Can we trust measures of trust? a comparison of results from open and closed questions

Quality & Quantity - Many public opinion surveys compare trust in a number of different information and (mediated) knowledge sources, typically using closed questions with a set of answer...     

Complementarity,fiscal decentralization and economic growth

Theories of the voluntary provision of public goods and development economics have clarified that complementarity in the production process is a crucial ingredient to understanding how alternative economic environments affect economic performance. This paper examines how the structures of intra- and inter-regional complementarity affect the relationship between economic growth and fiscal decentralization. We provide a theory that describes how fiscal decentralization affects economic growth under various structures of regional complementarity. Our empirical analysis, based on a panel data set of the fifty states of the United States over the period of 1992–1997, supports our theoretical specification of the production function. Also, we observe a hump-shaped relationship between fiscal decentralization and economic growth that is consistent with our theoretical result. Our analysis also shows that the optimal degree of fiscal decentralization conducive to economic growth is higher than the average of the data in some cases, and hence further decentralization is recommended for economic growth. The previous version of the paper was presented at the 59th Congress of the International Institute of Public Finance (University of Economics in Prague, Prague), the 2003 Fall Meeting of the Japanese Economic Association (Meiji University, Tokyo), the 60th Annual Meeting of the Japanese Institute of Public Finance (Kansai University, Osaka), and in seminars at Yokohama National University and the University of California, Irvine. The authors acknowledge the comments and discussions by people including Timothy Goodspeed, Kiyoshi Mitsui, Motohiro Sato, Etsuro Shioji, Tsunao Okumura, and Craig Parsons. We are also grateful for the comments by the Editor (Amihai Glazer) and two anonymous referees. The usual disclaimer applies. Nishimura acknowledges the financial support from JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Postdoctoral Fellowships for Research Abroad.     

Unawareness and indifference to economic reform among the public: evidence from India’s power sector reform

Although economic reform generates winners and losers, many people have no opinion whatsoever about it. Because most empirical research ignores these non-responses, the conventional wisdom on the determinants of support for economic reform ignores large groups of silent citizens. To correct this problem, we present a stylized model that accounts for support, opposition, indifference, and unawareness about reform. We argue that informed people and those who perceive the status quo as dysfunctional will form an opinion more readily than others. For evidence, we examine public opinion about electricity privatization from a large field survey in rural India. We find that information and perceived inefficiency have much larger effects on the likelihood of forming an opinion than on the direction of that opinion (yes or no), emphasizing the importance of accounting for opinion formation process. In this case, information and perceived inefficiency make reform a salient issue to a passive public, most of whom become vocal opponents of reform.     

The impact of public service values on services of general interest reform debates

Abstract

Competing values complicate debates on the reform of public services. Attention for competition and efficiency is balanced by concerns for equity and universality in service delivery. These potential value conflicts are best visible in the reform of services of general interest. Despite debates at the European and the national level, current research on services of general interest has been limited to scholars in law and economics. Citizens' opinion on the guiding principles of service delivery is generally disregarded. In this article, we analyse a number of Eurobarometer surveys dealing with services of general interest, as well as a general survey of citizens' perceptions of the public sector in Belgium. We delineate clusters of citizens' public service delivery value orientations, and show that one-sided or ideology-based reform strategies probably negate many of the continuing dilemmas in public service delivery.     

UNIVERSITY RESEARCH, INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND EUROPEAN INNOVATION SYSTEMS

Abstract This paper surveys the literature on university patenting. From the point of view of the economic theory of patents, it is argued that patenting knowledge developed by university researchers is paradoxical: patents are normally intended to stimulate knowledge development by providing property rights, but universities operate also under a different incentive scheme, i.e. they receive public funds to perform socially useful knowledge. In the debate surrounding the so‐called Bayh‐Dole Act in the USA, it has, however, been argued that patents on university inventions may be necessary to stimulate technology transfer from universities to private firms. The first part of the paper addresses two major questions. First, what is the economic logic of Bayh‐Dole, and, second, what were the effects on universities and the knowledge they develop? In the second part, the paper addresses the issue of whether ‘Bayh‐Dole‐like’ legislation would be beneficial for European countries. In a number of European countries, a suggestion has been made that this could enhance knowledge transfer from the public to the private sector. Using a new database resulting from a survey among patent inventors in six European countries, an assessment is given of the degree of university patenting in Europe. Because university researchers are often involved in patented inventions without the university being listed as a patent applicant, statistics based on the patent office databases alone often underestimate university patenting in Europe. The paper ends with a discussion of how this ‘European practice’ of university patenting affects public–private knowledge transfer in Europe, and how this compares to the effects of the Bayh‐Dole Act in the USA.     

Response Effects in Surveys on Children and Adolescents: The Effect of Number of Response Options,Negative Wording,and Neutral Mid-Point

Social researchers increasingly survey children and young adolescents.They are convinced that information about perspectives, attitudes, and behaviors of childrenshould be collected from the children themselves. Methodological expertise on surveying childrenis still scarce, and researchers rely on ad-hoc knowledge from fields such as child psychiatry and educationaltesting, or on methodological knowledge on surveying adults. Regarding adults, empirical evidenceshows that respondent characteristics (cognitive abilities) as well asquestion characteristics (question difficulty) affect response quality.This study reports on a methodological survey experiment on theeffect of negatively formulated questions, the number of response options and offeringa neutral midpoint as response option question characteristics on the reliability of theresponses, using children and young adolescents as respondents.The study shows no effects of negatively formulated questions onthe reliability measures, although children respond consistently differently on negativelyformulated questions than on positively formulated questions. Taking all results on the effectsof number of response options and offering a neutral midpoints on the different reliabilitymeasures into consideration; it would appear that offering about four responseoptions is optimal with children as respondents.     

The role of attitude in learning economics: Race and gender differences

This study identifies and analyzes factors that affect a learner's knowledge, comprehension, and application of economics by racial and gender grouping. A decomposition model is used to evaluate the impact of attitudinal effects and other exogenous variables on economic cognition. Preliminary findings suggest that the attitude of black students towards economics instruction differs from their white cohorts while no gender differences are found.     

流动人口社会融合现状与测度——基于大连市的调查数据

在快速城市化的背景下,流动人口的社会融合问题逐步成为影响城市管理的重要因素。利用对大连市1017名流动人口的调查数据,从公共服务、经济地位、社会保障、社区参与和身份认同5个方面对流动人口的社会融合状况进行了测量分析。研究结果表明,流动人口的总体社会融合程度偏低。从具体维度来看,流动人口的身份认同程度较好,而他们享受的公共服务有限,其经济地位、社会保障、社区参与的融合程度呈现出依次下降的趋势。户籍因素造成的"城乡差分"使得城—城流动人口的社会融合程度高于乡—城流动人口,而人力资本和社会资本也是影响流动人口社会融合程度的重要因素。     

How economic integration affects the vertical structure of the public sector

This paper investigates the impact of economic integration on the vertical structure of the public sector within a country. To tackle this issue we set up a model of fiscal federalism, where economic integration is assumed to affect central government tax revenues. The main findings are that when an increase of the impact of economic integration brings about a reduction in central government tax revenues, under certain conditions: (a) it reduces central government expenditure; (b) it reduces general government expenditure; (c) it increases local taxation; (d) it increases the degree of public sector decentralization. Quite interestingly, these results are consistent with different patterns of local public spending and grants to local government.     

The impact of knowledge diversity: Integrating two economic perspectives through the dynamic capability approach

This paper analyzes the two economic perspectives underlying the contradictory results of existing studies regarding the relationship between diversity and performance and integrates them using the dynamic capability approach. Transaction cost economics suggests that knowledge diversity has a negative impact on cost-saving performance, whereas evolutionary economics suggests that knowledge diversity has a positive impact on value-creation performance. According to the dynamic capability approach, the perspective of transaction cost economics is shown to relate to ordinary capabilities, whereas the perspective of evolutionary economics is shown to relate to dynamic capabilities. The former should be pursued in subservience to the latter.     

肥胖的经济学研究：文献综述

本文从肥胖问题导致的后果、产生的原因及针对的干预三个方面综述了肥胖的相关经济学研究。最近30年肥胖流行症在全球范围内的迅速蔓延已使得如何控制它成为全球最重要的公共健康议题之一。由于肥胖是由社会经济、个体行为、遗传因素及其交互作用所共同决定,单纯的医学研究倍受局限。随着肥胖问题日趋严重,越来越多的学者开始从经济学视角展开探索,这也使人们对肥胖问题有了崭新认识,该领域的研究也已经成为西方应用经济学科研究的重要方向。     

Mixture of Truthful–Untruthful Responses in Public Surveys

When sensitive issues are surveyed, collecting truthful data and obtaining reliable estimates of population parameters is a persistent problem in many fields of applied research mostly in sociological, economic, demographic, ecological and medical studies. In this context, and moving from the so‐called negative survey, we consider the problem of estimating the proportion of population units belonging to the categories of a sensitive variable when collected data are affected by measurement errors produced by untruthful responses. An extension of the negative survey approach is proposed herein in order to allow respondents to release a true response. The proposal rests on modelling the released data with a mixture of truthful and untruthful responses that allows researchers to obtain an estimate of the proportions as well as the probability of receiving the true response by implementing the EM‐algorithm. We describe the estimation procedure and carry out a simulation study to assess the performance of the EM estimates vis‐à‐vis certain benchmark values and the estimates obtained under the traditional data‐collection approach based on direct questioning that ignores the presence of misreporting due to untruthful responding. Simulation findings provide evidence on the accuracy of the estimates and permit us to appreciate the improvements that our approach can produce in public surveys, particularly in election opinion polls, when the hidden vote problem is present.     

The persistence of economic profit

Recently, as practitioners and researchers from developed countries have increasingly probed the activities of emerging economies, what exactly drives the long-term economic profitability of firms in China has become the most salient issue in the above fields. However, a study dedicated to the persistence analysis of profitability differentials among firms in China has not yet been proposed. This study thus employs China’s business database to examine the persistence in the incremental components of the industry and firm effects on economic profitability and tests the hypotheses that conform to the conventional wisdom of relative rates of persistence. A persistence partitioning model is fitted to a new data set, and the results show that the incremental effects of industry on economic profitability persist longer than the incremental effects of the firm. In other words, the long-term competitive advantages of firms in China are more predictable and sustainable based on industry influences compared to firm factors. These findings support the predictions of industrial organization economics, and provide some implications for corporate strategy.     

Time costs,aspirations and the effect of economic growth on German fertility

Recent research has shown strong support for the model of reproductive behavior derived from the new home economics, and it is shown in this discussion that the evidence from the Federal Republic of Germany is consistent with the new home economics model. There is little support for Easterlin's relative economic hypothesis, but there is limited endorsement for model which adds the influence of experience based material aspirations to the new home economics model. Easterlin's relative income model is reviewed before directing attention to the new home economics model and an explanation of fertility movements in West Germany. The new home economics model focuses on the family division of labor between home activities and work outside the home. The marked decline in German fertility during the 1970s is mostly attributable to factors such as expanding women's earning capacities which increased the importance of 2 earner families, who have a different family division of labor and possibly preferences biased towards "quality" of children rather than numbers. Also, real wage growth lagged behind the growth in experience based aspirations, and this drop in relative income is more dramatic if it is presumed that material aspirations are based upon the family's income experienced by a young adult during his/her adolescence, rather than just the father's earnings. The mother's contribution to family income will contribute to her family's actual standard of living and the desired standard of living of her children. The labor force participation rates of married, middle-aged German women increased markedly during the 1st half of the 1950s, thus tending to enhance the increase in the standard of living desired by the young adults reaching marrying and childbearing ages in the mid-1960s. The analysis indicates that if there is not a substantial reduction in the proportion of young married women in the labor force, fertility will move countercyclically. In that there must be some floor to fertility, one should be cautious of using these parameter estimates considerably outside the 1950-1977 period. Nonetheless, the estimates indicate that economic growth will not bring a substantial rise in German fertility, and, outside the unlikely situation of sustained economic decline, fertility will remain low.     

QUALITATIVE AND MIXED‐METHODS RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS: SURPRISING GROWTH,PROMISING FUTURE

Qualitative research in economics has traditionally been unimportant compared to quantitative work. Yet there has been a small explosion in use of quantitative approaches in the past 10–15 years, including ‘mixed‐methods’ projects which use qualitative and quantitative methods in combination. This paper surveys the growing use of qualitative methods in economics and closely related fields, aiming to provide economists with a useful roadmap through major sets of qualitative methods and how and why they are used. We review the growing body of economic research using qualitative approaches, emphasizing the gains from using qualitative‐ or mixed‐methods over traditional ‘closed‐ended’ approaches. It is argued that, although qualitative methods are often portrayed as less reliable, less accurate, less powerful and/or less credible than quantitative methods, in fact, the two sets of methods have their own strengths, and how much can be learned from one type of method or the other depends on specific issues that arise in studying the topic of interest. The central message of the paper is that well‐done qualitative work can provide scientifically valuable and intellectually helpful ways of adding to the stock of economic knowledge, especially when applied to research questions for which they are well suited.     

STATED PREFERENCES FOR PUBLIC SERVICES: A CLASSIFICATION AND SURVEY OF APPROACHES

The wider range of stated preference approaches to value public goods has not been systematically reviewed in recent years. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of this literature and to evaluate the strengths and limitations of alternative approaches. Since the public referendum has served as a ‘blueprint’ for survey design, two key dimensions by which many surveys differ from the public referendum are used for a simple classification of approaches. This yields eleven approaches, including different variants of micro-based demand surveys, referendum surveys, budget allocation surveys and contingent valuation surveys. Their evaluation in terms of the preference information they produce and the assumptions they require suggests there is no single preferred approach. Instead, each approach has its characteristic profile of strengths and limitations which follow from how it strikes the balance between the conflicting goals of measuring entire willingness-to-pay distributions and presenting manageable, credible and incentive compatible questions. Ultimately, judgments about the suitability of alternative approaches for specific objectives should rely on empirical evidence. Progress in the field could greatly benefit from a routine implementation of powerful experimental validity tests in applied work.     

New data collection modes for surveys: a comparative analysis of the influence of survey mode on question-wording effects

New opportunities have recently emerged in survey practice, coupled with a need to make changes, and alternative survey data collection modes such as those based on new technologies (for example, the Web and mobile phones) have become a focus of interest. Studies have considered the biases due to data collection modes and to the wording of questions in questionnaires, but they have rarely dealt with the interaction between the two phenomena. This paper presents the results of a study on the interactions between some of the best-known question-wording effects and three data collection modes: face-to-face, Web-based and SMS-based (Short Text Messaging). The results have highlighted some interesting characteristics of the various modes—innovative ones in particular—and have confirmed the existence of potential interactions between data collection modes and question-wording effects. The findings may have significant implications for the study and practice of surveys and entail that, when surveys are designed, account is taken of specific factors associated with the method used to word the questions in questionnaires.     

Housing Decisions of Young Swedish Adults

Pooled and longitudinal data for the years 1989 and 1992 were used to study the housing decisions of young Swedish adults before and after the 1991 Swedish tax reform. Although the household formation and tenure choice decisions of young adults were found to be simultaneously determined, neglecting the cross-equation correlation between these two decisions had no major impact on the estimated coefficients. Demographic factors were found to significantly affect both the household formation and tenure choice decisions. Economic factors were also found to significantly affect young adults' choice of tenure mode. This is however not the case regarding the household formation decision. Young adults' decision whether to form a household was found to be rather insensitive to economic factors. Furthermore, the impact of the relative cost of owned to rented housing was found to be significantly lower after the 1991 Swedish tax reform. One possible explanation might be the smaller variation in relative cost of owned versus rented housing between households after the 1991 Swedish tax reform. Finally, neglecting household-specific heterogeneity in the tenure choice estimation causes a downward bias in the parameter estimates.     

关于民族地区民营中小企业实施会计控制外部化的思考

寻找提高民族地区民族地区民营中小企业管理效率的途径对于民族地区的持续发展至关重要,会计控 制的效果直接影响民族地区民营中小企业的管理效率,鉴于会计控制的专业性要求及民族地区民营中小企业的现状,本文提出会计控制外部化的观点。文章从经济学需求、供给与均衡关系的角度,层层分析了会计控制外部化 的必要性和可行性,通过阐述民族地区民营中小企业存在外部化的动因及中介机构和注册会计师可以提供的专 业支持,提出各方可以借助政策支持通力合作,以优化社会资源,实现社会经济效益的最大化。     

Electronic monitoring in public organizations: evidence from US local governments

Technology use in the workplace expands the ability to monitor employees through activities such as website tracking, email scanning, and social media monitoring. Monitoring is a fundamental aspect of the relationship between organizations, employees, and stakeholders and can affect perceptions of privacy, autonomy, and trust in the workplace. However, electronic monitoring is little investigated in public management research and we have minimal knowledge about the factors that prompt public managers to adopt electronic monitoring. Focusing on small- and medium-sized US municipalities, we investigate types of electronic monitoring and how organizational, sociopolitical, and technological factors shape electronic monitoring intensity. We test our hypotheses with data from a 2014 national survey of 2,500 local managers, website coding data, and US Census data. We find that electronic monitoring, especially monitoring online activities, is a response to organizational centralization, participation of internal stakeholders, social media use, and technology concerns.