaviors in the 2002 Taiwan Social Change Survey for module “Family and Changing Gender Role”. Poisson Regression in 2-level Hierarchical Linear Model was employed to enhance the accuracy of the analysis of the accumulation of “don’t know” and “refusal” responses. The results showed that respondent cooperation significantly decreased the number of both “don’t know” and “refusal” replies. The decrease was not conditioned by any kind of social distance. Age and education distances have respectively negative and positive effect on the number of “don’t know” and “refusal” answers. The married–married interview produced more “don’t know” and “refusal” than other paired interview types. The larger the ethnicity distance is, the more “refusal” appears. The substantial findings imply that the effects of social-distance and rapport (respondent cooperation) on the number of item nonresponses deserve more attention in research on survey methodology. The divergent findings on gender-distance effect and marital-status effect, however, call for replication studies in the future.     

Musgrave’s vision of the public sector: the complex relationship between individual, society and state in public good theory

Richard Musgrave introduced the notion of a public good after reading an obscure publication by Lindahl in German in 1910. His great contribution to knowledge was to provide a clear and comprehensive structure for thinking about the process of achieving an “optimal” allocation of resources across public and private goods based individual preferences and the role of government in that process. A number of ambiguities and issues in Musgrave’s vision remain only partially resolved including the need to incorporate “higher laws” or community values into the allocation process.      

Does the Change to Win Federation Represent U.S. Labor’s Third Moment? Evidence from National Labor Relations Board Certification Elections, 2003–2005

In the conclusion to Labor in the New Urban Battlegrounds, Daniel Cornfield contends that U.S. labor’s third “moment” is exemplified by the establishment of the Change to Win (CTW) Federation in September 2005 in which the federation’s affiliated unions focused on organizing service sector workers into multi-jurisdictional unions. Cornfield defines a “moment” as an era in which labor adopts innovative organizing strategies for representing workers in industries and/or occupations previously unorganized within the economy. Utilizing National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) certification election data from 2003–2005, this article investigates the organizing patterns, based on the jurisdictions and industries of fifteen unions, nine affiliated with the AFL-CIO and six that joined the CTW, to ascertain if the CTW’s creation initiated U.S. labor’s third moment. Analysis of the certification election data indicates that the CTW’s formation does not constitute the inauguration of third moment unionism in the United States.     

Catching a draft: on the process of selecting quarterbacks in the National Football League amateur draft

The reverse order college draft gives the worst teams in the National Football League (NFL) the opportunity to hire the best amateur talent. For it to work effectively, teams must be able to identify the “best” talent. Our study of NFL quarterbacks highlights problems with the draft process. We find only a weak correlation between teams’ evaluations on draft day and subsequent quarterback performance in the NFL. Moreover, many of the factors that enhance a quarterback’s draft position are unrelated to future NFL performance. Our analysis highlights the difficulties in evaluating workers in the uncertain environment of professional sports.     

A theory of rent seeking with informational foundations

I develop a model of rent seeking with informational foundations and an arbitrary number of rent seekers, and I compare the results with Tullock’s (1980) classic model where the influence activities are “black-boxed.” Given the microfoundations, the welfare consequences of rent seeking can be studied. In particular, I show that competition among rent seekers can be socially beneficial, since the additional information that the decision maker gets access to makes the increase in rent-seeking expenditures worthwhile. However, the analysis also highlights a logic that, under natural parameter assumptions, makes the rent seekers spend more resources on rent seeking than is in society’s interest, which is consistent with the spirit of the rent-seeking literature.      

Temporary workers: Employee rights and employer responsibilities

As the number of temporary workers in the U.S. has increased dramatically over the past ten years, so, too, has social policy concent over the rights of temporary employees in the workplace and the responsibilities of employing organizations to them. This article first reviews the extent to which temporary workers can be considered “employees” of organizations and thereby be extended the same rights and protections as permanent, full-time employees. Then, the article reviews the current state of case law on the most salient legal issues pertaining to the treatment of temporary workers: discrimination, pay and fringe benefits, worker’s compensation, occupational safety and health, and union activity. The article concludes with the managerial implications of current labor law for compliance with legislative and judicial mandates.     

To dissent or not to dissent? Informative dissent and parliamentary governance

Legislative dissent has detrimental effects for both party and legislator, i.e., legislators depend on their party label for re-election, which value in turn depends in part on the party’s reputation of cohesiveness. Commonly dissent has been attributed to “extreme” preferences. I provide an informational rationale for dissent. Costly dissent allows the legislator to credibly signal information about his constituency’s preferences to the Cabinet. As a result the Cabinet can better calibrate its policies with the electorate’s preferences. Dissent is shown to depend on policy preferences as well a the legislators’ electoral strength, electoral volatility, and the cost of dissent. Finally, the results suggests that parties may sometimes benefit from tolerating some level of dissent. I am grateful to Christopher Kam, Randall Calvert, John Duggan, Mark Fey, Eduardo Leoni, Sona Golder, and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. I also wish to thank the Political Institutions and Public Choice Program at Michigan State University for its support. All remaining errors are mine.     

GDP Estimates: Rationality Tests and Turning Point Performance

The reliability of BEA’s estimates, as measured by the magnitude and pattern of revisions, is highly important to economic policy-making and business decisions. We find evidence that the revisions are partially predicable using contemporaneously available information for the current quarterly estimates of GDP. Information about national income is found to significantly supplement the information found in the final current quarterly estimates of GDP in explaining the revisions to the latest-available estimates of GDP. However, there is little evidence of the predictability of revisions in GDI or national income. Finally, both the advance and final current quarterly estimates are found to do a reliable job of measuring GDP and GDI around cyclical peaks, but a less reliable job around cyclical troughs, the declines preceding the troughs are overstated and the upturns after the troughs are understated. An earlier and somewhat expanded version of this paper, “Revisions, Rationality, and Turning Points in GDP,” was presented at the session “Tracking the Turning Points in the Economy,” AEA meetings January 3–5 2003, Washington DC. It is available in the “working papers” section of BEA’s web site, www.bea.gov     

Are day traders bias free?—evidence from internet stock message boards

This study addresses the issue whether day traders’ recommendations on stocks are biasfree. We test whether on average day traders’ “Hold” sentiment is skewed and different from a neutral opinion. Posted messages and mature text classifier technology provide a novel approach to analyze the content of these “Hold” sentiment postings among day traders. Findings indicate that the self-disclosed “Hold” sentiment conveys an optimistic opinion and significantly differs from neutral. These results help both investors and researchers to better understand day traders’ psychology and behaviors when they recommend stocks. The paper also provides insight into the construction of future online sentiment indexes based on stock message boards.     

Is the small-ball strategy effective in winning games? A stochastic frontier production approach

Since the Japanese National Baseball team won the inaugural World Baseball Classic, “small ball” has been accepted, at least by the media, as a mainstream form of baseball management in Korea. Small ball refers to a manager’s active intervention or strategy implementation in baseball games. In general, the frequency of managers’ orders for play actions such as a sacrifice bunt is higher in Asian baseball than in North American baseball. This paper attempts to statistically test the hypothesis that small ball is effective in winning games by using data from Korean baseball. The panel data analysis of a stochastic production frontier model presents somewhat mixed empirical results, but the overall evidence suggests that small ball actually has detrimental effects on the number of runs scored.     

Does government ideology influence budget composition? Empirical evidence from OECD countries

This paper examines whether government ideology has influenced the allocation of public expenditures in OECD countries. I analyze two datasets that report different expenditure categories and cover the time periods 1970–1997 and 1990–2006, respectively. The results suggest that government ideology has had a rather weak influence on the composition of governments’ budgets. Leftist governments, however, increased spending on “Public Services” in the period 1970–1997 and on “Education” in the period 1990–2006. These findings imply, first, that government ideology hardly influenced budgetary affairs in the last decades, and thus, if ideology plays a role at all, it influences non-budgetary affairs. Second, education has become an important expenditure category for leftist parties to signal their political visions to voters belonging to all societal groups.     

“Today’s employers are lookingfor creators of wealth,not just counters of wealth”

Praxis | Artikel

“Today’s employers are lookingfor creators of wealth, not just counters of wealth”     

Verbesserung des nicht-randomisierten exakten Testes von R.A. Fisher

Summary The so-called Exact Test of R. A. Fisher for comparing two probabilitiesp ₁ andp ₂ in a Fourfold-Table with small cell frequencies is known as a UMPU-Test. But in practice the test is used in a nonrandomized, often tabulated version. Given a certain level of significanceα it is shown: the critical region of this nonrandomized test, referred to as “Fisher 1”, can be enlarged considerably. For instance for all sample-size-sums up to 20 andα=0.01 the total number of points in the critical regions of “Fisher 1” is 552 whereas the analogous number of the new version “Fisher 2” is 788. The size of tables for “Fisher 2” can be reduced considerably because the main parts of the critical regions can be described by the aid of some Chi-square-test versions. In particular Yates’ continuity-correction turns out to be always conservative in the above mentioned region relative to “Fisher 2” whereas this is not strictly true relative to “Fisher 1”.      

A two-stage double-bootstrap data envelopment analysis of efficiency differences of New Zealand secondary schools

We conduct a two-stage (DEA and regression) analysis of the efficiency of New Zealand secondary schools. Unlike previous applications of two-stage semi-parametric modelling of the school “production process”, we use Simar and Wilson’s double bootstrap procedure, which permits valid inference in the presence of unknown serial correlation in the efficiency scores. We are therefore able to draw robust conclusions about a system that has undergone extensive reforms with respect to ideas high on the educational agenda such as decentralised school management and parental choice. Most importantly, we find that school type affects school efficiency and so too does teacher quality.     

The moral–emotional foundations of political discourse: a comparative analysis of the speech records of the U.S. and the Japanese legislatures

There is a growing body of research that focuses on the supposedly close association between an individual’s moral–emotional behavior and his/her political ideology. A prominent example is Haidt’s “moral psychology,” which claims that political liberals and conservatives draw on mutually different sets of moral foundations. However, this and other arguments, which have mostly been advanced in the social context of the United States, lack a comparative perspective. In this study, we examine these arguments in broader spatio-temporal settings by way of a comparative analysis of public deliberations in the U.S. and Japanese legislatures. More specifically, with the help of well-established moral- and emotional-word dictionaries, and employing advanced computational techniques for systematic data collection, we analyze a large volume of speech data that records floor debates over decades in the U.S. Congress and the Japanese Diet to derive longitudinal moral–emotional dynamics. We then use multilevel modeling to regress the derived moral–emotional patterns of legislative deliberations in each country on various covariates to locate possible drivers of these patterns. The results of these analyses reveal more qualified relationships between a moral–emotional framework and political ideology than preceding arguments have suggested, casting serious doubt on the widespread tendency in the literature to quickly rely on an ideological explanation. The findings suggest the need for a more comprehensive approach to handling moral–emotional phenomena in political science.     

Putting a Big Chill on a “Big Hurt:” Genuine Interest in Employment of Salts in Assessing Protection Under the National Labor Relations Act

As union membership has continued to decline steadily in the US, union organizers have become more creative and vigilant with their organizing strategies. Chief among these strategies has been “salting,” a process by which unions attempt to organize employees from the inside rather than the outside. The Supreme Court has ruled that, under the National Labor Relations Act, “salts” cannot be discriminated against solely on the basis of their status as salts. This paper examines employer responses to resist salting efforts, including a recent decision by the National Labor Relations Board, which redefines the landscape under which salting activities can be conducted and considered protected activity.     

The Use of Mixed Methods Models and Designs in the Human Sciences: Problems and Prospects

The article explores some of the emerging issues in the newly developing area of Mixed Methods (MM) research. Two of these issues concern the possibility of whether MM can provide for both “diverse” and “severe” testing. Based on a model of Placeholder Effects and utilizing an example of current empirical research, it is concluded that certain varieties of MM are potentially more robust than others in fulfilling the diverse and severe criteria. It is also argued that MM must concern itself with formulating “procedural rules” which guide the researcher in choosing and applying appropriate strategies for specific research problems.     

Selezione degli investimenti e costo del denaro

Alcuni Autori ritengono che non abbia senso il costo del denaro, in uno schema lineare in cui si può ripartire il proprio denaro in tutte e sole le operazioni che determinano il tasso di sconto. La conclusione di tali Autori appare azzardata: infatti il loro risultato discende da una ipotesi estranea al modello lineare. In questo lavoro io interpreto lo stesso modello, mostro che in esso ha senso il costo del denaro e propongo delle impostazioni alternative.

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An interesting economic problem consist in the search of the optimal allocation of one’s monetary resources in different financial transactions. We often consider as “optimal” the allocation which makes the sum of the actual values of investiments the highest possible, within the limits of all feasible operations. These values are reckoned according to the discount rates established by the financial market. This type of abstraction can be acceptable when we can split our capital into a number of operations that are on the whole negligible, if compared with the movement of the market. In case of a considerable turn over that may therefore affect the cost of money, it follows that we can’t determine an appropriate discount rate before establishing the distribution policy; on the other hand we cannot determine the distribution policy before defining the discount rate. As a border-line case we have that of an “enclosed” economy, where funds can be rationed into all and only those operations which determine the cost of capital. That is the case of “pure capital rationing”. To solve the problem of reckoning the cost of capital under pure capital rationing, some Authors have formulated the two dual linear programs (1) and (2) and have deduced that f is the vector of market prices if and only if the optimal dual solution is equal to f. As that happens if and only if f=0, Burton and Damon [2] consider their “main result a rigorous proof that there does not exist a meaningful solution for the pure capital rationing problem” and conclude “that if there exist a solution to the problem it is not to be found by the traditional linear programming formulations”. On the contrary I demonstrate that f=0 is the only possible capital cost because of the hypotesis =f, which is not related to the linear pattern and is not acceptable from an economic-financial point of view. Then I demonstrate that the market prices are all and only those based on which the actual values of the operations considered are 0. Nor was it right to expect more sophisticated conclusions of such an elementary scheme. Finally I express an alternative linear formulation, where the dual optimal solutions are exactly the market prices.

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Lavoro effettuato nell’ambito del G.N.A.F.A. del C.N.R.