Demand for environmentally friendly vehicles: A review and new evidence

Although the need for more environmentally friendly vehicles was recognized some decades ago, this new market has not yet established itself. Consumer behavior needs to be studied to ascertain when people will decide to purchase hybrid or electric vehicles rather than conventional ones. An in-depth review of the state-of-the-art has identified existing deficiencies and these are addressed in this paper, proposing a new approach that is applied to the case of Santander in Spain. Emphasis is placed on the role of citizens in researching the local market and their requirements with respect to such vehicles; our model assumes variability in user preferences, an utmost requirement as concluded from the literature review. Results suggest that the highest demand for cleaner vehicles would be achieved in two ways: firstly, by penalizing conventional vehicles in terms of costs/km; secondly, by providing incentives directed at lowering the purchasing price of hybrid and electric vehicles. Finally, as demand becomes more elastic, the preferred strategy should initially focus on hybrid vehicles.     

Comparison of four common data collection techniques to elicit preferences

We compare four common data collection techniques to elicit preferences: the rating of items, the ranking of items, the partitioning of a given amount of points among items, and a reduced form of the technique for comparing items in pairs. University students were randomly assigned a questionnaire employing one of the four techniques. All questionnaires incorporated the same collection of items. The data collected with the four techniques were converted into analogous preference matrices, and analyzed with the Bradley–Terry model. The techniques were evaluated with respect to the fit to the model, the precision and reliability of the item estimates, and the consistency among the produced item sequences. The rating, ranking and budget partitioning techniques performed similarly, whereas the reduced pair comparisons technique performed a little worse. The item sequence produced by the rating technique was very close to the sequence obtained averaging over the three other techniques.     

Hospital Mergers with Regulated Prices

We study the effects of a hospital merger in a spatial competition framework where semi‐altruistic hospitals choose quality and cost‐containment effort. Whereas a merger always leads to higher average cost efficiency, the effect on quality provision depends on the strategic nature of quality competition, which in turn depends on the degree of altruism and the effectiveness of cost‐containment effort. If qualities are strategic complements, then a merger leads to lower quality for all hospitals. If qualities are strategic substitutes, then a merger leads to higher quality for at least one hospital, and might also yield higher average quality provision and increased patient utility.     

Disability Insurance: Theoretical Trade-Offs and Empirical Evidence*

Disability insurance provides protection against health shocks that limit the ability to work. In most countries, these programmes are large and growing, both in expenditure and in number of recipients. We discuss the traditional trade-off between insurance and incentives in providing this insurance, with a focus on the US and UK experiences. There is substantial evidence on the extent of the labour supply incentive costs of disability insurance, but there has been a lack of evidence on the insurance value until very recently. Further, evidence on errors in the disability insurance process suggests false rejections of genuine claimants is a substantial problem, and these are more serious than false acceptances of healthy applicants. We provide a life-cycle framework for understanding the trade-offs and to evaluate the welfare implications of policy reforms. We argue that reforms should be focused on reducing false rejections and supporting labour market attachment. The difficulty in considering reform is that the design of disability insurance has many aspects that interact and impact on outcomes.     

On Lipschitz continuity of policy functions in continuous-time optimal growth models

Summary. This paper proves the C ^1,1 differentiability of the value function for continuous time concave dynamic optimization problems, under the assumption that the instantaneous utility is C ^1,1 and the initial segment of optimal solutions is interior. From this result, the Lipschitz dependence of optimal solutions on initial data and the Lipschitz continuity of the policy function are derived, by adding an assumption of strong concavity of the integrand. Received: July 29, 1996; revised version: November 25, 1997     

Immigration,socio-economic conditions and crime: a cross-sectional versus cross-sectional time-series perspective

This study purpose is to verify if there is an association between foreign immigration and crime. In doing this, the study investigates also some satellite aspects revolving around this possible association: the range of offences affected by immigration, the relationship between immigrant and native crime, and whether the immigration impact on crime is direct or indirect. The present study has addressed these issues by both a cross-sectional and a longitudinal analysis, the latter including an instrument. The study is based on data of the Italian provinces. Italy represents a critical case for studying the migration–crime relationship, because in this country the rise in foreign immigration has been sudden and its pace feverish. The cross-sectional analysis findings show that crime intensities are affected by time-invariant factors and marginally by immigration. On the contrary, the longitudinal analysis shows that variations in immigration had a positive impact on both the most serious and the most common offences, on property crimes as well as on crimes of violence. There is no evidence of indirect effects of immigration on crime or of a link with native crime. In contrast to previous literature regarding the U.S., Canada, and Australia, these results suggest that a spiralling immigration can affect crime. In terms of methods, these findings show that the standard synchronic analysis models can be biased by non-observed factors and that therefore cross-sectional time-series models can offer significant advantages.     

The Effects of Extrinsic Cues on Olive Oil Price in Brazil

Over the past two decades, world olive oil consumption registered an impressive growth. Although olive oil consumption remains concentrated in the main producer countries surrounding the Mediterranean Sea (“traditional” markets), it is also growing rapidly in many other countries all over the world, where olive oil is still largely perceived as a novelty food (“nontraditional” markets). This study focuses on the Brazilian market of olive oil, which is one of the most important nontraditional markets in terms of both its dimension and growth rates. A hedonic price model has been used to evaluate whether, and to what extent, extrinsic cues impact on the retail price of olive oil. Data were collected via direct observation of several e-shops where Brazilian consumers could purchase olive oil. Results show that the retail price of olive oil is highly influenced by extrinsic cues such as branding, labeling, and packaging.     

HOMEOSTATIC VERSUS ACTIVE POLICIES IN A NONLINEAR OPTIMAL CONTROL PROBLEM

Perfect foresight dynamics require local determinateness and, consequently, sensitivity to initial conditions. If such dynamics have to be computable, exact integration is needed. We study a non-linear optimal control problem which cannot be integrated exactly; we also introduce some simpler, implementable policy rules and compare their relative performance. Our results make out a case against perfect foresight as a positive theory of expectations formation and as a useful modelling tool.     

How does public service motivation affect teacher self-reported performance in an education system? Evidence from an empirical analysis in Italy

Quality & Quantity - This paper deals with self-reported teacher performance, and the starting point is the relationship between teacher performance and the main determining factor, public...     

Density Nowcasts and Model Combination: Nowcasting Euro‐Area GDP Growth over the 2008–09 Recession*

Combined density nowcasts for quarterly Euro‐area GDP growth are produced based on the real‐time performance of component models. Components are distinguished by their use of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’, aggregate and disaggregate, indicators. We consider the accuracy of the density nowcasts as within‐quarter indicator data accumulate. We find that the relative utility of ‘soft’ indicators surged during the recession. But as this instability was hard to detect in real‐time it helps, when producing density nowcasts unknowing any within‐quarter ‘hard’ data, to weight the different indicators equally. On receipt of ‘hard’ data for the second month in the quarter better calibrated densities are obtained by giving a higher weight in the combination to ‘hard’ indicators.