性别失衡与人口流动视角下的男男性行为:来自中国城市地区的证据

利用"城市地区流动大龄男性生殖健康和家庭生活调查"数据,通过与同年龄段已婚男性的对比,探究了性别失衡背景下流动大龄未婚男性的男男性行为。同性性行为发生率受到相关态度、婚姻状况等的显著影响。性别失衡所带来的"婚姻挤压"迫使流动大龄未婚男性"被动失婚",缺乏正常稳定的性伴侣,从而导致男男性行为发生率有增加的可能性;流动大龄未婚男性的男男性行为具有高风险特征,而对于艾滋病、性病知识的缺乏是高风险性行为发生的重要影响因素。     

Applying public participation GIS (PPGIS) to inform and manage visitor conflict along multi-use trails

Managing visitor conflict is an important task in protected areas. This study used public participation GIS (PPGIS) mapping and a visitor survey to research conflicts between mountain bikers and horse riders, and other groups frequenting trails for tourism and recreation in national parks in northern Sydney (Australia). The goal was to evaluate the effectiveness of the PPGIS for determining conflict locations, and to integrate stated reasons and conflict resolution measures in a model. The survey showed that 42% of mountain bikers and 69% of horse riders had experienced conflicts, with each other, motorbike riders, walkers/hikers and dog walkers. PPGIS effectively mapped concurrent usage intensity to predict potential conflict locations over a reasonably large study area thereby identifying trails of the greatest concern. PPGIS also offered high-quality GIS visualisation options, and the novelty of the PPGIS increased participant engagement. We evaluated PPGIS compared to questionnaire-based surveying, direct visitor observations, GPS tracking, traffic counters and cameras. Because visitor conflict occurs within a spatial context, conflict management will require greater spatial knowledge of visitor activity, which can be obtained through the innovative PPGIS mapping. A conflict model is presented that integrates this study's empirical findings on conflict reasons and resolutions with existing conflict theory.     

Optimal Regulation of Cooperative R&D Under Incomplete Information

A regulator offers a cooperation contract to two firms to develop a research project. The contract provides incentives to encourage skill-sharing and coordinate subsequent efforts. Innovators must get informational rents to disclose their privately known skills, which results in distorting R&D efforts with respect to the first-best level. When efforts are strategic complements, both efforts are distorted downwards. By contrast, when efforts are strategic substitutes, the effort of the firm with most valuable skills is distorted downwards (to decrease rents) and the effort of the other firm is distorted upwards (to compensate the previous efficiency loss).     

Productive efficiency of French grain producers: A latent variable model

In this article we propose to implement a covariance structure analysis to deal with the estimation of a stochastic frontier production function on panel data and the measurement of a time-varying technical efficiency. First, this method solves the potential problem of correlations between input quantities and individual effects. Second, individual effects and efficiency measures can be recovered as a byproduct of the analysis through the so-called factor scores. We implement this approach by fitting to a balanced panel of French grain producers, a parsimonious version of the Cornwell, Schmidt, and Sickles [1990]'s model where technical efficiencies are individual-specific linear functions of time. A specification search shows that this model is preferred to the traditional production function. Results shed light on the temporal pattern of efficiency in the French grain production sector.The authors thank Jacques Mairesse, Quang Vuong, two referees, the editor, and session participants at the Econometric Society European Meeting, Cambridge, September 1991, at the Second European Workshop on Efficiency and Productivity Analysis, Louvain-la-Neuve, October 1991, at the Conference on Current Issues in Productivity, Newark, December 1991, and at the ENSAE-EHESS seminar, Paris, March 1992, for helpful comments and suggestions.     

Bonus-Malus Systems

Abstract

Bonus-malus is a merit-rating technique used in most of Europe and Asia, and some Latin American and African countries. Policyholders from a given risk cell are subdivided into bonus-malus classes. Their claims histories then modify the class upon each renewal. Markov chain theory provides the tools for the design, evaluation, and comparison of these systems. In this article, definitions and examples of bonus-malus systems are provided (Section 2). The main actuarial tools for the study and design of bonus-malus systems are reviewed (Section 3). In the discussions that follow, Krupa Subramanian outlines a model for analyzing market shares in a competitive environment, a crucial research topic given current deregulation trends, and Pierre Lemaire compares actuarial with regulatory approaches to bonus-malus.     

Can firms' location decisions counteract the Balassa-Samuelson effect?

This paper examines the determinants of relative prices in a model combining a Harrod-Balassa-Samuelson (HBS) mechanism and an endogenous location of traded good producers. Besides the standard HBS effect, asymmetric productivity improvements in the traded good sector push new firms to enter the market. This benefits local consumers who save on trade costs and exerts an upward pressure on relative wages. As a consequence, relative prices in the traded good sector either increase or fall in general equilibrium. In a panel cointegration framework, the wage effect is shown to dominate. This means the HBS effect is strengthened by the relocation of traded good producers.     

Locating fire stations: An integrated approach for Belgium

This paper illustrates the potential of a decision-support system developed for Belgium by a consortium of universities and a private firm, in the framework of a public call made by the Ministry of the Interior. The system is designed to provide the Belgian emergency management administration with a complete decision-aid tool for the location of fire stations. The originality of the project is that it includes a risk-modeling approach developed at a national scale. This analysis involves a multiscale GIS that includes a thorough representation of the physical, human and economic spatial realities, a risk-modeling approach, an adequate optimal location and allocation model (taking into account both queuing and staffing problems). The final result is an interactive operational tool for defining locations, equipment allocations, staffing, response times, the cost/efficiency trade-off, etc. This flexible tool can be used in an assessment as well as a prospective context. It has been used to draw a national reorganization plan for fire stations that started being implemented in 2010.     

When does leverage hurt productivity growth? A firm-level analysis

In the wake of the global financial crisis, several macroeconomic contributions have highlighted the risks of excessive credit expansion. In particular, too much finance can have a negative impact on growth. We examine the microeconomic foundations of this argument, positing a non-monotonic relationship between leverage and firm-level productivity growth in the spirit of the trade-off theory of capital structure. A threshold regression model estimated on a sample of Central and Eastern European countries confirms that TFP growth increases with leverage until the latter reaches a critical threshold beyond which leverage lowers TFP growth. This estimate can provide guidance to firms and policy makers on identifying “excessive” leverage. We find similar non-monotonic relationships between leverage and proxies for firm value. Our results are a first step in bridging the gap between the literature on optimal capital structure and the wider macro literature on the finance-growth nexus.     

Are family firms really superior performers?

Although international evidence suggests that families may be unhelpful to firm performance, recent analyses of U.S. public companies indicate that family firms outperform. This study probes these contrasting findings by investigating more fine-grained measures of family business in the U.S. Specifically, it makes a fundamental but neglected distinction between lone founder businesses in which no relatives of a founder are involved, and true family businesses that do include multiple family members as major owners or managers. The research also seeks to overcome issues of endogeneity and selection bias by examining both Fortune 1000 firms and a random sample of 100 much smaller public companies. The results show that findings are indeed highly sensitive both to the way in which family businesses are defined and to the nature of the sample. Fortune 1000 firms that include relatives as owners or managers never outperform in market valuation, even during the first generation. Only businesses with a lone founder outperform. Moreover neither lone founder nor family firms exhibited superior valuations within a randomly drawn sample of companies. Our results confirm the difficulty of attributing superior performance to a particular governance variable.     

Market Discipline and the Use of Stock Market Data to Predict Bank Financial Distress

We assess the extent to which stock market information can be used to estimate leading indicators of bank financial distress. We specify a logit early warning model, designed for European banks, which tests if market based indicators add predictive value to models relying on accounting data. We also study the robustness of the link between market information and financial downgrading in the light of the safety net and asymmetric information hypotheses. Some of our results support the use of market-related indicators. Other results show that the accuracy of the predictive power depends on the extent to which bank liabilities are market traded.