Can the Life Insurance Market Provide Evidence for a Bequest Motive?

Using U.K. microeconomic data, we analyze the empirical determinants of participation in the life insurance market. We find that term insurance demand is positively correlated with measures of bequest motives like being married, having children, and/or subjective measures of strong bequest motives. We then show that a life‐cycle model of life insurance demand, saving, and portfolio choice can rationalize quantitatively the data in the presence of a bequest motive. These findings provide evidence supporting the presence of a bequest motive.     

HOW DO EUROPEANS EVALUATE INCOME DISTRIBUTIONS? AN ASSESSMENT BASED ON HAPPINESS SURVEYS

The purpose of this paper is to measure the evaluation of income inequality by European citizens. Starting from the concept of a social welfare function defined on income distributions the paper estimates the degree and nature of inequality aversion of Europeans. It uses subjective well-being (SWB) as an empirical measure of welfare and estimates how SWB is related to average income and measures of income inequality (from an appropriate class). The estimated relationship is used to determine those inequality measures which qualify as proper representations of people's inequality aversion.     

Decision making and brand choice by older consumers

Older adults constitute a rapidly growing demographic segment, but stereotypes persist about their consumer behavior. The goal of this review was to develop a more considered understanding of age-associated changes in consumer decision making. Our theoretical model suggests that age-associated changes in cognition, affect, and goals interact to make older consumers’ decision-making processes, brand choices, and habits different from those of younger adults. We first review literature on stereotypes about the elderly and then turn to an analysis of age differences in the inputs (cognition, affect, and goals) and the outcomes (decisions, brand choices, and habits) of decision processes.     

Access to Finance and Exports – Comparable Evidence for Small and Medium Enterprises from Industry and Services in 25 European Countries

Open Economies Review - This study uses strictly comparable data for small and medium sized enterprises from industry or services in 25 European countries to test for links between credit...     

A comparison of financial duration models via density forecasts

Using density forecast evaluation techniques, we compare the predictive performance of econometric specifications that have been developed for modeling duration processes in intra-day financial markets. The model portfolio encompasses various variants of the Autoregressive Conditional Duration (ACD) model and recently proposed dynamic factor models. The evaluation is conducted on time series of trade, price and volume durations computed from transaction data of NYSE listed stocks. The results show that simpler approaches perform at least as well as more complex methods. With respect to modeling trade duration processes, standard ACD models successfully account for duration dynamics while none of the models provides an acceptable specification for the conditional duration distribution. We find that the Logarithmic ACD, if based on a flexible innovation distribution, provides a quite robust and useful framework for the modeling of price and volume duration processes.