Heterogeneity and the evaluation of efficiency: the case of Italian universities

This study investigates the quarterly relationship between the quantity of cigarettes sold, real disposable income per capita, and the relative price level of cigarettes in Canada. Careful attention is paid to the nonstationarity of the data and the dynamic specification of the model. It is concluded that cigarette demand is extremely insensitive to price and income changes. This is evidence of the large consumer surplus smokers enjoy and the large revenue increasing potential of a cigarette tax increase policy, as opposed to cigarette bans.     

Being Good Parents or Being Good Citizens: Dilemmas and Contradictions of Urban Families in Middle‐Class Enclaves and Mixed Neighbourhoods in Germany

In recent years, cities have become ever more attractive to middle‐class families. On the one hand, middle‐class families tend to withdraw into (often newly built) socially homogeneous middle‐class neighbourhoods. On the other hand, they are also known to move into inner‐city and socially mixed areas, thus triggering processes of gentrification. Academic literature has often denounced these housing choices as being either ‘separatist’ or ‘revanchist’, more broadly categorized as strategies of ‘middle‐class disaffiliation’. Although there is a grain of truth in these interpretations, the reality is certainly more complicated. In our research on middle‐class parents’ housing and neighbourhood choices as well as their patterns of neighbourhood use, carried out in each of the two types of residential area mentioned above, we have only very rarely found an explicit desire to draw boundaries that exclude those ‘beneath’ them. We rather argue that the housing choices and neighbourhood‐related activities of middle‐class family households are heavily influenced by the specific dilemmas the interviewees face as (working) urban parents. While a significant number of respondents worry about the social sustainability, justice and cohesion of urban society, they are also concerned about the future prospects of their children. Many find it difficult to reconcile these conflicting normative demands under the prevailing circumstances.     

Making the ‘Invisible’ Visible: Redevelopment‐induced Displacement of Migrants in Shenzhen,China

Gentrification in China is intertwined with urban redevelopment, which causes the large‐scale displacement of rural–urban migrants from ‘villages in the city’ (ViCs). Because of the informality of ViCs, migrant renters have very insecure tenancy and during redevelopment they are treated as a negligible (‘invisible’) social group. As they are very difficult to locate after displacement, they are also literally invisible to researchers. To make the invisible visible, this study traced a sample of displaced migrants from Huangbeiling village in Shenzhen. The focus was on the displacement process and on identifying the consequences for the displaced. We found various forms of displacement during the redevelopment process. Nearby ViCs were prioritized by displaced migrants to minimize as much utility loss as possible. However, they generally suffer from decreased proximity, increased living costs, and the loss of social networks and job opportunities. Remarkably, some choose to return to the gentrifying village, enduring displacement in situ caused by increasing rents, drastic physical neighbourhood changes and declining liveability, in exchange for retaining their original social and economic networks. Large‐scale urban redevelopment is causing the rapid shrinkage of informal housing. Recognizing and addressing the housing needs of this impoverished social group is a matter of urgency.     

Multinationals and Training: Some Evidence from Irish Manufacturing Industries

This paper sets out to analyse the effect of plant and sectoral level characteristics on the provision of training to employees using plant level data for Irish manufacturing. There is no clear evidence that foreign owned plants are more likely to provide training. By contrast, we find that they spend less than domestic plants on training, ceteris paribus. There is also no evidence that plants that receive training grants are more likely to provide training. This may be likely to reflect the targeting of training grants on plants that are otherwise unlikely to provide much training. We do, however, find that training activity in the sector, either by other foreign or domestic plants, has a positive effect on plant level training activity, at least for domestic owned plants.     

Spillover Dynamics of Central Bank Interventions

Abstract. Central banks frequently intervene in foreign exchange markets to reduce volatility or to correct misalignments. Such operations may be successful if they drive away destabilizing speculators. However, the speculators do not simply vanish but may reappear on other foreign exchange markets. Using a model in which traders are able to switch between foreign exchange markets, we demonstrate that while a central bank indeed has several means at hand to stabilize a specific market, the variability of the other markets depends on how the interventions are implemented.     

Are There Differential Effects of Price and Policy on College Students’Drinking Intensity?

This article investigates the impact of campus bans on alcohol use and the price of alcohol on college students'drinking intensity. The impact of a campus ban on drinking appears to depend on the ability of students to substitute off-campus access to alcohol for on-campus access. Where few off-campus alternatives exist, campus bans reduce the odds that a student becomes a heavy drinker but have no impact on the odds of transitioning from abstainer to drinker. Where off-campus alternatives are more plentiful, campus bans are less effective. Increasing the price of alcohol appears to be equally effective at reducing the likelihood of drinking and heavy drinking. (JEL)     

Strongly stable networks

We analyze the formation of networks among individuals. In particular, we examine the existence of networks that are stable against changes in links by any coalition of individuals. We show that to investigate the existence of such strongly stable networks one can restrict focus on a component-wise egalitarian allocation of value. We show that when such strongly stable networks exist they coincide with the set of efficient networks (those maximizing the total productive value). We show that the existence of strongly stable networks is equivalent to core existence in a derived cooperative game and use that result to characterize the class of value functions for which there exist strongly stable networks via a “top convexity” condition on the value function on networks. We also consider a variation on strong stability where players can make side payments, and examine situations where value functions may be non-anonymous—depending on player labels.     

Parallel Trade and its Ambiguous Effects on Global Welfare

The regulation of parallel trade is a fiercely debated issue in the global trading system. This paper investigates the welfare effects of parallel trade freedom for different levels of trade costs and market size. It is found that parallel trade freedom has a positive effect on global welfare if countries are sufficiently heterogeneous in terms of market size and trade costs are sufficiently low. Contrary to intuition, this result even holds in a situation where parallel trade freedom implies the closure of the smaller market. If, however, countries are virtually homogenous in terms of market size, parallel trade freedom may be detrimental to global welfare for specific levels of trade costs.