Cuestionario del Trabajo Decente: Elaboración y validación en dos muestras de trabajadores intelectuales

Se propone un Cuestionario del Trabajo Decente como herramienta de medición basada en las percepciones de los trabajadores, cubriendo así un vacío de investigación: el análisis a escala individual. Los autores parten de los elementos fundamentales del Programa de Trabajo Decente de la OIT. La versión definitiva del cuestionario comprende 31 enunciados vinculados, mediante análisis factorial, a siete factores. Las pruebas de fiabilidad, validez convergente y validez discriminante arrojan buenos valores, por lo que el cuestionario podría abrir nuevas vías de investigación empírica sobre la base del concepto de trabajo decente.     

Bringing geography into the analysis of trade competition

Trade competition between two countries is usually measured through structural similarity indicators (e.g., Krugman Specialization Index). We contribute to the area of research that focuses on how to measure trade competition between two countries by proposing an indicator that simultaneously accounts for structural and geographical similarity (i.e., similarity in sectoral weights for each market and weights of destination markets). We perform an empirical analysis considering the exports from the 28 EU countries to more than 120 markets. The importance of the geographical dimension is confirmed, highlighting that applied studies may produce inaccurate conclusions when this dimension is excluded.     

On the Likelihood and Welfare Effects of "Stop–and–go" Policies

Baleiras and Santos (2000) show that "stop–and–go" policies may be inherent in the institutional set–up rather than result from the wrong timing of expansionary vs. contractionary policies or any form of players' irrationality. We use this set–up, involving ultrarational players and perfect foresight, to show that stop–and–go policies are more likely (in a statistical sense) than the opposite type of phenomenon. Moreover, it is shown that having the voters' and the business community's preferences concerning the cycle converge to the socially optimal cycle pattern may entail a welfare loss.     

Intra-industry trade by types: What can we learn from Portuguese data?

We provide evidence on intra-industry trade (IIT) in the Portuguese case from 1994 onwards by disentangling vertical from horizontal IIT with two different indexes—the Grubel-Lloyd and the so-called CEPII index- and analyse the determinants of both IIT types. Distinct explanatory factors are identified for each IIT type and we confirm the comparative advantage explanation in the vertical case. The regression results are robust to different estimation methods and to alternative IIT indexes. Nonetheless, sensitivity of the IIT levels to the arbitrary criterion of the CEPII measurement points out to the Grubel-Lloyd index as a preferable method. JEL no. F12, F14     

Memory in returns and volatilities of futures' contracts

Various authors claim to have found evidence of stochastic long‐memory behavior in futures’ contract returns using the Hurst statistic. This paper reexamines futures’ returns for evidence of persistent behavior using a biased‐corrected version of the Hurst statistic, a nonparametric spectral test, and a spectral‐regression estimate of the long‐memory parameter. Results based on these new methods provide no evidence for persistent behavior in futures’ returns. However, they provide overwhelming evidence of long‐memory behavior for the volatility of futures’ returns. This finding adds to the emerging literature on persistent volatility in financial markets and suggests the use of new methods of forecasting volatility, assessing risk, and optimizing portfolios in futures’ markets. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Jrl Fut Mark 20:525–543, 2000     

Adam Smith and Catholic Social Teaching

Journal of Business Ethics - The connections between Adam Smith and Catholic Social Teaching (CST) raise several questions. The principle of subsidiarity adopted in CST, according to which higher...     

The confident forecaster. Lessons from the upscaling of the electricity industry in England and Wales

This article analyses the upscaling technological stage in the life cycle of capital-intensive technologies from the business history viewpoint. We correspondingly demonstrate how the pursuit of technological trajectories based on systematic increases in the size and power capacities of units pushed a new class of professionals, skills and procedures to the forefront of business decision-making. From 1958 onwards, forecasting framed and sharpened organisational insight into problems. Drawing on archival data on coal-fired, oil-fired and nuclear powered stations in England and Wales, the final section proceeds to measure the gap between reality and forecasts and singles out three major hypotheses to explain forecasting errors: inability to predict rapid changes outside the model (inter-fuel substitution); disregard of technical shortcomings in replication and standardisation, and overconfidence in extrapolating cost reductions at higher capacity levels.     

Political aspects of the capital controversies and capitalist crises

The Cambridge controversies about the theory of capital were ultimately underpinned by a clash between two different visions of capitalism, the neoclassical view, according to which distribution depends on the supply and demand curves of capital and labor, and the post Keynesian view, according to which distribution depends on political and institutional factors instead. I shall argue that the distinction between “meritocratic capitalism” and “patrimonial capitalism,” which underpins the discussions surrounding Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, is also connected to those two different visions of capitalism, which were behind the Cambridge controversies. These two visions of capitalism have important implications for our understanding of political power over workers, and also to our understanding of political power over land and its natural resources. The role of land and natural resources was not discussed in the Cambridge controversies, but is addressed in Piero Sraffa’s Production of Commodities, and is implied in Piketty’s inclusion of land in his definition of capital, which brings in a geographical dimension to our understanding of capitalism and capitalist crises, as I shall argue.     

Trade policy, cross-border externalities and lobbies: do linked agreements enforce more cooperative outcomes?

We analyze whether linking international cooperation in trade policy to environmental policy (or other issues with nonpecuniary externalities) promotes more cooperation in both policies, or whether cooperation in one is strengthened at the expense of the other. In the context of self-enforcing agreements, we show that if the policies are independent in the government's objective function, then linkage promotes cooperation in one policy at the expense of the policy that is easier to enforce under no-linkage. However, if the linked policies are not independent and if these policies are strategic complements, then linkage can sustain more cooperation in both issues than no-linkage. The policies are strategic complements only if (i) the production externality has cross-border effects; (ii) the weight on the externality cost is high; (iii) import competing lobbies are not “powerful”.