An Econometric Study of Quits Rate Trends in the United States since the Great Recession: Cyclical Movement or Structural Change?

This paper attempts to identify the possible reasons behind a drop of the quits rate in the period since the Great Recession. (As defined by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the quits rate is the number of quits during the entire month as a percent of total employment.) The paper examines several essential questions on the quits rate using econometric models and analysis: What are the crucial determinants that explain the movements in the quits rate? Is the postrecession stagnation of the quits rate a result of current cyclical macroeconomic conditions, or does it reflect a structural change? As far as we know, no recent research has attempted to model this indicator to answer these questions. Quits rate data have been systematically collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics through the Job Opening and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) only since the end of year 2000. By dividing our data set into 12 industrial categories and four regions, we are able to come up with empirical models to explain quits rate behavior over a consecutive time span and also across industries and regions. After developing our model, we are then able to examine if there is evidence of structural change using several methods.     

How Sensitive are Individual Retirement Expectations to Raising the Retirement Age?

This paper investigates the causal effects of the announcement of an increase in the statutory pension age on employee retirement expectations. In June 2010, the Dutch government signed a new pension agreement with the employer and employee organizations that entailed an increase in the statutory pension age from 65 currently to 66 in 2020 for all inhabitants born after 1954. Given the expected increase in average life expectancy, it was also decided that in 2025 the pension age would be further increased to 67 for those born after 1959. This new pension agreement received huge media coverage. Using representative matched administrative and survey data of public sector employees, we find that the proposed policy reform increased the expected retirement age by 3.6 months for employees born between 1954 and 1959 and by 10.8 months for those born after 1959. This increase is reflected in a clear shift in the retirement peak from age 65 to ages 66 and 67 for the respective treated cohorts. Men respond less strongly to the policy reform than women, but within couples we find no evidence that the retirement expectations of one spouse are affected by an increase in the statutory pension age of the other. Furthermore, we show that treatment effects are largely driven by highly educated individuals but are lower for employees whose job involves physically demanding tasks or managerial and supervisory tasks.     

Has China replaced colonial trade?

Review of World Economics - China is often suspected of taking over the extraordinary trade relationships that former colonies had within colonial empires. Besides preferential bilateral...     

Opening entrepreneurial ecosystem’s black box: the power of networks in African low-income countries

What makes one type of entrepreneurial ecosystem (EE) more conducive to entrepreneurial dynamics than another? EE research is a hot topic, and considerable progress has been made as regards its elements, network, and actors’ components. However, some scholars regret the absence of an empirical analysis of EE as a whole to understand how EE configuration operates. To introduce this perspective, we propose an unexplored inter-organizational ties analysis among all EE actors, at a country-level scale. Based on the network theory perspective, we conduct an exploratory research in five low-income African countries, using innovative research methods (the quantitative graph theory, web scraping, the fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis) to understand the organizational patterns in these EEs, and their impact on entrepreneurial outcomes. At the core of this perspective lie inter-organizational ties measures of closeness, cohesiveness, and inter-connectedness, which are key causal conditions for high entrepreneurial dynamics levels and rates in low-income countries. This research underlines the importance of EE network attributes to facilitate the easy distribution of entrepreneurial nurturing components to entrepreneurs. It also highlights the importance of ease of information and knowledge flow, as well as a strong collaborative and coopetitive environment to make an EE more conducive to entrepreneurial dynamics.

     

Non-parametric determination of real-time lag structure between two time series: the ‘optimal thermal causal path’ method

We introduce a novel non-parametric methodology to test for the dynamical time evolution of the lag–lead structure between two arbitrary time series. The method consists of constructing a distance matrix based on the matching of all sample data pairs between the two time series. Then, the lag–lead structure is searched for as the optimal path in the distance matrix landscape that minimizes the total mismatch between the two time series, and that obeys a one-to-one causal matching condition. To make the solution robust to the presence of a large amount of noise that may lead to spurious structures in the distance matrix landscape, we generalize this optimal search by introducing a fuzzy search by sampling over all possible paths, each path being weighted according to a multinomial logit or equivalently Boltzmann factor proportional to the exponential of the global mismatch of this path. We present the efficient transfer matrix method that solves the problem and test it on simple synthetic examples to demonstrate its properties and usefulness compared with the standard running-time cross-correlation method. We then apply our ‘optimal thermal causal path’ method to the question of the lag-dependence between the US stock market and the treasury bond yields and confirm our earlier results on an arrow of the stock markets preceding the Federal Reserve Funds’ adjustments, as well as the yield rates at short maturities in the period 2000–2003. Our application of this technique to inflation, inflation change, GDP growth rate and unemployment rate unearths non-trivial lag relationships: the GDP changes lead inflation especially since the 1980s, inflation changes leads GDP only in the 1980 decade, and inflation leads unemployment rates since the 1970s. In addition, our approach seems to detect multiple competing lag structures in which one can have inflation leading GDP with a certain lag time and GDP feeding back/leading inflation with another lag time.     

The impact of development of customer online banking skills on customer adviser skills

The object of this article is the development of customer banking skills as a result of using online banking and its impact on the competence of customer advisers in face‐to‐face customer contacts. The main results show that online banking enables customers to develop a range of banking skills.