From income to consumption: measuring households partial insurance

This article computes the degree of consumption insurance with respect to transitory and permanent income shocks. The lack of income–consumption data in the US surveys forces researchers to use an empirical strategy to impute consumption. This procedure is avoided by using the Spanish Household Budget Continuous Survey, which contains true panel data on consumption and income information in the same survey. We find full insurance for transitory income shocks and partial insurance for permanent shocks for some sub-groups. For the full sample, a 10% permanent income shock induces a 4.8% permanent change in consumption, with higher insurance capacity for college, home-owner and high-wealth households. We also compute the role of durables and family income transfers as smoothing devices. The comparison of insurance level when based on true consumption data versus imputed consumption data shows that the use of imputed consumption underestimates permanent insurance.     

Determinants of International R&D Outsourcing: The Role of Trade

This paper investigates the determinants of international R&D outsourcing, in particular the role of trade. We sketch a monopolistic competition model with heterogeneous firms where outsourcing increases a firm's fixed transaction costs as well as its productivity. Financial constraints affect the decision to outsource R&D more to nonexporters than to exporters. In contrast, exporters are more sensitive to a lack of information because they have higher losses when there is technology leakage. We test these predictions using a panel database of Spanish companies. The results highlight the relevance of information in competitive markets, and the role of trade to induce companies to engage in other globalization strategies.     

Learning from the “worst behaved”: Iceland's financial crisis and the Nordic comparison

This article explores how the financial crisis in 2008 could have been partially avoided by Iceland through observing the warning signs. Iceland experienced the harshest consequences from the financial crisis in the Western world, such as the total collapse of its banking sector. This article compares the prelude of Iceland's financial crisis to the Scandinavian one, less than 20 years ago, providing an understanding of the sources of the crisis and its impact. Results show that signs of overexpansion in Iceland were clear and numerous. Iceland's structural weaknesses resemble many other badly hit countries, simply more extreme. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Tourism Demand Forecasting with Neural Network Models: Different Ways of Treating Information

This paper aims to compare the performance of three different artificial neural network techniques for tourist demand forecasting: a multi‐layer perceptron, a radial basis function and an Elman network. We find that multi‐layer perceptron and radial basis function models outperform Elman networks. We repeated the experiment assuming different topologies regarding the number of lags used for concatenation so as to evaluate the effect of the memory on the forecasting results. We find that for higher memories, the forecasting performance obtained for longer horizons improves, suggesting the importance of increasing the dimensionality for long‐term forecasting. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.