British Coal Mining Strikes 1893–1940: Dimensions, Distribution and Persistence

Strikes in manufacturing are known to be highly concentrated in a small number of plants. This study extends the analysis of strike concentration to coal mining and is the first study of strike concentration with significant temporal scope. The authors show that strikes were also highly concentrated in coal mining; that the prevalence of recorded strike activity was far from complete; that there was a rapid turnover in the population of highly strikeprone collieries and places; and that persistent strike activity was rare. These results afford a new perspective on strike concentration, the research implications of which are drawn out in the final section.     

Fuzzy Targeting Indices and Orderings

The targeting efficiency and the coverage of social programs for the poor are typically analyzed by partitioning the total population in four mutually exclusive groups: the poor who benefit from a program or policy, the poor who do not benefit, the non‐poor who benefit, and the non‐poor who do not benefit. While useful, this partition into crisp sets may not capture the difficulty of identifying the poor. This paper presents a method that consists of using a membership function to identify to what extent households can be considered as poor or non‐poor. The method builds on fuzzy sets theory whereby the definition of the boundaries of a set, say the poor or the non‐poor, is fuzzy. We characterize the properties that membership functions should have, and we test for the robustness of targeting performance comparisons to the choice of the membership function.     

Technical efficiency effects of input controls: evidence from Australia's banana prawn fishery

This paper provides the first ex post estimates of the effects of input controls on technical efficiency in a fishery. Using individual vessel data from the northern prawn fishery of Australia for the years 1990–1996 and 1994–2000, stochastic production frontiers are estimated to analyse the efficiency impacts of input controls on engine and vessel size. The results indicate that technical efficiency is increasing in a measure of vessel size and engine capacity that was controlled by the regulator from 1985 to 2001, and decreasing in an unregulated input, gear headrope length. The study shows that fishers have substituted from regulated to unregulated inputs over the period 1990–2000 and technical efficiency has declined coincident with increasing restrictions on vessel size and engine capacity. The decline in technical efficiency indicates that the goal of the regulator to increase economic efficiency has not been realized.     

Math,girls and socialism

This paper argues that the socialist episode in East Germany, which constituted a radical experiment in gender equality in the labor market and other instances, has left persistent tracks on gender norms. We focus on one of the most resilient and pervasive gender gaps in modern societies: mathematics. Using the German division as a natural experiment, we show that the underperformance of girls in math is sharply reduced in the regions of the former GDR, in contrast with those of the former FRG. We show that this East–West difference is due to girls’ attitudes, confidence and competitiveness in math, and not to other confounding factors, such as the difference in economic conditions or teaching styles across the former political border. We also provide illustrative evidence that the gender gap in math is smaller in European countries that used to be part of the Soviet bloc, as opposed to the rest of Europe. The lesson is twofold: (1) a large part of the pervasive gender gap in math is due to social stereotypes; (2) institutions can durably modify these stereotypes.     

Bid-ask bounce and speads in the foreign exchange futures market

This paper examines the intraday bid-ask bounce in Deutschemark and Japanese yen futures prices. The intraday Markovian bid-ask bounce process, which leads to a desirable equilibrium condition of reaching a bid or an ask transaction type with equal chances, is identified. A second-order Markov chain transition matrix model is used to derive a generalized estimator of bid-ask spreads in the foreign exchange futures market. It incorporates the conditional probabilities of a subsequent transaction being the same type as the current transaction's () and that of the next transaction being the same as the current type but different from the previous type (). The specification is {-Cov(P _t ,P _t+1 )/[(1–)(–)]}^1/2. The empirical results show that the average implied bid-ask spread is about $10, which is less than one tick's value of $12.50. It is also found that spreads are higher at the beginning and end of the trading day than the rest of the day, reflecting the uncertainty due to information flows and overnight inventory carrying costs, respectively.     

基于协同规划的步行城市建设策略——以墨尔本为例

对步行城市思想的产生背景做了概括总结,对国内外相关研究实践做了梳理分析,进而从内涵、价值两个层面对步行城市及其与步行系统的关系做了阐述,以上述理解为基础,结合研究方法提出了基于协同规划的步行城市建设策略,对步行系统与机动车交通、公共交通、公共空间、公共建筑以及骑行系统的协同规划意义做了论述,结合墨尔本步行城市建设实践总结并提出了上述五个纬度的协同规划实施途径。     

Firm Efficiency in a Transitional Economy: Evidence from Vietnam

The paper examines efficiency performance of the non-state small and medium manufacturing industries in a transitional and developing economy. Using firm level data in Vietnam from 1996 and 2001, cross-sectional models are estimated using the stochastic frontier method. The results show a considerable variation in efficiency levels among firms and that a greater use of family labor and a metropolitan location are associated with improvement in technical efficiency. The results indicate few benefits from direct government financial and non-financial assistance to businesses.     

Fuel poverty and access to electricity: comparing households when they differ in needs

Although sequential stochastic dominance techniques have been used in the literature to make comparisons of income poverty which are robust to the assumptions made about the economies of scale within households, the techniques could be applied to a much wider set of issues. In this paper, these techniques are applied to energy deprivation in Guatemala. Fuel poverty is compared among households with and without access to electricity, and it is assessed whether access to electricity for those who do not have access currently would eliminate the observed difference in fuel poverty between the two groups of households.     

Increase in Risk and its Effects on Welfare and Optimal Policies in a Dynamic Setting: The Case of Global Pollution

This paper studies the effects of an increase in risk on welfare and optimal policies in a stochastic dynamic model of global pollution. In a first step, we focus on the case of a single decision maker, and make use of an approach pioneered by Kimball (2014) for studying the impact of a marginal change in risk in optimal stochastic control models. Using a simple model with only one state variable and one control variable, we show how the optimal carbon tax responds to an increase in risk. It is found that the third derivative of the decay function of the stock of pollution may play a decisive role. In a second step, we investigate the extent to which Kimball’s approach may be extended to the case of stochastic dynamic games. We show how strategic interactions complicate the task of evaluating the effects of an increase in risk. Interestingly, in a dynamic model of the tragedy of the commons, we find that an increase in risk can increase welfare even though all agents are risk averse. The reason is that higher risk can cause agents to be more conservative, and this mitigates the tragedy of the commons.