Unemployment insurance: The role of electoral systems and regional labour markets

Levels of insurance against unemployment vary considerably across countries. Replacement rates, the ratio relating income from unemployment to what people earned when they were employed, are higher in countries with proportional electoral systems than in countries with majoritarian systems. Also, replacement rates are positively correlated with per capita income and negatively correlated with the countries' unemployment rates. I develop an electoral competition model that replicates these stylized facts.     

Relative importance of scheduled macroeconomic news for stock market investors

This paper investigates the relative importance of scheduled U.S. macroeconomic news releases for stock valuation. The study focuses on 11 macroeconomic announcements selected on the basis of the previous literature and the Bureau of Labor Statistics classifications of major economic indicators. The paper shows that five out of the 11 announcements have significant influence on stock valuation. These are the Employment Report, NAPM (manufacturing), Producer Price Index, Import and Export Price Indices, and Employment Cost Index. Of these six announcements, the Employment Report and NAPM (manufacturing) exert the greatest influence. The time of the announcement, measured by days from the beginning of the month to the release day, has a moderating impact on the relationship between macroeconomic announcements and its importance.     

A substitution orbit model of competitive innovations

Successful innovation and diffusion of technology can be attributed to the identification of the orbit of emerging new technologies that complement or substitute for existing technologies. This dynamism resembles the co-evolution process in an ecosystem. In an ecosystem, in order to maintain sustainable development, the complex interplay between competition and cooperation, typically observed in predator-prey systems, create a sophisticated balance. Given that an ecosystem can be used as a masterpiece system, this sophisticated balance can provide suggestive ideas for identifying an optimal orbit of competitive innovations with complement or substitution dynamism.Prompted by such a sophisticated balance in an ecosystem, this paper analyzes the optimal orbit of competitive innovations and, on the basis of an application of Lotka-Volterra equations, it reviews substitution orbits of Japan's monochrome to color TV system, fixed telephones to cellular telephones, cellular telephones to mobile Internet access service, and analog to digital TV broadcasting. On the basis of substitution orbits analyses, it attempts to extract suggestions supportive to identifying an optimal policy option in a complex orbit leading to expected orbit.Key findings include policy options that are effective in controlling parameters for Lotka-Volterra equations leading to expected orbit.     

WEALTH AND THE DISTRIBUTION OF INCOME, CANADA 1969–70

This paper explores the sensitivity of the size distribution of family income in Canada to alternative definitions of income. These alternative definitions examine both wealth generally in the form of an annuity equivalent, and home ownership in the form of imputed rent. An adjustment for family size differences is also made. The impact of these adjustments is assessed for average incomes, inequality, and the incidence of low income for different age groups. The adjustments do have significant effects that vary by age; in particular, the economic position of the elderly seems understated by the usual data. Also, methodological considerations, such as the direct use of micro data and the choice of inequality indicator are shown to be significant.     

Managing academic innovation in Taiwan: Towards a ‘scientific-economic’ framework

Since the passage of the Science and Technology Basic Law in 1999, Taiwanese universities have taken a more “scientific-economic” approach to protect and commercialize their research. This research mainly examines innovation activities such as patenting, licensing, and incubated startups in the context of Taiwanese higher education institutions (HEIs). The “scientific-economic” framework used to analyze the strategic aspects influencing these academic innovations includes (1) intellectual property managerial capabilities, (2) the strength of external industrial partnerships, (3) the university entrepreneurial orientation, and (4) government research policy. Four hypotheses were developed. Data were collected via a questionnaire with all 122 HEIs in Taiwan surveyed.The research reveals that the aspects of intellectual property managerial capability, HEI-industry partnerships, and academic entrepreneurial orientation are useful to distinguish the university's innovation performance on patent grants, licensing incomes, and firm incubation. Also, government support on research plays a moderating role in academic innovation. Managerial and policy implications for managing innovation effectively in universities were drawn.     

The Economics and Bioeconomics of Folk and Scientific Classification

Synopsis This paper is the product of a collaboration between a biologist (Ghiselin 1997) who works on the philosophy of classification and an economist (Landa 1981, 1994) who works on the ‘Economics of Identity’: how and why people classify people based on identity in the context of a theory of ethnic trading networks. In developing the ‘bioeconomics’ (the synthesis of economics with biology) of classification, we crossed a number of disciplinary boundaries—anthropology, economics, sociology, biology, and cognitive psychology including evolutionary psychology’s ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics. Using a bioeconomics approach, we argue that folk classifications—the classifications used by ordinary persons—have much in common with scientific classifications: underlying both is the need for economy of information processing in the brain, for the efficient organization of knowledge, and for efficiency of information acquisition and transmission of information to others. Both evolve as a result of trial and error, but in science there is relatively more foresight, understanding, and planning.     

Complex solutions of nonconcave dynamic optimization models

Summary In this paper we consider a class of time discrete intertemporal optimization models in one dimension. We present a technique to construct intertemporal optimization models with nonconcave objective functions, such that the optimal policy function coincides with any pre-specifiedC ² function. Our result is a variant of the approach presented in a seminal paper by Boldrin and Montrucchio (1986). Whereas they solved the inverse problem for the reduced form models, we address the different question of how to construct both reduced and primitive form models. Using our technique one can guarantee required qualitative properties not only in reduced, but also in primitive form. The fact that our constructed model has a single valued and continuous optimal policy is very important as, in general, nonconcave problems yield set valued optimal policy correspondences which are typically hard to analyze. To illustrate our constructive approach we apply it to a simple nonconcave model.We are grateful for the helpful comments of L. Montrucchio, K. Nishimura, T. Mitra and an anonymous referee. Financial support of the Austrian Science Foundation under contract No. P7783-PHY and No. J01003-SOZ is gratefully acknowledged. This paper was written while M. Kopel was visiting the Department of Economics, Cornell University.     

Assessing French nursing home efficiency: An indirect approach via budget-constrained DEA models

In this paper, data envelopment analysis (DEA) techniques are applied to the French nursing home industry in order to address two policy issues. The first involves nursing home size and returns to scale, while the second deals with the potential effects of a change in nursing home reimbursement from a flat rate to one based on the severity of case-mix. To accomplish this, our analysis expands on the existing nursing home literature to analyze technical and allocative efficiency along with budget-constrained models rather than the more common direct input-based distance function. Technical efficiency is evaluated via an indirect output distance function while allocative output efficiency is computed with a cost indirect revenue function. The findings suggest that system-wide efficiency and equity may result from coming reforms since payments would more accurately reflect resource use.     

The measurement of marketing efficiency in the presence of spillovers: theory and evidence

We develop a model of marketing efficiency based on a directional distance function that allows for marketing spillovers. A parametric model is used to test for spillovers from rival marketing and from a firm's marketing activity of its other related products. We then show how this information can be incorporated into a non‐parametric model and used to estimate marketing inefficiency. We apply brand level data from the US brewing industry to the non‐parametric model to determine the effectiveness of television, radio, and print advertising. We find that advertising spillovers are important in brewing and show that efficiency estimates are inaccurate when spillover effects are ignored. Our results also suggest that marketing efficiency may be an important component to firm success in brewing, a result that may apply to other consumer goods industries. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Can oil shocks explain asymmetries in the US Business Cycle?

We consider whether oil prices can account for business cycle asymmetries. We test for asymmetries based on the Markov switching autoregressive model popularized by Hamilton (1989), using the tests devised by Clements and Krolzig (2000). We find evidence against the conventional wisdom that recessions are more violent than expansions: while some part of the downturn in economic activity that characterises recessionary periods can be attributed to dramatic changes in the price of oil, post-War US economic growth is characterized by the steepness of expansions. First Version Received: December 2000/Final Version Received: September 2001