An examination of preferences and evaluations of visitors based on environmental attitudes: Biscayne Bay national park

This study links visitor preferences to environmental attitudes in an effort to assist national park managers reconcile the public demand for both protection of the natural environment and its utilisation. Support was found for the hypothesis that visitors with ecocentric views will prefer that national park resources be allocated to protect and preserve the environment while those with anthropocentric inclinations will favour transforming the environment. The results suggest that park resource managers may need to consider alternative management practices for the two groups as well as monitor changes in environmental attitudes that will impact preferences for park management practices.     

Penalized maximum likelihood estimation of logit-based early warning systems

Panel logit models have proved to be simple and effective tools to build early warning systems (ews) for financial crises. But because crises are rare events, the estimation of ews does not usually account for country-specific fixed effects, so as to avoid losing all the information relative to countries that never face a crisis. I propose using a penalized maximum likelihood estimator for fixed-effects logit-based ews where all the observations are retained. I show that including country effects, while preserving the entire sample, improves the predictive performance of ews, both in simulation and out of sample, with respect to the pooled, random-effects and standard fixed-effects models.     

Equestrian tourism: animal agency observed

There is limited scholarship engaging with equestrian tourism even though this segment of the tourism industry has recently undergone phenomenal growth in both supply and demand. This article will focus on the core element of equestrian tourism, travel on horseback, and will explore the role of equine animal agency in the co-creation of tourism experiences and tourism places. Employing qualitative methods, it will demonstrate how horses assert themselves as subjective agents and active players in the communities that tour groups form, assuming a variety of roles that effect their riders' self-actualization and psychological enrichment. At the same time, they assume an active role in determining their own fate by contributing to a climate of animal ethics specific to equestrian tourism. A predominantly female clientele looks to their equine partners for companionship and inspiration and reciprocates by demanding high standards of animal welfare and horsemanship. On the supply side, equestrian ground operators have established themselves as lifestyle entrepreneurs who place their own and their guests' passion for horses and lifestyle values ahead of business savvy and economic efficiency.     

Equal Pay for Equal Task: Assessing Heterogeneous Returns to Tasks across Genders

We inspect the heterogeneous association between tasks and wages across genders using individual-level data on U.S. workers. Our findings suggest that women receive a higher wage premium when engaged in cognitive tasks and experience more contained wage losses when performing manual activities. However, a wage penalty characterizes women engaged in highly social intensive jobs. Further inspection reveals that this result is especially driven by the teamwork component of social activities.     

A web-based multi-agent decision support system for a city-oriented management of cruise arrivals

Cruise tourism represents a strategic sector for the economic growth of several countries, impacting on different direct and indirect markets. The arrival of cruises in a city represents an unmissable opportunity to increment its tourist market penetration. Nevertheless, the management of an unforeseen number of passengers that need to visit a city in a short time may also have a negative impact, so reducing the expected benefits. This is mainly due to the difficulty of taking the right decisions when organizing the dispatching of passengers in different city areas since these decisions depend on several conditions that can also dynamically occur, and may have an impact on different city sectors. Here, a decision support system is proposed to help involved stakeholders to make decisions to plan passengers' transportation in the city and also to evaluate the consequences for the city if the plans are really implemented. The system is designed according to the multi-agent paradigm, so allowing one to easily manage the necessary coordination among different entities and data sources that are usually distributed and need to cooperate to provide useful suggestions. In addition, a prototype of a web-based application is provided to end users, so that it can run on heterogeneous platforms, and it can be easily accessed by different users from different devices, as it is the case for the considered application domain.     

Interest rate pass-through,monetary policy rules and macroeconomic stability

In this paper we analyze equilibrium determinacy in a sticky price model in which the pass-through from policy rates to retail interest rates is sluggish and potentially incomplete. In addition, we empirically characterize and compare the interest rate pass-through process in the euro area and the U.S. We find that if the pass-through is incomplete in the long run, the standard Taylor principle is insufficient to guarantee equilibrium determinacy. Our empirical analysis indicates that this result might be particularly relevant for bank-based financial systems as for instance that in the euro area.     

Ex ante margin squeeze tests in the telecommunications industry: What is a reasonably efficient operator?

This paper studies the implementation of Reasonably Efficient Operator margin squeeze tests by National Regulatory Authorities in European telecommunications markets. It provides a theoretical framework which shows how regulatory authorities deal with the asymmetries between entrants and incumbents by adjusting the Equally Efficient Operator margin squeeze test used in competition policy. Using this framework, this paper presents a benchmark of implementation choices by inspecting authorities' guidelines, market analyses, and decisions. Whereas some implementation choices are very similar across authorities' decisions, some others display a strong heterogeneity.     

Comparison of farmers’ mental models of the present and the future: A case study of pesticide use

Farmers in developing countries will in the future be confronted with major changes. The ability to cope with these challenges rests on their capability to relate future problems to current behavior. Our approach investigates this capability and consists in comparing mental models of the present and future. The approach moreover enables us to explore whether and how farmers are able to imagine a future differing from the perceived present.Data from previous studies investigating present and future pesticide application were used. In the datasets the mental models of farmers’ livelihood were structured into livelihood capitals (human, health, natural and financial capital), causal relations among the livelihood capitals were derived, and present and future causal relations were compared.The comparison of these causal relations led to six cases, each representing a different degree of dependence of future on present causal relations. The dependence was found to vary among farmers and analyzed livelihood capital. Three types of farmers with differing dependence patterns were identified.The differences found lead to new insights for policy recommendations, depending on farmers focus in their causal relations. We therefore expect that interventions focusing either more on the causes or effects of causal relations will result in a better uptake of knowledge by farmers.