An analysis of risk factors associated with road crash severities in Namibia

Abstract

Road crash is a leading cause of death and disabilities in Namibia and other developing countries. Based on recent trends, the World Health Organization indicated that progress to realize Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) target 3.6 – which calls for a 50% reduction in the number of road traffic deaths by 2020 – remains far from sufficient. To contribute to efforts in reducing road fatalities in Namibia, this study examined risk factors associated with the severity of crashes recorded in the country. Mixed logit modelling methodology was adopted to address the problem of unobserved heterogeneity in injury severity analysis. Model estimation results reveal that collision with pedestrians, head-on collisions, ran-off road collisions and crashes involving high occupancy passenger vehicles were more likely to result in fatalities and severe injuries. The findings and recommendations of this study are expected to enhance countermeasure implementation to reduce road crashes in Namibia.     

LATE CAREER JOB LOSS AND THE DECISION TO RETIRE

This article provides an empirical analysis of the effect of involuntary job loss on the lifetime income and labor supply of older workers. I develop and estimate a dynamic programming model of retirement with savings, costly job search, and exogenous layoffs. The average cost of job loss is equivalent to one year of predisplacement earnings, 70% due to the wage reduction and 30% to the search frictions. Displaced workers on average retire 14 months earlier. Workers who approached retirement during the Great Recession will work approximately five months longer in response to the contemporaneous financial and labor market shocks.     

Should Mobile Marketers Collect Data Other Than Geo‐Location?*

We take today's mobile marketing data landscape as a starting point and consider a duopoly model of third‐degree price discrimination in which firms can complement geo‐location information with data on consumer flexibility of varying quality. We show that, depending on consumer heterogeneity, higher‐quality flexibility data affect profits according to three different patterns. In equilibrium, both firms tend to acquire data if the data are of high quality, while only one acquires data if the data quality is low. Firms are likely to gain from additional data if consumers have similar preferences and/or when data are precise. Although social welfare (weakly) improves, consumers can be harmed.     

Property rights in land and output growth in Russia

This paper tests whether the implementation of a key market‐oriented reform in post‐Soviet Russia, property rights in land, proxied by the percent of privatized land by region, affected the pace of sub‐national economic growth during two unprecedented expansion periods: 2001–2008 and 2010–2014. Individuals gained the Constitutional right to own land in 1993, but implementation was stalled. The pace of land privatization can be explained by arguably exogenous factors such as distance to Moscow, as well as climate and also regional political culture, proxied by concentration of votes in the 2004 presidential election. We show that this rate of land privatization in Russia's regions was significantly associated with output growth in 2010–2014, confirming the policy importance of this measure for developing economies. Regions where private holdings expanded most rapidly with the enforcement of property rights in land, gained a competitive advantage in the growth process through increased investment in fixed assets and private consumption.     

Takeover duration and negotiation process

We study the relations between takeover negotiations duration, competition and learning, focusing on the private phase of bidder-initiated transactions. While the negotiation goes on, both parties learn about true deal synergies. At any moment, rival bidders can show up and compete for the target. Using a discrete-time finite-horizon dynamic programming approach, we derive the equilibrium relations between the negotiation duration, the pressure of potential competition and the learning process. Next, we perform a calibration exercise on a large sample of merger negotiations with hand-collected data from the Securities and Exchange Commission filings. Our results provide evidence of a very competitive M&A (Mergers and acquisitions) market.     

A multi-country,multi-sector replication challenge to the validity of the cultural tightness-looseness measure

Asia Pacific Journal of Management - In this study, we assess the internal and external validity of Gelfand et al.’s (2011) recently developed measure of cultural tightness-looseness (CTL)....     

Assessing the greenness of environmental advertising claims made by multinational industrial firms

Growing skepticism about green advertisements calls for a thorough investigation of the environmental claims made by firms. This is particularly important in the context of industrial and international markets, where research on the subject is virtually non-existent. By employing legitimacy theory, this article develops several research hypotheses linking various dimensions of environmental claims made in green advertisements (i.e., focal points, evaluation areas, leverage aspects, driving forces) with advertising greenness (i.e., shallow, moderate, deep). It then tests these hypotheses with data obtained from a content analysis of 383 green magazine advertisements by multinational firms producing industrial goods. In accord with legitimacy theory, the results indicate that, the stronger the greenness of an advertisement: (a) the greater the use of focal points relating to a product, processes, image, and facts; (b) the more specific, strong, substantive, and acceptable are the issues raised; (c) the higher the employment of rational, emotional, and moral points to leverage environmental matters; and (d) the sharper the driving forces relating to the planet and its flora, fauna, and human entities. Several important conclusions, managerial implications, and directions for future research are derived from these findings.