Are they telling the truth? Revealing hidden traits of satisfaction with a public bike-sharing service

Public bike-sharing systems (BSSs) are an emerging mode of transportation introduced by municipalities to solve congestion problems in metropolitan areas, especially when integrated with other types of transportation. In the last years, the number of public bike-sharing services has been constantly on the rise all over the world, and generally the overall satisfaction with them is high. However, satisfaction with public services is driven by mechanisms that can differ from those in the private sector. It is important to establish to what extent a high satisfaction is genuine or simply ephemeral. Even “old” public services (like public transportation) become “gold” when accompanied by the introduction of new technologies. In this paper we analyze this phenomenon using data from a satisfaction web-survey conducted among customers of the public BSS “BikeMi” in Milan, Italy, in a period when mobile technologies have been introduced to speed up the service. On analyzing the responses to satisfaction questions using simple summary statistics, the level of satisfaction resulted very high. However, our aim was to look for potential “darker” sides of the service by detecting possible hidden satisfaction components. For this purpose, we used the Nonlinear Principal Components Analysis, which is particularly powerful in this context. A simple textual analysis was also performed as a validating test. Results from our analysis indicated that satisfaction is flawed by a set of factors like the mechanics of the bikes, the picking and dropping system, and the apps used to organize the service. Less concern was detected for more general aspects of the service.     

Using Weighted Least Squares to Deflate Input–Output Tables

This article proposes a balancing procedure for the deflation of input–output (I-O) tables from the viewpoint of users. This is a ‘subjective’ variant of the Weighted Least Squares (WLS) method, already known in the literature. It is argued that it is more flexible than other methods, and it is shown that SWLS subsumes the first-order approximation of RAS as a special case. Flexibility is due to the facts that (a) users can attach differential ‘reliability’ weights to first (unbalanced) estimates, depending on the confidence they have in the different parts of their pre-balancing work, (b) differently from RAS, one is not bound to take any row or column total as exogenously given, and (c) additional constraints can be added to it. The article describes also how SWLS was utilised to estimate a yearly (1959–2000) series of constant-price I-O tables for the Italian economy.     

Revisiting the role of migrant social networks as determinants of international migration flows

This note revisits the role of migrant social networks (MSNs) as determinants of bilateral migration flows. We do so using two alternative databases, covering about 190 world countries for the period 1960–2000. In line with previous estimates, we consistently find a significant, positive, impact of MSNs at destination. We also find that such an impact decreases very slowly as the year when MSNs are observed is farther back in the past. We also find that geographical distance is becoming less and less important over time but significantly explains the absence of a migration corridor only when MSNs at destination have very small sizes.     

Some Unintended Consequences of Parallel Trade in Pharmaceuticals

It is widely argued that international arbitrage, or parallel trade (PT), in patented drugs may increase consumer surplus in the relevant countries but at the expense of R&D investment. We show how the effects of PT depend on the vertical contract (linear pricing or dual pricing) between the manufacturer and the foreign licensee or distributor and on whether and how drug prices are regulated and reimbursed. We find that, contrary to what policy makers generally predict, we should be more concerned with the impact of PT on aggregate consumer surplus than on R&D investment. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Heterogeneous life-cycle profiles, income risk and consumption inequality

Was the increase in income inequality in the US due to permanent shocks or merely to an increase in the variance of transitory shocks? The implications for consumption and welfare depend crucially on the answer to this question. We use Consumer Expenditure Survey (CEX) repeated cross-section data on consumption and income to decompose idiosyncratic changes in income into predictable life-cycle changes, transitory and permanent shocks and estimate the contribution of each to total inequality. Our model fits the joint evolution of consumption and income inequality well and delivers two main results. First, we find that permanent changes in income explain all of the increase in inequality in the 1980s and 1990s. Second, we reconcile this finding with the fact that consumption inequality did not increase much over this period. Our results support the view that many permanent changes in income are predictable for consumers, even if they look unpredictable to the econometrician, consistent with models of heterogeneous income profiles.     

Covered interest arbitrage profits: The role of liquidity and credit risk

We study the profitability of Covered Interest Parity (CIP) arbitrage violations and their relationship with market liquidity and credit risk using a novel and unique dataset of tick-by-tick firm quotes for all financial instruments involved in the arbitrage strategy. The empirical analysis shows that positive CIP arbitrage deviations include a compensation for liquidity and credit risk. Once these risk premia are taken into account, small arbitrage profits only accrue to traders who are able to negotiate low trading costs. The results are robust to stale pricing and the nonsynchronous trading occurring in the markets involved in the arbitrage strategy.     

Measuring ‘indirect’ investments in ICT in OECD countries

ABSTRACT

ICT components, such as microprocessors, may be embodied in other capital goods not recorded as ICT in National Accounts. We name ‘indirect ICT investment’ the value of embodied ICT components in non-ICT investment. The paper provides estimates of ‘indirect ICT investment’ based on detailed and unpublished Supply-Use tables (SUT) in 12 OECD countries: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, Israel, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Our main finding is that ICT investment appears significantly higher when considering its indirect component, the average increase being about 35%. The inclusion of indirect ICT investment, excluding software (for which firms’ expenditures are difficult to measure), changes significantly the relative position of countries with respect to the ICT intensity of their investments. The inclusion of software further increases indirect ICT investment but the increase is smaller (in percentage) than without this inclusion. A final result, but concerning only three countries, it that the diagnosis of a stabilisation, or even a decrease, of ICT investment in percentage of GDP or of total investment, observed from the beginning of the century, is not modified if we take into account the indirect ICT investment.     

Trade Costs,Trade Balances and Current Accounts: An Application of Gravity to Multilateral Trade

In this paper we test the well-known hypothesis of Obstfeld and Rogoff (NBER Macroeconomics Annual 7777:339–390, 2000) that trade costs are the key to explaining the so-called Feldstein–Horioka puzzle. Our approach has a number of novel features. First, we focus on the interrelationship between trade costs, the trade account and the Feldstein–Horioka puzzle. Second, we use the gravity model to estimate the effect of trade costs on bilateral trade and, third, we show how bilateral trade can be used to draw inferences about desired trade balances and desired intertemporal trade. Our econometric results provide strong support for the Obstfeld and Rogoff hypothesis and we are also able to reconcile our results with the so-called home bias puzzle.

Null models of economic networks: the case of the world trade web

In all empirical-network studies, the observed properties of economic networks are informative only if compared with a well-defined null model that can quantitatively predict the behavior of such properties in constrained graphs. However, predictions of the available null-model methods can be derived analytically only under assumptions (e.g., sparseness of the network) that are unrealistic for most economic networks like the world trade web (WTW). In this paper we study the evolution of the WTW using a recently-proposed family of null network models. The method allows to analytically obtain the expected value of any network statistic across the ensemble of networks that preserve on average some local properties, and are otherwise fully random. We compare expected and observed properties of the WTW in the period 1950–2000, when either the expected number of trade partners or total country trade is kept fixed and equal to observed quantities. We show that, in the binary WTW, node-degree sequences are sufficient to explain higher-order network properties such as disassortativity and clustering-degree correlation, especially in the last part of the sample. Conversely, in the weighted WTW, the observed sequence of total country imports and exports are not sufficient to predict higher-order patterns of the WTW. We discuss some important implications of these findings for international-trade models.