Fragmentation and East Asia's information technology trade

This article studies the growth and determinants of information technology (IT) trade in the Asia-Pacific region. We argue that the rise of IT trade must be understood within the context of increasing vertical fragmentation of production processes that has occurred over the past two decades. To evaluate this empirically, we estimate a set of pooled bilateral IT export equations for eight Asian countries, the USA and the EU, where foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows are introduced as a proxy for fragmentation. We apply a panel cointegration approach that allows for heterogeneity in short-run dynamics and in fixed effects. Consistent with production fragmentation, we find that the evolution of IT trade can be explained in part by traditional income and relative price effects but also by FDI inflows.     

Does Age Exacerbate the Gender-Wage Gap? New Method and Evidence From Germany, 1984–2014

ABSTRACT

Given theoretical premises, the gender-wage gap adjusted for individual characteristics is likely to vary according to age. This study adapts John DiNardo, Nicole M. Fortin, and Thomas Lemieux's (1996) semi-parametric technique to disentangle year, cohort, and age effects in adjusted gender-wage gaps. The study relies on a long panel of data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) covering 1984–2015. The results indicate that, in Germany, the gender-wage gap increases over a birth cohort's lifetime, including in the post-reproductive age for some birth cohorts. The results suggest that age and gender are overlapping handicaps in the labor market and call for a policy intervention.     

Determinants of private health insurance coverage among Mexican American men 2010–2013

Abstract

Background: Private health insurance (PHI) represents the largest source of insurance for Americans. Hispanic Americans have one of the lowest rates of PHI coverage. The largest group in the US Hispanic population are Mexican Americans; they account for about two in every three Hispanics. One in every three Mexican Americans aged 64 years and under did not have health insurance coverage. Mexican Americans have the most unfavorable health insurance coverage of any population group in the nation.

Objectives: The objective is to determine the factors associated with the gap in PHI coverage between Mexican American and non-Hispanic American men.

Methods: This study used the National Health Interview Surveys (2010–2013) as the sample. A non-linear Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition was run, estimating the explained and unexplained gap in PHI coverage between the groups. Several robustness tests of the model were also included.

Results: This study estimates that 44.4% of employed Mexican American men are covered by PHI compared to 79.5% of non-Hispanic American men. Nearly 60% of employed Mexican American men were found to be foreign born, 35% have an educational attainment less than a high school degree, and 40% are likely to have language barriers. Decomposition results show that income, low educational attainment, being foreign-born, and language barriers diminished the probability of private health insurance coverage for Mexican Americans, and that 10% of the gap is unexplained.

Conclusions: Most of the difference in the PHI rate between Mexican American men and non-Hispanic men is explained by observable differences in group characteristics: education, language, and immigration status. About 10% of the difference can be attributed to discrimination under the traditional interpretation of an Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition. The PHI rate gap is large and persistent for Mexican American men.     

Fiscal deficits,monetary reform and inflation stabilization in romania

Developing countries have witnessed an increase in foreign bank participation during the last decade. Using bank level data for the period 1991–2001, we examine the influence of foreign banks on the financing of small firms in Tanzania. Despite dominating the banking sector, results suggest that the financing of small firms by foreign banks is insignificant compared to domestic banks. Clearly, there is a need for a new approach to policy that will encourage significant foreign bank lending to small firms.     

What do professional forecasters actually predict?

This paper studies what professional forecasters predict. We use spectral analysis and state space modeling to decompose economic time series into trend, business cycle, and irregular components. We examine which components are captured by professional forecasters by regressing their forecasts on the estimated components extracted from both the spectral analysis and the state space model. For both decomposition methods, we find that, in the short run, the Survey of Professional Forecasters can predict almost all of the variation in the time series due to the trend and the business cycle, but that the forecasts contain little or no significant information about the variation in the irregular component.     

Career mentoring in context: A multilevel study on differentiated career mentoring and career mentoring climate

This study explores how supervisor career mentoring contributes to contemporary organizational career development, which strives to foster employees' promotability while strengthening their intention to stay. Specifically, we focus on the implications of career mentoring in team contexts. Applying a multilevel framework, we distinguish between individual‐level differentiated mentoring (i.e., an employee's mentoring perceptions as compared to those of other team members) and group‐level career mentoring climate (i.e., the average perception across all group members). In a workplace setting, we collected data from vocational job starters (N ranged from 230 to 290) and their company supervisors (N ranged from 56 to 68). We find that career mentoring climate positively relates to promotability, more so than differentiated career mentoring. Both career mentoring climate and differentiated career mentoring are positively related to the intention to stay. At the individual level, this relationship is mediated by job satisfaction. We discuss theoretical and practical implications of differentiated and group‐level mentoring.     

Recovering Hicksian Consumer Surplus within a Collective Model: Hausman's Method for the Household

The purpose of this paper is to describe the implications of the collective model of household behavior for the methods used to estimate the economic value of non-marketed environmental resources. After demonstrating how the separability restrictions inherent in the collective model allow individual preference and household income allocation choices to be distinguished, the paper demonstrates how the framework can be used to recover Hicksian consumer surplus. An algebraic example is used to illustrate how the framework can be used in valuing environmental resources.     

On an optimal consumption problem for p-integrable consumption plans

A generalization is presented of the existence results for an optimal consumption problem of Aumann and Perles [4] and Cox and Huang [10]. In addition, we present a very general optimality principle. Received: July 14, 1999; revised version: September 9, 1999