Cultural indicators in Abu Dhabi: theoretic framework and challenges for their building

Quality & Quantity - Evidence-based decision-making in Abu Dhabi cultural sector is increasingly being influenced by the development of data generation from a coordinated statistical system....     

Health Effects of Risky Lifestyles and Adverse Working Conditions: Are Older Individuals More Penalized?

Using unusually rich panel data from Denmark, we investigate differences by age in the health implications of risky lifestyles and adverse working conditions. Accounting for time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity, overall, we find no health penalties for older workers (55 and over) compared to younger ones (18–34; 35–54). However, the former suffer more from the health consequences of risky lifestyles — especially the lack of consumption of fruit and vegetables and physical inactivity. Working conditions negatively relate with health, but fewer differences across age groups exist. Selection bias, namely the healthy worker effect, does not alter our results.     

Extralegal payments to state officials in Russia, 1750s–1830s: assessing the burden of corruption

This article uses the records of expenditures from a set of estates that belonged to the Golitsyn family to assess the level of ‘routine corruption’ in Imperial Russia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The data from these books allow us to identify individual cases of unofficial facilitation payments made by the estates and by peasant communes to district‐level officials; to delimit key types of payment situations; and to calculate the sums expended for payments by a given estate in a given year. The resulting numbers are compared to the overall volume of obligations borne by the serfs to the state and to their landlords. Our conclusion is that while the facilitation payments were ubiquitous and accompanied any interaction with the state, the volume of these ‘routine’ payments (as opposed to other forms of extraction) was quite low and they did not put a significant burden on the peasants, while at the same time securing hefty extra incomes for top district officials. Rather, by the last decades of the eighteenth century Russian Imperial officials at the district level might have switched from a tribute‐like extortion from the population at large to acquiring vast sums by collecting unofficial payments in more targeted ways.     

Intertemporal preference parameters for some European monetary union countries

In the European Monetary Union, the estimation and analysis of preference parameters in its members is of special interest because possible differences could help us to understand why a common monetary policy could have different effects on the different economies involved. In this article, we have focused our attention on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution, one of the key preference parameters in intertemporal macroeconomic models. Several studies have shown a possible underestimation of such elasticity for different countries. It is common practice to estimate the parameter using only nondurable goods and services consumption data, without referring to the flow of services generated by durable consumption. This is only admissible if the intratemporal utility can be separated among the different consumption components. Our first objective is, therefore, to test the assumption of intratemporal separability for a selection of European countries (Germany, Spain and France), and then to analyse the effect of durable consumption on the estimated values of the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of these countries, our ultimate goal. Knowledge of such elasticity will enable us to characterise how saving in these economies reacts to variations in the real interest rate.     

Labour market institutions and wage setting: evidence for OECD countries

The main channel through which labour market institutions are supposed to work in affecting unemployment is through their effects on the key parameters of the wage curve. In particular, labour market institutions may have both a direct wage push (or level) effect, i.e. change the level of the real wage for any given level of the unemployment rate and productivity, and an indirect slope effect, i.e. change the responsiveness of the real wage to the unemployment rate. The question this article addresses is whether there is any evidence that these transmission mechanisms were at work in a group of 20 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries over the period 1960 to 1999. The analysis is accomplished in two steps. Pooled Mean Group (PMG) estimates of a wage equation including unemployment, productivity and a set of wage push institutions are first obtained, allowing only a subset of institutional coefficient to be homogeneous, while leaving the unemployment and other coefficients free to differ across countries. The country specific estimates of the unemployment coefficients are then used to investigate whether and to what extent cross-country heterogeneity in the estimated wage response to unemployment is related to institutional differences. The results support the existence of significant wage push effects of union density and benefit replacement rates, and of significant slope effects of benefit replacement rates, benefit duration and employment protection. A more generous unemployment benefit structure is found to lower the wage responsiveness to unemployment, while higher employment protection, contrary to what one expects, is found to enhance it. No significant level and slope effects are found for the tax wedge and bargaining coordination.     

Family firms’ investments, uncertainty and opacity

This paper contributes to the literature on family firms in two ways. First, it focuses on a largely neglected but important issue of family firms’ investment decisions. Second, it uses a novel and rich data set about Italian private firms; this complements the literature, which typically focuses on publicly traded companies, in an important way, given that most family firms are private and relatively little information is available on their behaviour. Our results suggest that family firms’ investments are significantly more sensitive to uncertainty than nonfamily firms. We find evidence that the greater sensitivity to uncertainty is basically due to the greater opacity of family firms and to their higher risk aversion, rather than to the degree of sunk fixed capital as is typical in the literature on investment decisions.     

Face to face and telephone surveys in terms of sampling representativeness: a multidimensional analysis

This paper analyzes sample structure in a survey-based research project using both face-to-face and telephone survey techniques, at a time when the telephone survey has completely ousted the face-to-face survey; particularly in electoral studies. Multiple Correspondence Analysis is applied to the data from a political poll conducted prior to regional elections held in Spain’s Autonomous Community of Galicia in which half of the questionnaires were administered by telephone and the other half via face-to-face interview. Unlike other studies—that use a partial approach based on bivariate analysis—this one examines all the sociodemographic variables simultaneously.     

How Analysts Process Information: Technical and Financial Disclosures in the Microprocessor Industry

Abstract

Following Bradshaw (‘Analyst information processing, financial regulation, and academic research’ [2009], and Analysts' forecasts: What do we know after decades of work? [2011]), this paper examines how analysts process information, particularly in an information environment characterised by multiple and potentially complementary information sources. The setting is the microprocessor industry, one in which technical information is particularly significant and complex to digest. Based on 3837 analyst earnings-forecast revisions, issued by 134 analysts, we examine quantitatively the speed, magnitude, and information content of the reactions of individual analysts and subgroups of analysts to both periodic and timely technical disclosures, and as a complement to periodic financial disclosure. We find that analysts are much slower to react to timely technical disclosures than they are to periodic financial disclosures. We find also that technical and financial disclosures complement each other. Furthermore, we find that there is a ‘hierarchy’ of analysts in this particular industry, as evidenced through the strength of reaction to timely technical disclosures. Finally, we find that lower speed in reacting to timely technical disclosures and a higher intensity in the use of timely technical disclosure (in conjunction with periodic financial disclosure) result in greater accuracy, and that more experienced analysts tend to be less accurate. We suggest that the findings may have implications for other industries such as Bio-Tech Pharma.     

Firm heterogeneity and aggregate business services exports: Micro evidence from Belgium,France, Germany and Spain

This paper uses detailed micro data on services exports at the firm–destination–service level to analyse the role of firm heterogeneity in shaping aggregate services exports in Belgium, France, Germany and Spain from 2003 to 2007. We decompose the level and the growth of aggregate services exports into different trade margins paying special attention to firm heterogeneity within countries. We find that the weak export growth of France is at least partly due to poor performance by small exporters. By contrast, small exporters are the most dynamic contributors to the aggregate exports of Belgium, Germany and Spain. Our results highlight the importance of firm heterogeneity in understanding aggregate export growth.