Lost in transition?

Using data for Germany and 23 other economies in Eastern and Western Europe, this paper estimates the monetary returns to education acquired under communism more than 10 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. We show that, in the 2000s, Eastern European workers who completed their education under communism earned in the 2000s similar returns to their education as did workers belonging to the same age cohorts who studied in Western Europe. This might suggest that education under communism is still as valuable as education attained in Western Europe. However, individuals educated under communism are more likely than their Western counterparts to be unemployed, retired or disabled, and therefore to earn lower or zero returns to their education. Moreover, when we allow the returns to pre‐ and post‐secondary education to differ, we find that senior males who have attained only primary or secondary education under communism are penalized in the post‐transition Eastern European labour markets, and that those who have completed post‐secondary education under communism enjoy in these markets higher payoffs to their education than similarly educated Western European individuals who are employed in the West.     

The expected benefit as determinant of deal-prone consumers' response to sales promotions

This study proposes that the responses of more and less deal-prone consumers to price discounts and premiums depend on the promotional benefit level. At low and moderate benefit levels, low deal-prone consumers show a higher evaluation for price discounts than for premiums but if the benefit is high, deal proneness does not bias the higher evaluation of price discounts. An experimental study shows that low deal-prone consumers are concerned with obtaining price discounts. Taken together, these findings suggest that consumers more concerned with obtaining promotions do not always prefer price discounts.     

Estimates and Determinants of Armington Elasticities for the U.S. Food Industry

This paper provides estimates of elasticities of substitution between domestic and imported goods for 40 4-digit S.I.C. food manufacturing industries and explains the inter-industry differences among these coefficients in terms of industry sectoral characteristics. The results show that there is a wide range of variation among such elasticities and that the intensity of each industrys percentage of output sold to final consumers, foreign direct investment, expenditures on advertising and the existence of import quotas affect the degree of substitutability between domestic and foreign goods in the face of a relative price change.     

Systematic Variation in Willingness to Pay for Aquatic Resource Improvements and Implications for Benefit Transfer: A Meta-Analysis

Researchers are increasingly considering benefit transfer approaches that allow welfare measures to be adjusted for characteristics of the policy context. The validity and reliability of such adjustments, however, depends on the presence of systematic variation in underlying WTP. This paper describes a meta-analysis conducted to identify systematic components of WTP for aquatic resource improvements. Model results reveal systematic patterns in WTP unapparent from stated preference models considered in isolation, and suggest that observable attributes account for a substantial proportion of the variance in WTP estimates across studies. The analysis also exposes challenges faced in development, estimation, and interpretation of meta-models for benefit transfer and welfare guidance. These challenges remain salient even in cases where the statistical performance of meta-models is satisfactory.