Correction to: Inside Buchanan’s Samaritan’s Dilemma: altruism,strategic courage and ethics of responsibility

Economics of Governance - The Samaritan’s Dilemma has largely been investigated, frequently by assuming that Samaritans help recipients out of altruism. Yet, Buchanan did not make any...     

The derivation of the NPV variance of a risky capital investment project with first-order autoregressive cash flows and autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic variances

In this article, the authors develop a closed-form solution for assessing the capital investment project NPV variance when cash flows obey a first-order autoregressive process. A distinction is established between static and dynamic solutions as the authors focus on the case involving partial positive dependence between cash flows. Under a Markovian process, the NPV solution is stationary in mean but not strictly in variance. Constraining the process to become fully stationary will overestimate the NPV variance. Finally, the authors show that the Markovian NPV variance closed-form solution is robust to the introduction of autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic variances complying with a GARCH(1,1) process; it will, however, have its value increased and consequently the riskiness of the capital investment project.     

Economists on Darwin's theory of social evolution and human behaviour

Abstract

This article analyses Darwin's image among economists with a specific focus on his theory of social evolution as presented in the Descent of Man (1871). We propose an analysis of the way and context in which economists refer to Darwin, mention his name and quote his writings. It then appears that Darwin is most of the time viewed as a biologist only, who never developed his own theory of social evolution. He is thus quoted as a biologist who either borrowed concepts from economists who developed a theory of social evolution, or laid the basis for biological theory of social evolution developed by others, Spencer, in particular. It is only recently that eventually the twofold dimensions—biological and social—of Darwin's general theory of evolution are considered together by bioeconomists.     

Segmenting the Belgian charitable sector: The impact of environmental factors on households' generosity

Research on charitable giving has known a renewed interest over the last years. Despite a recent evolution, the literature remains predominantly Anglo‐Saxon, and studies are consequently conducted in societies marked by a strong charitable giving culture. In that respect, donors are generally considered as isolated individuals, and the impact of social and environmental factors such as public policies, institutional specificities, and punctual events is often underestimated. Moreover, research on generosity often suffers from the absence of reliable data, free of desirability bias. Based on fiscal data of tax returns and gift tax returns provided by the official Belgian statistics bureau, this research investigates individual donating behaviors while considering the influence of environmental determinants on generosity. More specifically, we empirically assess the generosity of Belgian households over a period of 8 years marked by natural disasters, massive calls for public generosity, and changes in tax policies. Among other things, we qualify the results of previous research on the role of age and open the debate on the role of household composition as a variable for segmenting donors. Finally, we propose leads for future research in order to stimulate further academic effort on the topic.     

Systemic justice and burnout: A multilevel model

With the aim of extending organisational justice research to embrace significant and enduring aspects of the workplace context, this study examines organisational culture and human resource management (HRM) as constitutive dimensions of systemic justice and relates them to employee health. Bridging organisational justice, HRM, organisational culture, and occupational health research, we advance and test a multilevel model relating systemic justice to burnout. Data collected from 60 organisations; 89 employee groups; and 1,976 employees provide support for the hypothesised relationships between justice‐oriented culture, in terms of organisational values and group culture, and justice‐oriented HRM. In turn, justice‐oriented HRM related directly to employee burnout and indirectly through employee perceived job control and supervisor social support.     

Federalism and Conflicts over Principalship. Some Insights into the American Constitutional History

The article provides an economic interpretation of Kelsen's theory of decentralized governments. It helps to distinguish different forms of federalism and in particular the corresponding conflicts of principalship inside the governmental structure. The model is applied to the early American constitutional history and shows how opposed views of agency relationships in the constitution foreshadowed what would later end up in a civil war.     

Trade mechanism selection in markets with frictions

We endogenize the trade mechanism in a search economy with many homogeneous sellers and many heterogeneous buyers of unobservable type. We study how heterogeneity and the traders' continuation values—which are endogenous—influence the sellers' choice of trade mechanism. Sellers trade off the probability of an immediate sale against the surplus expected from it, choosing whether to trade with everyone and how quickly. In equilibrium sellers may simply target one buyer type via non-negotiable offers (price posting), or may price discriminate (haggling). We also study when haggling generates trading delays. A price setting externality arises because of a strategic complementarity in the sellers' pricing choices.     

Multicrop Production Models with Multinomial Logit Acreage Shares

The main objective of this paper is to show that the MultiNomial Logit (MNL) framework can be used for deriving simple acreage share models. More specifically we show that MNL acreage choice models can be defined as parts of consistent multicrop models. When coupled with suitably designed crop production models, e.g. a specific parameterization of the standard quadratic yield function, the parameters of these multicrop models are easily interpreted and estimated. Although MNL acreage choice models are usually derived by aggregating crop choices defined at the plot level, we show that these models can also be derived by considering a profit maximisation problem at the farm level. This provides a simple theoretical background for the Standard MNL acreage share model, as well as for simple extensions of these models: the Nested MNL acreage share models. An empirical application on French farm-level data over the period 1996–2007 investigates the empirical performances of the multicrop econometric models based on the proposed MNL framework for modelling acreage choices.