Future play: tourism,recreation and land use

Recent changes in land use for tourism and recreation have been driven by socio-demographic shifts, increases in disposable time and incomes, technological changes, transport developments, and emerging systems of policy and governance. Combined with changes in consumption preferences, these have led to general but differentiated increases in tourism and recreation. Outbound tourism has grown more rapidly than inbound, which has led to some displacement of land use demands. In the case of recreation, there are shifts between at home and outdoor recreation, and changes in the content and location of each. The resulting land use trends can be understood in regional, intra-regional (urban versus rural versus coastal) and temporal terms. Future trends are considered in terms of how this broad set of drivers and the relationships between them are being and are likely to be transformed.     

Income inequality and education revisited: persistence,endogeneity and heterogeneity

This article presents new results on the relationship between income inequality and education expansion – that is, increasing average years of schooling and reducing inequality of schooling. When dynamic panel estimation techniques are used to address issues of persistence and endogeneity, we find a large, positive, statistically significant and stable relationship between inequality of schooling and income inequality, especially in emerging and developing economies and among older-age cohorts. The relationship between income inequality and average years of schooling is positive, consistent with constant or increasing returns to additional years of schooling. While this positive relationship is small and not always statistically significant, we find a statistically significant negative relationship with years of schooling of younger cohorts. Statistical tests indicate that our dynamic estimators are consistent and that our identifying instruments are valid. Policy simulations suggest that education expansion will continue to be inequality reducing. This role will diminish as countries develop, but it could be enhanced through a stronger focus on reducing inequality in the quality of education.     

Nostalgia versus Pragmatism? How attitudes and interests shape the term sustainable agriculture in Switzerland and New Zealand

National public debates on sustainable agriculture are often framed by the respective attitudes and interests of the dominant stakeholders involved.     

The cross section of conditional mutual fund performance in European stock markets

This paper implements strategies that use macroeconomic variables to select European equity mutual funds, including Pan-European, country, and sector funds. We find that several macro-variables are useful in locating funds with future outperformance and that country-specific mutual funds provide the best opportunities for fund rotation strategies using macroeconomic information. Specifically, our baseline long-only strategies that exploit time-varying predictability provide four-factor alphas of 12–13% per year over the 1993–2008 period. Our study provides new evidence on the skills of local versus Pan-European asset managers, as well as how macroeconomic information can be used to locate and time these local fund manager skills.     

Determinants of the 1991–1993 Japanese recession: Evidence from a structural model of the Japanese economy

The objectives of this paper are to determine the extent to which various factors contributed to the most recent recession in Japan and to assess whether the recent behavior of the Japanese economy differs from that in previous recessions. Toward that end, we develop a small, structural macroeconometric model of the Japanese economy and estimate it using data from 1971 Q1 to 1991 Q1, the period just prior to the recent downturn. The important results can be summarized as follows. First, the severity of the recent recession probably does not reflect structural economic changes. Second, the poor economic performance in 1991–1993 period was to some extent predictable, reflecting the unwinding of imbalances that developed during the preceding expansion. Finally, unpredictable movements in exchange rates, land prices, and stock prices occurring after 1991 played an important, but not predominant, part in accentuating the downturn, while unusually stimulative fiscal and monetary policies appear to have contributed substantially to GDP during the recession.     

The Greenspan years: an analysis of the magnitude and speed of the equity market response to FOMC announcements

We examine the impact of monetary policy on the S&P 500 using intraday data. The analysis shows an economically and statistically significant relationship between S&P 500 intraday returns and changes in the Fed funds target rate. The significance and magnitude of the response is dependent on whether the change was expected or unexpected. An expected change in the Fed funds target rate has no impact on prices in the broad equity market; however, an unexpected change of 25 basis points in the Fed funds target rate results in an approximate 48 basis points decline in the broad equity market’s return. The speed of these market reactions is rapid with the equity market reaching a new equilibrium within 15 minutes.

Mobility,risk tolerance and competence to manage risks

Migration is a risky behaviour because of the uncertainty about future wages, living conditions, changing relationships with family and friends and cultural adjustment. While there has been some research on risk and uncertainty in migration, this has mostly been approached as a form of ‘rational’ decision-making: such approaches explain why some groups of individuals are more likely than others to migrate, but are limited in explaining individual variations in behaviour within these groups. Individual migrants vs. non-migrants are self-selected in terms of tolerance of risk and uncertainty but, with very few exceptions, there has been no research on migration within the framework of risk tolerance/aversion and competence to manage risk. Moreover, existing research is based on, and constrained by the limitations of, incumbent data-sets. Drawing on a specially commissioned large-scale survey of the UK population, this paper uses principal component analysis and logistic regression to analyse the extent to which risk and risk-related measures can be used to predict four different types of mobility profiles. There are significant associations between these individual mobility characteristics and general risk/uncertainty tolerance, and competence-based tolerance. These are strongest in terms of the two most polarised mobility types: the least mobile, the Stayers, and the most mobile, the Roamers. Recognising that previous migration is exogenous, a further analysis of migration intentions, with previous migration included as an independent variable, finds the propensity for future migration is, in fact, negatively associated with previous migration, probably due to the importance of ‘pure risk’ as opposed to acquired competence via migration experience, and to life cycle considerations.