Age Structure and the Personal Savings Rate in the United States, 1956-1995

Cointegration techniques are applied to time series data on the personal savings rate and the age structure of the population in the United States over the period 1956-1995. The personal savings rate is cointegrated with the ratios of minors and of retired persons to the working-age population and both of these ratios had a negative and significant impact on the personal savings rate. The results support the life-cycle hypothesis of savings.     

The ratchet,price sensitivity,and assortment plan

The performance of the USSR economy is seriously damaged by the proclivity of enterprises to restrict output and to violate their assortment plan. This note shows that when managers of multiproduct enterprises successfully restrict output, they thereby also increase the influence of output prices on their selection of the relative levels of production of the various goods. If Soviet prices are irrational in that they do not reflect relative scarcities, the increased influence of output prices on this set of managerial decisions induces socially dysfunctional decisions. Moreover, the restriction of output may cause enterprises to violate their assortment plan. The analysis focuses on the two features of the incentive system that induce managers to restrict output and abstracts away from other considerations.     

Skin color shades in advertising to ethnic audiences: The case of African Americans

Two experimental studies were conducted to examine African Americans' (AA) perceptions and attitudes toward light-skinned and dark-skinned AA female models in print advertisements. Using convenience student samples from three universities in the southeastern USA, the first study examined the perceptions and attitudes of 299 AA males toward the advertising stimuli, while the second study explored the perceptions and attitudes of 251 AA females to the same stimuli. In Study 1, consistent with marketplace, evolutionary and reinforcement theories, AA males evaluated light-skinned AA female models higher on physical attractiveness and more favorably on ad- and brand-based evaluations than dark-skinned AA female models. The exploratory results of Study 2 found that AA females evaluated dark-skinned AA female models higher on physical attractiveness than light-skinned AA female models, but no significant differences on ad- and brand-based evaluations were reported. The authors discuss the findings, limitations and directions for future research.     

The Ricardian equivalence hypothesis: evidence from Bangladesh

In this paper, a probabilistic discrete choice approach is used to examine the influence of economic and non-economic factors on the choice of medical specialty by new physicians. A two level nested logit model is estimated that relaxes the independence from irrelevant alternatives assumption, and allows for a potentially more realistic pattern of substitution across specialty choices. The results from this specification are compared to those obtained from joint and conditional logit models. The findings, which are relatively robust across models, indicate that economic incentives play an important role in the specialty choice process, in particular, expected hours worked and medical school indebtedness. Physician tastes for specialties also appear to have an important influence.     

European Banking Union and bank risk disclosure: the effects of the Single Supervisory Mechanism

Review of Quantitative Finance and Accounting - This paper provides evidence on the impact of European Banking Union (BU) and the associated Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) on the risk...