Does country matter in urban organic food products consumption?

The main goal of this paper is to evaluate the possibility of finding international consumer segments in the organic food product (OFP) market. For that purpose, the power of country of residence in discriminating between urban frequent, occasional and non‐consumers of OFP was evaluated; and the most appropriate international segmentation bases for that market were studied. In order to achieve this goal, a survey of organic food consumers from Lisbon (Portuguese) and Berlin (German) was implemented through a structured questionnaire. Upon this, factorial and discriminant analysis was applied to the data. The results highlight the significance of the “Country” variable when distinguishing between groups of urban OFP consumers and non‐consumers as well as between frequent and occasional urban OFP consumers. The different levels of OFP consumption are mostly explained by the level of declared “OFP knowledge”. Therefore, we can conclude that in order to increase the consumption of OFP and dilute the effect of the country variable and to be able to work with international segments, marketers should aim to increase awareness and knowledge on these products. It is important to mention that this study was based on a non‐probabilistic sample and, consequently, generalizations of its conclusions must be made with care.     

Price and interest rate dynamics induced by multiperiod contracts

This paper suggests a mechanism by which nominal price rigidities can create a transmission mechanism for monetary shocks through relative price distortions in an economy with both spot and contract markets. The globally unique equilibrium time path of interest rates and prices following an impulse shock to the money supply is characterized. The model predicts that prices and interest rates cycle around the new steady state, with real interest rates initially falling and prices overshooting in the case of a positive shock. The volatility of spot prices and interest rates exceeds that of contract prices.     

Language–Related Differences in a Contingent Valuation Study: English versus Spanish

To test the similarity of English– and Spanish–speaking households responses to a contingent valuation survey, phone interviews were conducted in both languages regarding two forest fire prevention programs. While there were similar response rates, there were significant differences in the most frequent reasons given for refusing to pay. In the pooled logit model, the language intercept and bid interaction variables were insignificant in both programs. The likelihood ratio test of separate logit equations showed no statistical difference between English– and Spanish–speaking households responses to either program. Mean benefits reported by Spanish–speaking households were about one–third lower than English–speaking households, although the difference is not statistically significant.     

Modeling Financial Sector Joint Tail Risk in the Euro Area

We develop a novel high‐dimensional non‐Gaussian modeling framework to infer measures of conditional and joint default risk for numerous financial sector firms. The model is based on a dynamic generalized hyperbolic skewed‐t block equicorrelation copula with time‐varying volatility and dependence parameters that naturally accommodates asymmetries and heavy tails, as well as nonlinear and time‐varying default dependence. We apply a conditional law of large numbers in this setting to define joint and conditional risk measures that can be evaluated quickly and reliably. We apply the modeling framework to assess the joint risk from multiple defaults in the euro area during the 2008–2012 financial and sovereign debt crisis. We document unprecedented tail risks between 2011 and 2012, as well as their steep decline following subsequent policy actions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

EFFECTS OF FEDERAL CONSTITUTIONAL GRANTS IN BRAZILIAN MUNICIPALITIES

The objective of the present study is to verify the flypaper effect of 476 Brazilian municipalities from 2005 to 2012, considering the new variables as instruments of grants. Political alignment, alignment of the party, and coalition of the mayor with the federal president and of the state governor were considered as instruments of grants. A municipal tax autonomy index was considered as a control variable, which represents the percentage of local taxes in the municipal total revenues. The results allow concluding that the flypaper effect exists in Brazilian municipalities and is intensified by the alignment of the representatives in the same way of theoretical literature (Hamilton 1983; Hines & Thaler 1995; Inman 2008) and previous empirical studies in Brazil. Moreover, evidences of higher flypaper effect were found in municipalities with low tax autonomy.     

Who Should Abate Carbon Emissions? A Note

Economists commonly believe that failure to equalize the marginal cost of carbon abatement across countries implies a loss of global efficiency. Chichilnisky and Heal [(1994), Economic Letters 44, 444] first challenged this consensus a decade ago, demonstrating that, in general, efficiency does not require equalizing marginal abatement costs. This note revisits that important debate. It provides the missing intuition behind Chichilnisky and Heal’s surprising result, explains what critical assumption gives rise to their result, and clarifies the role a social welfare function plays in their model. The implications of Chichilnisky and Heal’s result are increasingly important, given international debate over the preferential role given to developing countries in the Kyoto Protocol and the role those countries will play in future climate negotiations.     

A systematic mapping study of process mining

This study systematically assesses the process mining scenario from 2005 to 2014. The analysis of 705 papers evidenced ‘discovery’ (71%) as the main type of process mining addressed and ‘categorical prediction’ (25%) as the main mining task solved. The most applied traditional technique is the ‘graph structure-based’ ones (38%). Specifically concerning computational intelligence and machine learning techniques, we concluded that little relevance has been given to them. The most applied are ‘evolutionary computation’ (9%) and ‘decision tree’ (6%), respectively. Process mining challenges, such as balancing among robustness, simplicity, accuracy and generalization, could benefit from a larger use of such techniques.     

Results of a cross-national structured cognitive interviewing protocol to test measures of disability

This paper describes the Washington Group project to test a short battery of disability questions developed for national censuses. The study used an unusually structured cognitive test protocol and was administered to a total of 1,290 respondents selected from convenience samples in fifteen countries in Central and South America, Asia and Africa. The test protocol consisted of the six core disability questions followed by questions designed to illustrate: (1) whether core questions were administered with relative ease; (2) how core questions were interpreted by respondents; (3) the factors considered by respondents when forming answers to core questions; and (4) the degree of consistency between responses to core questions and a set of more detailed functioning questions. Additionally, demographic and general health sections allowed for an examination of comparability, specifically, whether test questions performed consistently across all respondents, or if nationality, education, gender or socio-economic status impacted the ways in which respondents interpreted or considered each core question.     

Never Say Never? Uncovering the Never‐Unionized in the United States

This paper analyses individuals who never hold a unionized job and are never represented by a union ('never-unionized'). Using 21 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 data to track individuals starting at age 15 or 16, we show that by the time workers are 40 or 41 years old, one-third of them are never-unionized, and a convex never-unionization trajectory suggests that most of them will remain never-unionized. An analysis of the demographic and labour market characteristics of the never-unionized further suggests two types of never-unionized workers — those who lack opportunities for obtaining unionized jobs and those who lack the desire to obtain unionized jobs.     

Risk aversion under preference uncertainty

We show that if an agent is uncertain about the precise form of his utility function, his actual relative risk aversion may depend on wealth even if he knows his utility function lies in the class of constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility functions. We illustrate the consequences of this result for optimal asset allocation: poor agents that are uncertain about their risk aversion parameter invest less in risky assets than wealthy investors with identical risk aversion uncertainty.