Tareas,ocupaciones y salarios en países de la OCDE

En este artículo se investigan los vínculos entre ingresos, capital humano y tareas laborales, utilizando información internacionalmente comparable del PIAAC (OCDE) sobre competencias de adultos. Tomando el marco teórico de Autor y Handel (2013), se amplía el análisis empírico a 21 países de la OCDE. Los datos permiten tener en cuenta tanto el nivel de instrucción como una medida de las competencias cognitivas. Los resultados confirman que las tareas que implica cada ocupación tienen influencia en las diferencias salariales tanto entre ocupaciones como dentro de cada una y proporcionan pruebas empíricas del poder de predicción del modelo para un gran número de países.     

Recent Developments at DG Competition: 2018/2019

Review of Industrial Organization - The Directorate General for Competition at the European Commission enforces competition law in the areas of antitrust, merger control, and state aids. This...     

The Evolution of the Credit‐to‐GDP Ratio: An Empirical Analysis

We assess the persistence of the credit‐to‐GDP ratio over more than 130 years of data for 11 advanced economies, employing an approach based on fractional integration and allowing for nonlinearities. We show how the time series properties of the data changed around World War II (WWII). Moreover, our findings are consistent with the idea that the supply of mortgage loans has been particularly strong since WWII, in the sense that the degree of integration of the leverage ratio obtained with only these loans is larger than that of the ratio obtained with the total loans for almost all the studied countries. Nevertheless, it is generally the case that both types of ratios show a higher degree of integration after WWII than before it, though often insignificantly, and that their time trends are significant only after WWII.     

Fiscal Policies and Credit Regimes: A TVAR Approach

This work investigates how the state of credit markets affects the impact of fiscal policies. We estimate a threshold vector autoregression (TVAR) model on US quarterly data for the period 1984–2010. We employ the spread between BAA‐rated corporate bond yield and 10‐year treasury constant maturity rate as a proxy for credit conditions. We find that the response of output to fiscal policy shocks is stronger and more persistent when the economy is in the ‘tight’ credit regime. Fiscal multipliers are significantly different in the two regimes: they are abundantly and persistently higher than one when firms face increasing financing costs, whereas they are feebler and often lower than one in the ‘normal’ credit regime. The results appear to be robust to different model specifications, fiscal foresight, alternative threshold variables, different measure of variables and sample periods. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

How competition affects schools' performances: Does specification matter?

If the number of individuals is odd, majority rule is the only non-dictatorial strategy-proof social choice rule on the domain of linear orders that admit a Condorcet winner (Campbell and Kelly, 2003). This paper shows that the claim is false when the number of individuals is even, and provides a counterpart to the theorem for the even case.     

Equality of Opportunity and Equality of Outcome: Open Leagues, Closed Leagues and Competitive Balance *#We thank the Editor and an anonymous referee for helpful comments.

This paper compares conventional static measures of competitive balance with measures that take account of the mobility of teams into the upper ranks of professional leagues, which we call dynamic competitive balance. We use this measure to compare the open soccer leagues that permit entry by the process of promotion and relegation, to the closed leagues of North America where there is no automatic right of entry. We also identify the theoretical distribution of entrants to the top k ranks assuming that all teams have equal probabilities of winning. We find that the open leagues (OL) we study are less balanced, dynamically, than closed leagues (CL), and also that OL lie much further away from the theoretical distribution than CL.     

Design Inertia: Designing for Life‐Cycle Flexibility in Internet‐Based Services*

Managing innovation in rapidly moving environments, such as Internet‐based services, is a major challenge in theory and in practice. Most of the existing literature focuses on the development process as the main area in which innovation takes place. However, in environments where the pace of change of technology and market needs is extremely high, managing service innovations means not only being able to design a good service but also, more importantly, continuously redesigning and adapting the service in order to deal with frequent exogenous changes and opportunities. A high number of innovations therefore must be introduced throughout the entire life cycle of a service. This capability of introducing incremental and radical innovations during the service life cycle (i.e., to adapt a service to contextual changes and opportunities after it has been first released onto the market) at low costs and in the shortest possible time is what is defined here as service life‐cycle flexibility. This process of service adaptation and upgrading implies significant challenges that can be traced back to when a service is first conceived and designed. In fact, many decisions made during the first design process (i.e., the choice of a given database environment) involve a low reversibility rate and may reduce the possibility of taking advantage of future unpredictable opportunities, creating what is called inertia toward innovation. In other words, service life‐cycle flexibility largely depends on how a service has been first designed. This article analyzes two in‐depth case studies of Italian online newspapers and identifies five possible inertia factors that may influence service life‐cycle flexibility, namely (1) technological inertia; (2) internal organizational inertia; (3) external organizational inertia; (4) customer inertia toward changes in the service package; and (5) customer inertia toward changes in the service interaction design. These inertia factors are traced back to the service development process in order to suggest design practices that may increase the service life‐cycle flexibility.     

Moonlighting politicians

In most modern democracies elected officials can work in the private sector while appointed in parliament. We show that when the political and market sectors are not mutually exclusive, a trade-off arises between the quality of elected officials and the time they devote to political life. If high-ability citizens can keep earning money outside of parliament, they will be more likely to run for election; for the same reason, they will also be more likely to shirk once elected. These predictions are confronted with a dataset about members of the Italian Parliament from 1996 to 2006. The empirical evidence shows that bad but dedicated politicians come along with good but not fully committed politicians. There is in fact a non-negligible fraction of citizens with remarkably high pre-election income who are appointed in parliament. These citizens are those who gain relatively more from being elected in terms of outside income. At the same time, they are less committed to the parliamentary activity in terms of voting attendance.     

SEASONALITY,FORECAST EXTENSIONS AND BUSINESS CYCLE UNCERTAINTY

Abstract Seasonality is one of the most important features of economic time series. The possibility to abstract from seasonality for the assessment of economic conditions is a widely debated issue. In this paper we propose a strategy for assessing the role of seasonal adjustment (SA) on business cycle measurement. In particular, we provide a method for quantifying the contribution to the unreliability of the estimated cycles extracted by popular filters, such as Baxter and King and Hodrick–Prescott (HP). The main conclusion is that the contribution is larger around the turning points of the series and at the extremes of the sample period; moreover, it much more sizeable for highpass filters, like the HP filter, which retain to a great extent the high‐frequency fluctuations in a time series, the latter being the ones that are more affected by SA. If a bandpass component is considered, the effect has reduced size. Finally, we discuss the role of forecast extensions and the prediction of the cycle. For the time series of industrial production considered in the illustration, it is not possible to provide a reliable estimate of the cycle at the end of the sample.