Diferencias de satisfacción con el trabajo en Europa según nivel salarial

Los datos de seis olas (1996–2001) del Panel de Hogares de la Unión Europea (PHOGUE) indican que los trabajadores que cobran salarios bajos están mucho menos contentos que los que perciben una remuneración alta en el sur de Europa, si bien no ocurre lo mismo en los países del norte. Los empleos europeos de remuneración modesta no son forzosamente malos, aunque sí lo son en algunos países donde un sector de los trabajadores sufre de lleno el doble infortunio del trabajo mediocre con salario bajo. Las diferencias nacionales obedecen a las características propias de la transacción entre flexibilidad y seguridad, por lo que es esencial impulsar políticas que mejoren la calidad del trabajo.     

Nuevas perspectivas en el ámbito de las relaciones laborales transnacionales

Las federaciones sindicales internacionales y las empresas multinacionales están concluyendo acuerdos marco internacionales para proteger sus intereses en el entorno económico de la globalización. Los autores modelizan las negociaciones al respecto y muestran que puede esperarse la conclusión de estos acuerdos cuando ambas partes son reacias al riesgo, pero el acuerdo favorecerá a la que menos lo sea. Como la globalización ha afectado más a los sindicatos que a las empresas, los acuerdos marco hasta ahora firmados ofrecen mínimas ventajas a los trabajadores; ello debería cambiar gracias a las capacidades sindicales transnacionales reforzadas y a la posibilidad de atacar la imagen de las EMN, lo cual igualará las actitudes frente al riesgo.     

Predicting technical effciency in stochastic production frontier models in the presence of misspecification: a Monte-Carlo analysis

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the sensitivity of technical efficiency measures to the choice of functional specification in stochastic production frontier models. It is shown that inappropriate functional specifications translate into a misspecification in the conditional mean of the stochastic frontier regression model. This misspecification, in turn, results in estimates of technical efficiency, confidence intervals and production elasticities being biased, even asymptotically. Monte-Carlo simulations reveal that the severity of the bias depends on the functional specification and the percentage contribution of the variance of technical inefficiency to the total variance of the composed errors.     

WHAT DO VARS TELL US ABOUT THE IMPACT OF A CREDIT SUPPLY SHOCK?

In the aftermath of the recent financial crisis, a variety of structural vector autoregression (VAR) models have been proposed to identify credit supply shocks. Using a Monte Carlo experiment, we show that the performance of these models can vary substantially, with some identification schemes producing particularly misleading results. When applied to U.S. data, the estimates from the best performing VAR models indicate, on average, that credit supply shocks that raise spreads by 10 basis points reduce GDP growth and inflation by 1% after one year. These shocks were important during the Great Recession, accounting for about half the decline in GDP growth.     

Valuing Consumer Perceptions of Olive Oil Authenticity

Nowadays, while the authenticity of agri-food products becomes a major concern for consumers, given the increasing rate of food fraud reports across the world, olive oil records the highest adulterations. The high selling price of olive oil is the main reason for conducting adulteration, which is often caused through false indications on the packaging (mislabeling). On the other hand, consumers are well aware of the alteration, and they are looking for authenticity signals during the purchase process. Authenticity, therefore, becomes an evaluation and decision-making criterion that guides consumer choices. The aim of this paper was twofold: to highlight the attributes in which Greek consumers attach great importance during the evaluation of olive oil’s authenticity, and second, through consumers’ demographic segmentation, to gain more detailed knowledge about the attributes that consumers evaluate in olive oil authenticity. CUB (Covariates in a mixture of Uniform and Binomial random variables) models are employed for the interpretation of ordinal data due to the ability of comparing and clustering the rating distributions consumers express about olive oil features, and due to the ability of detecting significant similarities and differences in consumer responses. Moreover, with the introduction of respondents’ social, demographic, and financial characteristics, CUB models allow the measurement of the influence that the consumers’ profile has upon the attributes of olive oil authenticity. The results showed that consumers attached great importance to taste, acidity, country and region of origin, olive variety, color, organic production, and regional certification in the evaluation of olive oil authenticity. In addition, secondary school graduates tend to use taste and olive variety, also indicating confidence in the authenticity of organic olive oil.     

Markets and welfare effects of food fraud

This study develops a theoretical framework of heterogeneous consumers and producers and imperfectly competitive food companies to analyse the system‐wide market and welfare effects of food fraud in the form of food adulteration and mislabelling. The results show that, while the price impacts of food fraud are product‐specific with the equilibrium prices of high‐quality and low‐quality products moving in different directions, the equilibrium quantities depend on the relative magnitude of the demand and supply effects of food fraud. Regarding the welfare effects of food fraud, they are shown to be highly asymmetric across different consumers and producers. In addition to enabling the disaggregation of the welfare effects of food fraud, the explicit consideration of agent heterogeneity, asymmetries in the probability of fraud detection and the endogeneity of the producer quality choices also enables the derivation of a key result of this study; contrary to what is traditionally believed, both low‐quality and high‐quality producers can have economic incentives to commit fraud. The group that is more likely to cheat is determined by the social attitudes towards fraudulent behaviour, the enforcement policy parameters and the relative magnitude of the demand and supply effects of food fraud. A comparison of the market effects of mislabelling and food adulteration reveals that, while the equilibrium quantity of the high‐quality product is higher in the presence of mislabelling, producers are more likely to mislabel than adulterate their products.     

Quit behavior and the role of job protection

Job protection reduces job turnover by changing firms' hiring and firing decisions. Yet the effect of job protection on workers' quit decisions and post-quit outcomes is still unknown. We present the first evidence using individual panel data from 12 European countries, which differ both in worker turnover rates and in the level of job protection. We find that workers are less likely to quit their job in countries with more job protection, and those workers who quit receive higher wages compared to stayers. This evidence can be explained by increased mobility costs associated with higher expected risk of post-quit layoff and job mismatch.     

Regulating the Market for Audit Services: A Game Theoretic Approach

We apply game theory to model how alternative mandatory audit firm rotation regimes can affect the strategic interaction between auditee and auditor firms, and analyze potential consequences on detection risk and impairment of auditor scepticism. The major results suggest that: (1) relative to an initial state with no rotation requirement but high probability for impaired auditor scepticism, imposing either short-term or long-term mandatory audit firm rotation will remove the threat to auditor scepticism and lead to higher audit fees and lower detection risk; (2) relative to long-term mandatory audit firm rotation, imposing a short-term rotation will lead to lower audit fees and higher detection risk, resulting from greater informational frictions. We further find that imposing supplementary regulatory instruments, such as increased regulatory scrutiny of the auditee and/or auditor, can be used to lower the detection risk and increase audit quality. We discuss implications of these findings for empirical research.     

Toward a political budget cycle? Unveiling long-term latent paths in Greece

Quality & Quantity - Empirical studies demonstrated the existence of political budget cycles in many countries, although mechanisms underlying such cycles remain substantially unclear. The...