Pension Type and Retirement Wealth

In this article I analyze the effect of a shift from defined-benefit pensions to defined-contribution pensions on retirement wealth. Regressions results suggest that workers with a defined-benefit pension appear to have more retirement resources than those who either have no pension or have a defined-contribution pension, although individual savings is generally insufficient. I use the Health and Retirement Survey (HRS), which contains data on individuals 51 to 61 years of age.     

Maximizing public value for subsidized non-profit firms: a mathematical economic model

In many public service industries, firms are assumed to maximize certain public goals and are not allowed to make any profits. These public service firms are financed by fixed and variable subsidies and fees-for-services paid by users. Standard economic models, such as the profit maximization and cost minimization model, are not suitable for describing the production structure and the economic behavior of these firms. Productivity and efficiency measures derived from these models therefore are not accurate. This paper derives a model that fits this type of firm and its economic context. It derives the exact mathematical relationships between public value, services delivered, (money) revenues, costs, service prices, resource prices and subsidies. In an empirical setting the model can be used as a reference to calculate productivity and efficiency scores. The usability of the model is demonstrated by an application to Social Labor Services in the Netherlands.     

Female consumers: Decision-making in brand-driven retail

This article is a theory-building exploratory study conducted to investigate how female shoppers make meaning in a branded-retail store shopping experience. This study extends research on retail consumers' decision-making and the retail shopping experience using hermeneutic phenomenology. The authors conducted in-depth interviews with respondents, who were self-identified customers of a leading intimate apparel retailer. The results suggest that consumers' retail shopping decision-making incorporates a complex set of interactive components that are brand-driven and simultaneously affect and are affected by the interaction of in-store shopping and retail setting. The findings show a rich understanding of the consumer decision-making process is achievable by including the actual in-store experience, consumers' prior contextual experiences and expectations regarding retail visits.     

Österreichs Alterssicherung: Vorbild für Deutschland?

As a result of political reforms, pension provision in Germany is the task of a multi pillar model including private and occupational schemes in addition to the public pension insurance. By contrast, the Austrian single pillar model has been developed into an encompassing public insurance system now also covering the self employed and civil servants. A comparison of the two countries shows that the Austrian system provides much higher benefits. Economic developments in Germany and Austria have been rather close in recent years. This, we argue, shows that a strong public pension insurance does not hamper a country’s economic performance.     

Ageing in Europe

For many people all over Europe, there is an understanding and an expectation that in old age they will be taken care of by the state. High social security contributions throughout the three or four decades of a working life are rationalised by the prospect of a straightforward transition out of the labour force when the time comes. While this was a reasonable expectation in decades past, a number of factors have combined to cause people all across the continent to feel very anxious about what awaits them once it is time to exit the labour force into retirement. The well-documented demographic transition of many rich European countries is a big factor, as greying populations start to weigh on the sparser younger generations, leading to increasing dependency ratios that would cause any social security system to buckle. The Great Recession has not helped matters, and the austerity measures still crippling many vulnerable European nations will not make anyone in these countries feel optimistic about their post-working lives. The following papers look at different threads of the new reality of ageing in Europe, from pension reform and prolonging the working life to more qualitative aspects such as an analysis of the quality of life of the elderly across Europe. They serve to inform and advise on an important issue that will affect everyone in Europe at some point in their lives.     

A random coefficients mixture hidden Markov model for marketing research

The hidden Markov model (HMM) provides a framework to model the time-varying effects of marketing mix variables. When employed in a panel data context, it is important to properly account for unobserved heterogeneity across individuals. We propose a new random coefficients mixture HMM (RCMHMM) that allows for flexible patterns of unobserved heterogeneity in both the state-dependent and transition parameters. The RCMHMM nests all HMMs found in the marketing literature. Results of two simulation studies demonstrate that 1) averaging across a large number of different data generating processes, the RCMHMM outperforms all its nested versions using both in-sample and out-of-sample performance and 2) the RCMHMM is more robust than its nested versions when underlying model assumptions are violated. In addition, we apply the RCMHMM to an empirical application where we examine the effectiveness of in-game promotions in increasing the short-term demand for Major League Baseball (MLB) attendance. We find that the effectiveness of four promotional categories varies over the course of the season and across teams and that the RCMHMM performs best.     

Changes in the stock of on-the-job training,race, and wage growth

This article analyzes the rate of return to on-the-job-training (OJT) investment and in particular, the different rates of return faced by whites and nonwhites. Using data from thePanel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) on tenure on a particular job and on the amount of time necessary for the average person to become fully trained on that job, I estimate the amount of training (in months) acquired by each individual on each job held. Log wage growth is then regressed on changes in the stock of training the individual held with the current firm. In one specification, changes in the stock of training are interacted with race dummies. The results suggest that the rate of return to an additional month of training is actually higher for nonwhites than for whites.     

AN ONLINE PORTFOLIO SELECTION ALGORITHM WITH REGRET LOGARITHMIC IN PRICE VARIATION

We present a novel efficient algorithm for portfolio selection which theoretically attains two desirable properties:

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