“Surfeiting,the appetite may sicken”: entrepreneurship and happiness

Do the presence and nature of entrepreneurship impact on national happiness, and are nations with happy citizens better for entrepreneurs to start new businesses? To provide tentative answers we survey the literature on entrepreneurship and subjective well-being and use various data sources to uncover the first evidence of the relationship between entrepreneurship and happiness at the country level. We find that opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship may contribute to a nation’s happiness but only to a certain point, at which the effects of happiness begin to decline. Moreover, our results suggest that a nation’s happiness affects early-stage opportunity-driven entrepreneurial activity.     

Towards a new approach for the identification of atypical accident scenarios

Proper hazard identification (HAZID) in safety reports has become progressively more difficult to achieve. Several major accidents in Europe in recent years, such as Buncefield and Toulouse, were not even considered by their site ‘Seveso-II’ Safety Case. One of the reasons is that available HAZID methodologies take no notice of apparently least likely events. Nonidentified scenarios thus constitute a latent risk, whose management is extremely complex and open ended. For this reason, the EC project iNTeg-Risk, in one of its tasks, aimed to investigate the issue of atypical scenarios and explain how they could have been identified. This study wants to describe the approach used and its immediate results, paving the way towards a new method for the identification of atypical accident scenarios. An in-depth accident analysis of some of these accidents was performed, in order to outline general features of plants in which they occurred, their causes, consequences, and lessons learned. This analysis followed a precise common scheme, which allowed a systematic approach to the problem by the experts involved. Based on the findings, failures connected to risk management and risk appraisal were identified. Three main basic issues in risk appraisal were identified: the low perception of emerging risks related to atypical accident scenarios, the lack of knowledge about related events, such as early warnings, and the incapability of current techniques in leading analysts to the identification of atypical scenarios.     

Politicians, deficits, and monetary policy in the U.S. revisited

This paper reconsiders the evidence regarding the existence of executive and congressional influences on monetary policy in the U.S. Results regarding the source of the federal deficit (cyclical or structural) provide evidence that structural deficits occurring under Democratic presidential administrations have a significant impact on money growth rates, but those occurring under their Republican counterparts may not. Although the evidence regarding cyclical deficits is statistically weaker, their more limited influence on monetary growth rates appears to be similar regardless of whether they occur under Democratic or Republican presidents. This contrasts with previous research which suggests that cyclical deficits influence monetary growth rates under Democratic administrations while structural deficits generated a similar monetary response regardless of which party held the presidency.     

On multidimensional inequality with variable distribution mean

We compare inequality of alternative populations of individuals who differ in many characteristics besides income. To do so, we introduce a new criterion for ranking multivariate distributions with different means of marginals (hereafter marginal means) and show that some conditions, relevant in the analysis of multidimensional inequality, are equivalent to the ordering we propose.     

Nationalizations,bailouts and efficiency

ABSTRACT

We develop a theoretical model in which there are public and private firms and a government. When firms become insolvent, the government can intervene with bailouts or nationalizations. The government only intervenes when the bankruptcy of a firm entails social costs. In this setting, we analyze how government interventions affect allocative and productive efficiency. Nationalizations of private firms after unprofitable investments lead to increased allocative efficiency despite private ownership. The effort level chosen by the managers and employees working for a firm is also affected by the possibility of government interventions, reducing the productive efficiency advantage of private firms.     

Market symmetry in time-changed Brownian models

In this paper we examine which Brownian subordination with drift exhibits the symmetry property introduced by Fajardo and Mordecki [2006. Quantitative Finance 6, 219–227]. We find that when the subordination results in a Lévy process, a necessary and sufficient condition for the symmetry to hold is that the drift must be equal to-1/2. Also, we derive explicit conditions to test whether the NIG, CGMY and Meixner processes are symmetric or not. Finally, we perform some tests with real financial data.     

Entrepreneurial opportunities in peripheral versus core regions in Chile

Governmental policies tend to support and boost entrepreneurship in peripheral regions in many countries. This research revives the debate about specific regional policies designed to foster local new business creation, and the entrepreneurial framework conditions needed at the regional level for emerging regions such as Latin America. We applied one of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s methodologies, the National Experts Survey, to a sample of 695 key informants in Chile at eight regions of which six are classified as peripheral. Using non-parametric statistics we compared the differences between peripheral and core regions. The main results indicate that peripherally located entrepreneurship experts perceive their regions as in a worse position than centrally located experts in terms of finance access and physical infrastructure. On the other hand, the results indicate that peripheral entrepreneurship experts detect more market dynamism in their regions and surprisingly perceive general policy and government programs as supporting entrepreneurship although the Chilean government had not promoted many regional policies.     

Quantifying the relationship between entrepreneurship and competitiveness development stages in Latin America

This research aims to quantify the importance of a country??s entrepreneurship level in terms of its competitiveness rates. Our hypothesis is that those countries entrepreneurship growth rates increase their competitiveness indicators and that this entrepreneurial improvement could be a key factor in reaching the next stage of development. We establish this relationship using a longitudinal database of Latin American countries that participated in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) and the Global Competitiveness Reports of the World Economic Forum (WEF) from 2001 to 2006. GEM and WEF construct aggregated indexes using several variables to rate each country??s entrepreneurship activity and competitiveness development. We use a discriminant analysis to identify various countries?? competitiveness subgroups and show how each country??s entrepreneurship rates have weight in different stages of competitiveness, placing a special emphasis on Latin America. Our results suggest that Latin American countries need to gain entrepreneurial dynamics and economic (and competitiveness) development by transforming their typical self-employment or low value-added new ventures for local markets into strong, innovative networked firms competing globally. Some management and policy implications are also discussed.     

Targeted Interventions in Healthcare: The Role of Facility Placement*

Adequate targeting is a primary concern in the design of any social programme that attempts to reach a specific group in society. This paper studies the targeting of a healthcare‐centre programme aimed at the poor that relies on household self‐selection into the programme at the local level. We find that a key variable in determining utilisation of the health centres is location. Households living near a centre are substantially more likely to use it than households living further away. This points to the importance of facility placement in targeting self‐selected health programmes to the poor.     

Public Choice as an Academic Enterprise

Abstract . This paper treats the development of public choice as an academic enterprise that originated at the University of Virginia and that grew to maturity at VPI. It seeks to distinguish between the particularistic and personal sources of programmatic success on the one hand, and institutional and organizational sources on the other. Only to the extent the success is institutional or organizational is there something that potentially can be duplicated through the adoption of an appropriate institutional framework. Otherwise the success is idiosyncratic, and must be attributed to the particular qualities of James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, independently of the institutional and organizational framework.