Call centres and beyond: a thematic evaluation

This introduction aims to place the articles in this special edition in the context of the wider literature on call centres. The discussion is arranged around four themes: the characteristics and organisational features of call centre work, the choices and strategies that are available to manage the work, the effects of this type of work on employees and, finally, the responses and reactions of call centre staff to their work experiences. The articles selected, which are drawn from a conference sponsored by this journal, are then summarised.     

Foreign direct investment in OECD countries: a special focus in the case of Greece

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is considered as an important instrument for economic development all over the world. The aim of this paper is to examine the FDI inflows determinants for 24 OECD countries. To this end we employ annual data from 1980 to 2012 for a series of potential FDI determinants that have been identified as the most important by the relevant literature. Our empirical strategy employs both the standard fixed effects panel as well as a dynamic panel approach. The empirical findings highlight the importance of market size, trade openness, unit labor cost, schooling, taxation, gross capital formation, institutional variables, and ROA/ROE as significant FDI determinants. In the case of the dynamic panel model those FDI inflows determinants are not uniform for all country groups. Additionally, the results indicate that corporate tax rates clearly affect FDI attractiveness. This finding is robust when testing different countries subgroups. The present study has important policy implications indicating the factors that host economies should place emphasis on in order to attract FDI inflows. Policy makers should not only pay attention to the corporate tax rate level but they should also design a simple, stable and transparent taxation system that minimizes the relevant business risk.     

Financial Development and Economic Growth Nexus: A Revisionist Approach

In this piece, we highlight some of the salient issues and controversies surrounding the relationship between financial development and economic growth, from both the theoretical and the empirical fronts. We first discuss the controversies on the role of financial development in economic growth; and we then proceed to review the causal relationship between financial development and economic growth. We conclude that the relationship between financial development and economic growth is highly complex, and is dependent on a number of factors. Hence, the argument that financial development always leads to economic growth should be taken with extreme caution.     

Shapley and Scarf housing markets with consumption externalities

We introduce externalities into the classical model by Shapley and Scarf; that is, agents care about others and their preferences are defined over allocations rather than over single indivisible goods. After collecting some results about the nonexistence of several cooperative solutions, we focus on stable allocations and propose domains of preferences that can guarantee that they both exist and form a stable set à la von Neumann and Morgenstern.     

Voting on the environment: Price or ideology? Evidence from Swiss referendums

Studies on preferences for environmental quality usually posit that price and income explain most of the observed choices. Incorporating recent advances in the economics of non-selfish behavior into the traditional public choice approach, we argue that the willingness to contribute to public goods as well as social norms need to be taken into account when analyzing environmental voting outcomes. We study aggregate results of three ballot proposals in Switzerland put to vote in the year 2000 which foresaw different tax schemes on fossil energy. Our main results show that the aggregate level choice pattern is to be explained by income as well as structural attributes that make costs and benefits of the projects vary. More importantly, our results underline the importance of including variables pertaining to the notion of ideology, both in terms of statistical fit and obtaining unbiased estimates for price and income determinants.     

Does seeing more deeply into a game increase one’s chances of winning?

The substantively rational value of the games studied in this paper does not help predict subject performance in the experiment at all. An accurate model must account for the cognitive ability of the people playing the game. This paper investigates whether the variation in measured rationality bounds is correlated with the probability of winning when playing against another person in games that exceed both players’ estimated rationality bound. Does seeing deeper into a game matter when neither player can see to the end of the game? Subjects with higher measured bounds win 63 percent of the time and the larger the difference the more frequently they win.     

Long-run estimates of money demand: new evidence from East Asian countries and the presence of structural breaks

Conventionally, the money demand function is estimated using a linear regression of the logarithm of money demand on a number of variables. In this article, we aim to estimate the long-run properties of money demand specification for a number of East Asian economies and within a panel framework with the presence of structural breaks. Various country-specific coefficients are allowed to capture inter-country heterogeneities. Consistent with theoretical postulates, it is found that (a) the demand for money in the long-run positively responds to real income and inversely to the interest rate spread, inflation, the real effective exchange rate and the US real interest rate; (b) the long-run income elasticity is greater than unity; and (c) both the currency substitution and capital mobility hypotheses hold. The empirical findings in this article can provide useful policy guidelines to the East Asian countries’ central banks in their quest for price stability. If one of the primary objectives of these countries is to minimize price instability, they should avoid creating unnecessary disequilibrium in the money market, while the employment of cointegration with the presence of structural breaks clearly recommends to central banks to use the supply of money to attain price and macroeconomic stability.