PUSHING THE SISYPHEAN BOULDER? MACROECONOMETRIC TESTING IN LATIN AMERICAN COUNTRIES

What are the implications of the historically observed economic policy instability in Latin American countries (LACs) for macroeconometric testing? Two pressing restrictions on the econometrician using time-series of LACs arise: time-varying parameters and time-varying specifications. Such an instability also has profound impacts on time-series measurements of national accounts at constant prices. This, together with the “second best methodology” used in LACs for computing real GNP, implies that LACs figures on GNP growth reflect growth in gross production rather than in value added. LACs time-series for private consumption are unreliable. Crucial data set constraints in LACs further complicate the task for the econometrician.     

Land‐use change trajectories up to 2050: insights from a global agro‐economic model comparison

Changes in agricultural land use have important implications for environmental services. Previous studies of agricultural land‐use futures have been published indicating large uncertainty due to different model assumptions and methodologies. In this article we present a first comprehensive comparison of global agro‐economic models that have harmonized drivers of population, GDP, and biophysical yields. The comparison allows us to ask two research questions: (1) How much cropland will be used under different socioeconomic and climate change scenarios? (2) How can differences in model results be explained? The comparison includes four partial and six general equilibrium models that differ in how they model land supply and amount of potentially available land. We analyze results of two different socioeconomic scenarios and three climate scenarios (one with constant climate). Most models (7 out of 10) project an increase of cropland of 10–25% by 2050 compared to 2005 (under constant climate), but one model projects a decrease. Pasture land expands in some models, which increase the treat on natural vegetation further. Across all models most of the cropland expansion takes place in South America and sub‐Saharan Africa. In general, the strongest differences in model results are related to differences in the costs of land expansion, the endogenous productivity responses, and the assumptions about potential cropland.     

Impacts of increased bioenergy demand on global food markets: an AgMIP economic model intercomparison

Integrated Assessment studies have shown that meeting ambitious greenhouse gas mitigation targets will require substantial amounts of bioenergy as part of the future energy mix. In the course of the Agricultural Model Intercomparison and Improvement Project (AgMIP), five global agro‐economic models were used to analyze a future scenario with global demand for ligno‐cellulosic bioenergy rising to about 100 ExaJoule in 2050. From this exercise a tentative conclusion can be drawn that ambitious climate change mitigation need not drive up global food prices much, if the extra land required for bioenergy production is accessible or if the feedstock, for example, from forests, does not directly compete for agricultural land. Agricultural price effects across models by the year 2050 from high bioenergy demand in an ambitious mitigation scenario appear to be much smaller (+5% average across models) than from direct climate impacts on crop yields in a high‐emission scenario (+25% average across models). However, potential future scarcities of water and nutrients, policy‐induced restrictions on agricultural land expansion, as well as potential welfare losses have not been specifically looked at in this exercise.     

A review of website evaluation studies in the tourism and hospitality fields from 1996 to 2009

This paper reviews website evaluation studies in the tourism and hospitality fields published between January 1996 and September 2009. A website evaluation framework that includes evaluation by phases, evaluation by features, and evaluation by features and effectiveness is developed. The strengths and weaknesses of each method of evaluation are analyzed, and research gaps and future research directions are explored. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Violence against women, social learning, and deterrence

We develop a simple model of sexual and domestic violence. By assumption, the potential victim’s threat to report if she is victimized is not credible, which implies that the only sequential equilibrium involves violence. However, a realistic social learning process converges to a non-sequential equilibrium without violence from all nearby states if the expected punishment for offenders whose victims report to the police is sufficiently high. A policy to increase the sentences for sexual and domestic violence convictions could therefore substantially reduce such violence in the long run, even if it is powerless to make women’s threats to report credible.

A Real Case Application of Game Theoretical Concepts in a Complex Decision-Making Process: Case Study ERTMS

Group Decision and Negotiation - Engineering systems are complex, amongst others due to the interdependencies between actor and technical aspects. This complexity has consequences for the way of...     

Tenacity in design entrepreneurship: how to stimulate entrepreneurial intention

International Journal of Technology and Design Education - Using a mixed methods approach and based on the theory of planned behaviour, the present study investigated the factors determining the...     

On the economic impacts of COVID-19: A text mining literature analysis

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected everyday lives worldwide. As governments started to implement confinement and business closure measures, the economic impact was felt by entire societies immediately. The urgency of such a theme has led researchers to study the phenomenon. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to provide the state of the art on relevant dimensions and hot topics of research to understand the economic impacts of COVID-19. In this survey, we conduct a text mining analysis of 301 articles published during 2020 which analyzed such economic impacts. By defining a set of relevant dimensions grounded on existing literature, we were able to extract a set of coherent topics that aggregate the collected articles, characterized by the predominance of a few sets of dimensions. We found that the impact on “financial markets” was widely studied, especially in relation to Asia. Next, we found a more diverse range of themes analyzed in Europe, from “government measures” to “macroeconomic variables.” We also discovered that America has not received the same degree of attention, and “institutions,” “Africa,” or “other pandemics” were studied less. We anticipate that future research will proliferate focusing on several themes, from environmental issues to the effectiveness of government measures.     

The impact of monitor choice on insurer loss reserves

This paper examines the association between monitoring and earnings management by property-casualty insurers. Prior literature has evaluated the impact of auditors and actuaries on insurer reserving. We extend this work by considering the nonrandom nature of monitor assignment. We model the insurer decisions regarding choice of auditor and actuary jointly using a Heckman selection model. Consistent with prior literature, we account for potential loss reserving incentives that may confound these decisions. We find that the use of internal actuaries is significantly related to higher reserve errors, but this is reduced, but not fully offset, when the internal actuary is an officer of the insurer. We find lower reserve error for auditors from a Big N firm. However, the use of an auditor and actuary from the same Big N firm is significantly related to higher reserve errors.