Monetary policy and long‐term interest rates: Evidence from the U.S. economy

This paper addresses the ability of central banks to affect the structure of interest rates. We assess the causal relationship between the short‐term Effective Federal Funds Rate (FF) and long‐term interest rates associated with both public and private bonds and specifically, the 10‐Year Treasury Bond (GB10Y) and the Moody's Aaa Corporate Bond (AAA). To do this, we apply Structural Vector Autoregressive models to U.S. monthly data for the 1954–2018 period. Based on results derived from impulse response functions and forecast error variance decomposition, we find: a bidirectional relationship when GB10Y is considered as the long‐term rate and a unidirectional relationship that moves from short‐ to long‐term interest rates when AAA is considered. These conclusions show that monetary policy is able to permanently affect long‐term interest rates and the central bank has a certain degree of freedom in setting the levels of the short‐term policy rate.     

Kinked norms of behaviour and cooperation

Using a country panel of domestic terror attacks from 1998 to 2004, we empirically analyze the impact of government decentralization on terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces domestic terror, while political decentralization has no impact.     

Shared wealth or nobody's land? The worth of natural capital and ecosystem services

The prerequisite for a sustainable and equitable use of common resources (the so-called Commons) must be the proper evaluation of their role within the complex network of relationships that ensure ecosystems functioning, resilience, and evolutionary dynamics. It is crucial to ascertain to what extent the common wealth is used for the common benefit. Money-based schemes for valuing the Commons, such as the so-called “willingness-to-pay”, provide a user-side evaluation perspective based on the idea that value only stems from utilization by humans. As a complement to such a point of view, we present and discuss in this paper a donor-side evaluation method (Emergy Synthesis) based on the idea that a proper measure of value can be achieved by also accounting for the work done by the biosphere in generating services and resources. It should not be disregarded that such resources and services also provide support to other species in the web of life. Emergy, a scientific measure of such environmental support, is suggested as a tool capable to assess quantity and quality of shared resources, thus providing a basis for their environmentally sound management.     

Financing Pay-as-you-go Public Pension Systems: Some Notes in the Light of the Classical-type Theory of Income Distribution

The paper uses a Sraffa-type two-sector model to study how the presence of retired workers interacts with the distribution of the surplus between workers and capitalists (firms). In particular, the paper investigates how the ongoing diminution of the ratio between active and retired workers affects the wage-profits-pensions frontier, which is defined after allowing that a social security tax, which reduces the claims of active workers and capitalists on the surplus of the economy, finances the pensions distributed each year to retired workers. Finally, it is argued that the different impact of defined-benefit and defined-contribution pay-as-you-go pension schemes depends on the actual incidence of payroll taxes.     

Salesperson's listening in buyer–seller service relationships

Research has consistently shown that salesperson's active listening behavior leads to strong sales performance. Yet the influence of management policies on listening has received very limited attention, and prior research linking listening to customer retention has led to mixed findings. This study examines how listening is enhanced through control systems and the influence of listening on customer retention in a service context. Dyadic data from salespeople and their customers show that a behavior-based control system (measured as a second-order construct) positively influences listening and the salesperson's customer orientation totally mediates the influence of listening on customer commitment to the salesperson and loyalty to the service company. Our findings indicate that listening is a necessary but not sufficient condition for assuring relationship development. More specifically, customer orientation is the generative mechanism through which listening is able to influence customer retention. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Creativity and the positive reading of Baumol cost disease

This paper proposes a more positive and useful reading of cost disease. A case is presented for refocussing general attention from the characteristics of cost disease (i.e. widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to its sources. This is a useful exercise because the most important aspect of cost disease is a fundamental intuition: some types of labour provide particular contributions to various production processes that capital and new technologies are not able to replace. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Characteristics of research on green marketing

This paper aims to describe and analyze the main characteristics of articles on green marketing published in the most relevant journals within the period 1993–2003, in order to determine the evolution of this current issue of research over recent years and improve our understanding of this subject. We built up a database with 112 articles on green marketing and we have explored the topic, the methodology and the techniques of analysis, as well as other relevant aspects of the research. In order to complete this analysis, we made a review of articles published in two journals specializing in environmental management: BSE and CSREM. In this way, this paper offers practical help to those who are beginning research on this topic because the results will help us to determine what still needs to be investigated in this topic and hence propose a research agenda for the coming years. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.     

Do Depositors Punish Banks for Bad Behavior? Market Discipline,Deposit Insurance,and Banking Crises

This paper empirically investigates two issues largely unexplored by the literature on market discipline. We evaluate the interaction between market discipline and deposit insurance and the impact of banking crises on market discipline. We focus on the experiences of Argentina, Chile, and Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s. We find that depositors discipline banks by withdrawing deposits and by requiring higher interest rates. Deposit insurance does not appear to diminish the extent of market discipline. Aggregate shocks affect deposits and interest rates during crises, regardless of bank fundamentals, and investors' responsiveness to bank risk taking increases in the aftermath of crises.