Directed technical change and environmental quality

Portuguese Economic Journal - We propose a directed technical change model with two sectors, clean and dirty, to analyze the impact of the degree of substitutability between sectors and the degree...     

Risk perceptions,preferences and management strategies: evidence from a case study using German livestock farmers

We analyze the factors affecting farmers’ choice accounting for farm, farmer, and household characteristics as well as elicited risk perception and risk preferences. We consider three alternative hypothetical methods for assessing risk preferences to test the stability and behavioral validity of them. Our case study focuses on livestock farmers in the German region North Rhine-Westphalia. We find that risk preferences are context depending, i.e. differ across different fields of farm-level decision-making. Furthermore, our analysis shows that risk-averse farmers are more likely to prioritize on-farm risk management strategies over off-farm strategies. Moreover, higher risk perception, age, subjective numeracy, farm succession, farm size, and the proportion of rented land show a significant impact on farmers’ risk behavior     

How good can heuristic-based forecasts be? A comparative performance of econometric and heuristic models for UK and US asset returns

This paper systematically investigates the sources of differential out-of-sample predictive accuracy of heuristic frameworks based on internet search frequencies and a large set of econometric models. The volume of internet searches helps gauge the degree of investors’ time-varying interest in specific assets. We use a wide range of state-of-the-art models, both of linear and nonlinear type (regime-switching predictive regressions, threshold autoregressive, smooth transition autoregressive), extended to capture conditional heteroskedasticity through GARCH models. The predictor variables investigated are those typical of the literature featuring a range of macroeconomic and market leading indicators. Our out-of-sample forecasting exercises are conducted with reference to US, UK, French and German data, both stocks and bonds, and for 1- and 12-months-ahead horizons. We employ several forecast performance metrics and predictive accuracy tests. Internet-search-based models are found to perform better than the average of all of the alternative models. For several country-asset-horizon combinations, particularly for UK bond returns, our heuristic models compare favourably with sophisticated econometric methods. The heuristic models are also shown to perform well in forecasting realized volatility. The baseline results are supported by several extensions and robustness checks, such as using alternative search keywords, controlling for Fama–French and Cochrane–Piazzesi factors, and implementing heuristic-based trading strategies.     

Quality evaluation and preferences of healthcare services: the case of telemedicine in Sardinia

Quality & Quantity - This paper explores preferences towards cardiological e-health services, assessed on a representative quota sample of potential users in Sardinia, Italy. By a mixture model...     

Precautionary Saving,Financial Risk,and Portfolio Choice

Relying on a direct question about the desired amount of precautionary wealth from the 2002 wave of the Italian “Survey of Household Income and Wealth,” I assess the main determinants of the precautionary motive for saving, focusing on the role played by financial risk on households' saving decisions. Households that invest mainly in safe assets do not need to protect themselves against future and unexpected financial losses. Consequently, once we control for households' sources of risk beside financial ones, the amount of precautionary savings of a household investing exclusively in safe assets should be lower compared to households who detain a non‐negligible share of risky assets in their portfolio. Results show that, as expected, a strong and negative correlation exists between the desired amount of precautionary wealth and the ownership of a portfolio made exclusively of safe assets.     

The Dynamics of Labour Flexibility: Relationships between Employment Type and Innovativeness

This paper investigates the relationship between flexible human resource (HR) practices and innovativeness. Testing the research model in a sample of first‐tier automotive suppliers indicates that internal flexibility practices are positively related to innovativeness. Regarding external flexibility, the association depends on the type of contingent employee: negative association for ‘short‐term hires’ and positive association for ‘consulting/contracting firms’. The relationships to innovativeness for practices associated with knowledge transfer are moderated by environmental dynamism, but the non‐knowledge related practices are not. Firms in highly dynamic environments can benefit more from flexible HR practices than firms in less dynamic environments.     

Bayesian Calibration of p‐Values from Fisher's Exact Test

p‐Values are commonly transformed to lower bounds on Bayes factors, so‐called minimum Bayes factors. For the linear model, a sample‐size adjusted minimum Bayes factor over the class of g‐priors on the regression coefficients has recently been proposed (Held & Ott, The American Statistician 70(4), 335–341, 2016). Here, we extend this methodology to a logistic regression to obtain a sample‐size adjusted minimum Bayes factor for 2 × 2 contingency tables. We then study the relationship between this minimum Bayes factor and two‐sided p‐values from Fisher's exact test, as well as less conservative alternatives, with a novel parametric regression approach. It turns out that for all p‐values considered, the maximal evidence against the point null hypothesis is inversely related to the sample size. The same qualitative relationship is observed for minimum Bayes factors over the more general class of symmetric prior distributions. For the p‐values from Fisher's exact test, the minimum Bayes factors do on average not tend to the large‐sample bound as the sample size becomes large, but for the less conservative alternatives, the large‐sample behaviour is as expected.     

Distance to Customers,Absorptive Capacity,and Innovation in High‐Tech Firms: The Dark Face of Geographical Proximity

This paper investigates the impact of both geographical and relational proximity on the innovative performance of the firm. We address the role of one firm characteristic—its absorptive capacity—as a specific contingency affecting the relationship between different proximities and innovation. Using data from 158 high‐tech firms located in the Tiburtina Valley in Italy, we studied the relationship between these firms and their key customers. Our findings support the need to downplay the role of geographical proximity in promoting innovation. Our results also show that relational proximity to key customers has a complementary relationship with absorptive capacity, which positively moderates its influence on innovative performance.     

The symbolic politics of delegation: macroprudential policy and independent regulatory authorities

This paper investigates the motivations that led policy-makers to delegate macroprudential authorities to newly created independent systemic regulatory authorities (SRAs). Three case studies are examined: the US Financial Stability Oversight Council, the European Systemic Risk Board and the UK’s Financial Policy Committee. Policy-makers’ motivations are captured by examining the specific institutional features of the newly created SRAs and by tracing the legislative debates that surrounded their creation. The findings of this empirical analysis call into question several of the conventional claims that are used to justify delegation to technocratic agencies from the functionalist and ideational scholarship. Given the limitations of the explanations based on efficiency considerations and socialisation of welfare losses, this paper suggests that the delegation of powers to SRAs was ultimately motivated by what is referred to as the ‘logic of symbolic politics.’ It is argued that the main motivation that emerges from the legislative debates for delegating this important task is that the SRAs provided a quick institutional ‘fix’ to signal to the public that in the wake of the international crisis of 2007–2009, policy-makers were redressing regulatory mistakes made prior to and during the crisis that had caused a severe deterioration of public’s wealth.