Tourism and online photography

This paper documents the use of online travel photo-sharing technologies among Hong Kong residents. The advent of Web 2.0 is changing fundamentally the tourist information search and destination choice process. Yet, to date, no study has documented Web 2.0 usage levels and preferences for certain media for posting travel photographs across an entire community. This study reveals that some 89% of pleasure travelers take photographs and that 41% of them posted their photographs online. Social network sites (SNSs), instant messaging, online photo albums and personal blogs were the most popular media used. In general, people who post photographs online tend to be younger, better educated, and earn a higher income than those who do not. The study determined that most people also use multiple media platforms to disseminate their images. Cluster analysis based on the four major styles of online platform identified five cohorts of users who differed in number and type of media used, demographic profile and travel motive. Implications for destination promotion are discussed.     

Early-Life Circumstances Predict Measures of Trust among Adults: Evidence from Hunger Episodes in Post-War Germany

Can a major shock in childhood permanently shape trust? We consider a hunger episode in Germany after World War II, and we construct a measure of hunger exposure from official data on caloric rations set monthly by the occupying forces, providing regional and temporal variations. We correlate hunger exposure with measures of trust using data from a nationally representative sample of the German population. We show that individuals exposed to low caloric rations in childhood have significantly lower levels of trust as adults. This finding highlights that early-life experiences can have long-term effects in domains other than health, where such effects are well documented.     

Children's influences on in-store purchases

Relatively little is known about the influence children have on their parents’ purchases in a retail setting. This study investigates which factors affect children's purchase requests and their parents’ subsequent purchases. It was found that factors influencing the number of children's purchase requests were the freedom of a child's movements, the product's visibility, and the child's developmental stage. The latter variable together with the suitability of the good for consumption on the premises, the linguistic form of child's request, the parent's household income, and the price of the good determine the number of purchases following a child's request.     

Capital Stock, Unemployment and Wages in the UK and Germany

This paper is concerned with the view that capital formation is an important variable in the determination of unemployment and wages in Germany and the UK. Adverse demand shocks affect employment and investment. When shocks reverse, unemployment may not fall to previous levels due to insufficient capital. The empirical results show that unemployment has risen in the last twenty years in both countries due to insufficient investment. Policies that are aimed at stimulating investment may have a permanent effect on unemployment in Germany and the UK.     

Union density and determinants of union membership in 18 EU countries: evidence from micro data, 2002/031

Using representative individual-level data from the first round of the European Social Survey fielded in 2002/03, this article provides an empirical analysis of unionisation in 18 countries of the EU. We show that union density varies considerably in Europe, ranging from 84 per cent in Denmark to 11 per cent in Portugal. Estimating identical models for each country, we find that individuals’ probability of union membership is significantly affected by their personal characteristics, their attitudes and the characteristics of their workplace, whereas social factors seem to play a minor role. The presence of a union at the workplace and employees’ attitudes concerning strong unions are the two variables most strongly associated with unionisation.     

Dynamic asset allocation with stochastic income and interest rates

We solve for optimal portfolios when interest rates and labor income are stochastic with the expected income growth being affine in the short-term interest rate in order to encompass business cycle variations in wages. Our calibration based on the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data supports this relation with substantial variation across individuals in the slope of this affine function. The slope is crucial for the valuation and riskiness of human capital and for the optimal stock/bond/cash allocation both in an unconstrained complete market and in an incomplete market with liquidity and short-sales constraints.     

Inside the black box: How important is the credit channel relative to the interest and exchange rate channels?

This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model to assess the importance of the credit channel relative to the interest and exchange rate channels. It is motivated by increasing theoretical and empirical evidence that credit market conditions affect the propagation of cyclical fluctuations in the economy. The relative contribution of each channel is determined by comparing the impulse responses when the relevant channel is suppressed with the impulse responses when all three channels are operating. The analysis shows that all three channels affect business cycle dynamics. But the interest rate channel has the largest effects in the transmission of shocks to the economy. The results suggest that it is substantially more important than the credit channel.     

On the equivalence between the overlapping-generations model and cyclical general-equilibrium models

We show that equilibrium cycles in an overlapping-generations model are equivalent to asymmetric equilibria in a general-equilibrium model. We use this equivalence to find equilibrium cycles in the overlapping-generations model with two and three generations, respectively. For the example with two generations we show that for certain parameter values cycles of all periods occur.     

Female self-perception as barrier to international careers?

It is a matter of fact that women are underrepresented in international management. In most of the articles on female expatriates, the companies' reluctance to send women abroad is usually named as first justification why female managers are rare in the international arena. The reasons cited are manifold, ranging from stereotypical views of the personnel managers to the prejudices women are expected to face abroad. Some authors tried to find additional causes such as dual career couples, cultural factors or the general lack of women in top management. However, only little has been written about the women's own fault for not being selected. Literature on gender-based stereotypes, female self-perception or traditional role models is broad. Typical issues are a perceived lack of self-confidence, stereotypical behaviour or underestimation. But a relation to expatriation is rarely found. Therefore, the aim of this article is to answer if and how women themselves contribute to their under-representation in international management.