Criteria affecting Taiwan wealth management banks in serving high-net-worth individuals during COVID-19: a DEMATEL approach

Journal of Financial Services Marketing - Wealth management services for high-net-worth individuals in Taiwan have grown rapidly over the last decade. This study used a decision-making trial and...     

Composite indicators of sustainable urban mobility: Estimating the rankings frequency distribution combining multiple methodologies

The contribution of this paper consists in applying several techniques to estimate a composite indicator of sustainable urban mobility for 116 Italian provincial towns, as proposed by Luzzati and Gucciardi (2015). The aim is to provide the decision-maker with a richer set of information on sustainable mobility, making explicit the impact of the techniques used on the values obtained. A set of 16 indicators with a nested structure has been selected and 33 combinations of normalization, weighting, and aggregation techniques are applied. The results are presented by city, by city groupings (size and location), and focusing on the ten largest Italian cities. It is found that small cities perform better in terms of sustainable mobility than medium or large cities. As expected, in some cases (e.g., Milan) the intervals of the results obtained are quite large, indicating that the techniques used to normalize, weight, and aggregate the indicators highly affect the performance indexes. In other cases (e.g., Rome) the results are stable across methodologies.     

Changes in the productive efficiency of U.S. flour mills in the late nineteenth century: an input-distance-function approach

Journal of Productivity Analysis - The productive efficiency of the U.S. flour milling industry increased substantially between 1850 and 1880. Specifically, a typical flour mill in 1880 was able to...     

An introduction to the economics of immigration in OECD countries

The share of the foreign-born population in member countries of the OECD is increasing, and this article summarizes economics research on the effects of immigration in those nations. Four broad topics are addressed: labour market issues, fiscal questions, the political economy of immigration, and productivity and international trade. Extreme concerns about deleterious labour market and fiscal impacts following from new immigrants are not found to be warranted. However, it is also clear that government policies and practices regarding the selection and integration of new migrants affect labour market, fiscal, social and cultural outcomes. Policies that are well informed, well crafted and well executed beneficially improve population welfare.     

Local Government Imperialism

Local government has attracted increasing criticism in recent years. It has been investigated by committees of enquiry. Central government has tried, but failed, to control its expenditures. Its trade unions can disrupt everyday life by strikes. What is wrong? This Open Letter diagnoses the crucial cause as the failure to subject local services to the measurement and discipline of price.