A COMPARISON OF LIVING STANDARDS ACROSS THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

We use an expected utility model to examine how living standards, or welfare, vary across the United States and how each state's welfare has evolved over time, accounting for cross-state variations in mortality, consumption, education, leisure, and inequality. We find considerable cross-state heterogeneity in welfare levels. This is robust to allowing for endogenous interstate migration and to computing welfare conditional on education, gender, and race. Although states experienced heterogeneous welfare growth rates between 1999 and 2015 (1.68–3.73% per year), there is no evidence of convergence in welfare levels, including during the subperiods preceding and following the Great Recession.     

Antecedents and outcomes of personal mastery: cross-country evidence in Higher Education

This paper contributes to our understanding of personal mastery by providing fresh insights from a cross-national study in Higher Education (HE). It presents findings from a rich sample of informants in two well-established universities in the UK and Vietnam, and develops a framework that illustrates the antecedents and outcomes of personal mastery in the two cultures. The multi-level analysis performed provides valuable insights that extend our current understanding of personal mastery beyond the individual level as it is traditionally theorized. Instead, we are able to show that a number of contextual conditions at the organizational, industry and the national culture that may also have a bearing on the way personal mastery is cultivated. By contributing a richer account of the multifaceted nature of personal mastery, the paper draws attention to a range of implications for both future research and practice. In particular, it invites practitioners in HE to apply the theories they develop in practice.     

Gender and Poverty Risk in Europe

This study advances research on the structural dimension in the predominantly individual-oriented field of poverty studies by evaluating to what extent cross-national differences in population and structural characteristics can explain the differences in poverty outcomes by gender. To facilitate an approach that integrates individual and structural context dimensions, the paper takes advantage of multilevel techniques to test gender differences in the risk of being poor, entering into poverty, and exiting from poverty among seventeen European countries. The analysis covers single-adult households, drawing on data from the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) for the years 2007–8. The study concludes that structural effects, such as welfare state policies, labor market characteristics, level of inequality, and the level of women's empowerment in the country, seem to be more relevant than individual effects in explaining differences in the gender poverty gap among countries.     

Family influence on young adult's brand evaluation. An empirical analysis focused on parent–children influence in three consumer packaged goods

Throughout the years, there has been debate in the consumer research literature on how families influence their children's attitudes to brands. This paper analyses parent–young adult children influence on the creation of brand associations, perceived quality and willingness to pay a price premium. In order to fulfil these goals, an empirical analysis using a sample of 349 young adults has been conducted. Relationships have been analysed by means of structural equations models in three consumer packaged goods, and results obtained allow us to conclude that the information provided by parents may foster the creation of brand associations, it may favour young adults' positive perception of the brand's quality, and finally, it may lead young adults to be willing to pay a price premium for the brand.     

Bayesian Value-at-Risk with product partition models

In this paper we propose a novel Bayesian methodology for Value-at-Risk computation based on parametric Product Partition Models. Value-at-Risk is a standard tool for measuring and controlling the market risk of an asset or portfolio, and is also required for regulatory purposes. Its popularity is partly due to the fact that it is an easily understood measure of risk. The use of Product Partition Models allows us to remain in a Normal setting even in the presence of outlying points, and to obtain a closed-form expression for Value-at-Risk computation. We present and compare two different scenarios: a product partition structure on the vector of means and a product partition structure on the vector of variances. We apply our methodology to an Italian stock market data set from Mib30. The numerical results clearly show that Product Partition Models can be successfully exploited in order to quantify market risk exposure. The obtained Value-at-Risk estimates are in full agreement with Maximum Likelihood approaches, but our methodology provides richer information about the clustering structure of the data and the presence of outlying points.     

A copula-VAR-X approach for industrial production modelling and forecasting

World economies, and especially European ones, have become strongly interconnected in the last decade and a joint modelling is required. We propose here the use of copulae to build flexible multivariate distributions, since they allow for a rich dependence structure and more flexible marginal distributions that better fit the features of empirical data, such as leptokurtosis. We use our approach to forecast industrial production series in the core European Monetary Union (EMU) countries and we provide evidence that the copula-Vector Autoregression (VAR) model outperforms or at worst compares similarly to normal VAR models, keeping the same computational tractability of the latter approach.     

Pigs in Space: Modeling the Spatial Structure of Hog Production in Traditional and Nontraditional Production Regions

We posit a spatially explicit, county-level model of the hog production sector and estimate how numerous firm-specific, locality-specific, and spatial agglomeration factors affect the location, movement, and intensity of hog production within 15 key hog production states. Spatial agglomeration, urban encroachment, input availability, firm productivity, local economy, slaughter access, and regulatory stringency variables affect the sample regions' spatial organization. Analyses suggest that western states in the sample may shape hog production levels by wielding traditional business recruitment and retention tools (e.g., tax rates, environmental stringency) while Corn Belt states may shape hog production via nontraditional tools (e.g., land use controls).     

Evaluating the Relative Efficacy of the Marketing Function in the Construction Complex of Ukraine

The break up of the USSR pushed 15 constituent states into a transition phase from a regulated economy to a free market style one. Partially, this involved the wholesale importation of a variety of theories, strategies, and operational plans. This paper seeks to examine the efficiency of the use of the marketing communications mix in medium and large firms in the Ukraine’s construction complex during the transition period to a market oriented economy. In order to do so, a survey of the most significant, privately owned firms in the industry was conducted. A variety of quantitative measures were employed, including econometric estimates and certain elasticity coefficients that allowed us to asses existing tendencies in the industry, identify problems, and to make tentative recommendations.     

Factors affecting corporate environmental strategy in Spanish industrial firms

During the last 30 years, environmental issues have become very important for governments, consumers and companies. Firms, aware of their environmental responsibilities, have started to show an important commitment to society and the natural environment, developing environmentally friendly strategies. However, the factors that determine the choice of environmental strategies are still unclear. They range from ethical motivations to social, legislative and competitive factors. This study analyses the main antecedents that influence firms' ecological behaviour, distinguishing between environmental orientation and environmental strategies. The hypotheses proposed in this study are analysed by means of a structural equation model on a sample of 235 industrial firms. The results reveal that competitive motivations and management commitment are the most important factors explaining why firms incorporate environmental issues into their strategic planning process. Moreover, management commitment is a critical factor for firms because managers' perception about customers' ecological concern directly influences firms' environmental behaviour. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.