Impacts of the Arab Spring on trade in airline services

This article examines the impacts of the ‘Arab Spring’ on trade in air services between the various North African and Levant countries involved. Studies of the implications of these socio-economic changes on trade in the region are made difficult because of a paucity of good economic data and the involvement of outside countries in the trade that now takes place. The number of international airline seats available provides a partial and fairly reliable variable to examine trade patterns. The analysis looks at changes in patterns of trade in these services between 1997 and 2013.     

Improving value transfer through socio‐economic adjustments in a multicountry choice experiment of water conservation alternatives

This study tests the transferability of the nonmarket values of water conservation for domestic and environmental purposes across three south European countries and Australia applying a common choice experiment design. Different approaches are followed to test the transferability of the estimated values, aiming to minimise transfer errors for use in policy analysis, comparing both single‐ and multicountry transfers, with and without socio‐economic adjustments. Within Europe, significant differences are found between implicit prices for environmental water use, but not for domestic water use. In the Australian case study, alleviating restrictions on domestic water use has no significant value. Pooling the three European samples improves the transferability of the environmental flow values between Europe and Australia. Results show that a reduction in transfer error is achieved when controlling for unobserved and observed preference heterogeneity in the single‐ and multicountry transfers, providing additional support for the superiority of socio‐economic adjustment procedures in value transfer.     

Power laws and the market structure of tourism industry

In this article, we use both graphical and analytical methods to investigate the market structure of one of the world’s fastest growing industries. For the German and Italian datasets, we show that the size distribution of tourism industry is heavy-tailed and consistent with a power-law behavior in its upper tail. Such a behavior seems quite persistent over the time horizon covered by our study, provided that during the period 2004–2009, the shape parameter is always in the vicinity of 2.5 for Germany and 2.6 for Italy. Size of the tourism industry has been proxied by the lodging capacity of hotel establishments: hotels, boarding houses, inns, lodging houses, motels, apartment hotels, tourist villages, and tourist apartments. Data belonging to the EUROSTAT and ISTAT databases have been used for Germany and Italy, respectively. Our aim is not to provide the best fit to the data but simply to focus our attention on the right tail of the size distribution of tourism industry. Understanding the behavior of the upper tail is indeed fundamental to capture the structure of the market. This study adds a new evidence to the list of empirical phenomena for which power laws hold.     

An analysis of the knowledge base of scientific research and development business services

It is argued that the literature on scientific research and development outsourcing focuses mostly on client firms, that is, the demand side, while little is known of the characteristics of the supplying sector. The present paper tackles this gap by elaborating an exploratory analysis of this business service sector with a view to analyze the main patterns of specialization and their evolution over time. Using data on job content and skill requirements in the United States, we elaborate a knowledge taxonomy of the sector and explore how different forms of knowledge coexist and coevolve.     

What drives a donor? A machine learning-based approach for predicting responses of nonprofit direct marketing campaigns

Direct marketing campaigns are one of the main fundraising sources for nonprofit organizations and their effectiveness is crucial for the sustainability of the organizations. The response rate of these campaigns is the result of the complex interaction between several factors, such as the theme of the campaign, the month in which the campaign is launched, the history of past donations from the potential donor, as well as several other variables. This work, applied on relevant data gathered from the World Wide Fund for Nature Italian marketing department, undertakes different data mining approaches in order to predict future donors and non-donors, thus allowing for optimization in the target selection for future campaigns, reducing its overall costs. The main challenge of this research is the presence of thoroughly imbalanced classes, given the low percentage of responses per total items sent. Different techniques that tackle this problem have been applied. Their effectiveness in avoiding a biased classification, which is normally tilted in favor of the most populated class, will be highlighted. Finally, this work shows and compares the classification results obtained with the combination of sampling techniques and Decision Trees, ensemble methods, and Artificial Neural Networks. The testing approach follows a walk-forward validation procedure, which simulates a production environment and reveals the ability to accurately classify each future campaign.     

Skills scarcity and export intensity

We describe a model of trade with skills-based product differentiation and non-proportional trade costs that predicts a positive correlation between firms' export intensity, the price of their exports and the wages they pay to their workers. In equilibrium, firms that employ workers with comparatively scarcer skills export a larger proportion of their output, pay higher wages and charge higher prices. In line with empirical evidence, the model predicts that trade liberalization can cause the distribution of earnings to become more polarized, with patterns that reflect the heterogeneous effects of trade liberalization on firms' export performance.     

Tax morale,fiscal capacity,and war

This paper studies the effects of mobilization for war on the development of fiscal capacity and the values of tax compliance (tax morale). We propose a dynamic setting where governments may invest resources to improve the efficiency of the fiscal apparatus and the citizens' tax morality in order to raise the necessary revenues for the defense against a threat (external or internal), and parents optimally choose to transmit their preferences of tax compliance to children. Despite fiscal capacity and tax morale are initially substitutes, we show how a dynamic complementarity may arise in equilibrium from a more efficient transmission of the values of tax compliance in countries with high fiscal capacity, and this may explain why they tend to move together over time. Under reasonable conditions, we obtain that the effect of a higher threat of war on the steady-state level of the culture of tax compliance is negative when fiscal capacity is relatively low, and positive when the latter is large. We show cross-country evidence based on war frequency, fiscal capacity, and tax morale that is consistent with the results of our theory.     

You can't be what you can't see: The role of gender in the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship

In this paper, we investigate how the intergenerational transmission of entrepreneurship varies between sons and daughters and whether such a process depends on living in a country characterized by a high gender gap. Using the Survey of Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe data set, we find that the effect on daughters' entrepreneurial choices of having an entrepreneur as father is lower than the one on sons only in countries with a high gender gap. Moreover, it is just in countries with high gender inequality that the effect of having an entrepreneurial mother is different between sons and daughters, with the impact being positive for daughters only. We also develop an individual-level indicator of gender gap within countries that corroborates our findings, which we interpret as evidence of the presence of a role-modeling mechanism. However, we find evidence of convergence across time of the intergenerational transmission process to the gender-independent transfer typical of more gender-equal countries.