Monetary policy and long‐term interest rates: Evidence from the U.S. economy

This paper addresses the ability of central banks to affect the structure of interest rates. We assess the causal relationship between the short‐term Effective Federal Funds Rate (FF) and long‐term interest rates associated with both public and private bonds and specifically, the 10‐Year Treasury Bond (GB10Y) and the Moody's Aaa Corporate Bond (AAA). To do this, we apply Structural Vector Autoregressive models to U.S. monthly data for the 1954–2018 period. Based on results derived from impulse response functions and forecast error variance decomposition, we find: a bidirectional relationship when GB10Y is considered as the long‐term rate and a unidirectional relationship that moves from short‐ to long‐term interest rates when AAA is considered. These conclusions show that monetary policy is able to permanently affect long‐term interest rates and the central bank has a certain degree of freedom in setting the levels of the short‐term policy rate.     

Kinked norms of behaviour and cooperation

Using a country panel of domestic terror attacks from 1998 to 2004, we empirically analyze the impact of government decentralization on terror. Our results show that expenditure decentralization reduces domestic terror, while political decentralization has no impact.     

Shared wealth or nobody's land? The worth of natural capital and ecosystem services

The prerequisite for a sustainable and equitable use of common resources (the so-called Commons) must be the proper evaluation of their role within the complex network of relationships that ensure ecosystems functioning, resilience, and evolutionary dynamics. It is crucial to ascertain to what extent the common wealth is used for the common benefit. Money-based schemes for valuing the Commons, such as the so-called “willingness-to-pay”, provide a user-side evaluation perspective based on the idea that value only stems from utilization by humans. As a complement to such a point of view, we present and discuss in this paper a donor-side evaluation method (Emergy Synthesis) based on the idea that a proper measure of value can be achieved by also accounting for the work done by the biosphere in generating services and resources. It should not be disregarded that such resources and services also provide support to other species in the web of life. Emergy, a scientific measure of such environmental support, is suggested as a tool capable to assess quantity and quality of shared resources, thus providing a basis for their environmentally sound management.     

The Citizen‐Consumer as Industrial Relations Actor: New Ways of Working and the End‐user in Social Care

This article explores the role of the citizen‐consumer as an actor in public service industrial relations. Based on research into the New Types of Worker programme in social care, the article considers how new work roles engage end‐users as citizen‐consumers in work relations and their consequences for stakeholders. It highlights the forms assumed by these roles and the factors influencing their development and impact, concluding that if the citizen‐consumer is to be treated as an actor in industrial relations, researchers must show greater sensitivity to the categories of end‐users and to the service context.     

Financing Pay-as-you-go Public Pension Systems: Some Notes in the Light of the Classical-type Theory of Income Distribution

The paper uses a Sraffa-type two-sector model to study how the presence of retired workers interacts with the distribution of the surplus between workers and capitalists (firms). In particular, the paper investigates how the ongoing diminution of the ratio between active and retired workers affects the wage-profits-pensions frontier, which is defined after allowing that a social security tax, which reduces the claims of active workers and capitalists on the surplus of the economy, finances the pensions distributed each year to retired workers. Finally, it is argued that the different impact of defined-benefit and defined-contribution pay-as-you-go pension schemes depends on the actual incidence of payroll taxes.     

Salesperson's listening in buyer–seller service relationships

Research has consistently shown that salesperson's active listening behavior leads to strong sales performance. Yet the influence of management policies on listening has received very limited attention, and prior research linking listening to customer retention has led to mixed findings. This study examines how listening is enhanced through control systems and the influence of listening on customer retention in a service context. Dyadic data from salespeople and their customers show that a behavior-based control system (measured as a second-order construct) positively influences listening and the salesperson's customer orientation totally mediates the influence of listening on customer commitment to the salesperson and loyalty to the service company. Our findings indicate that listening is a necessary but not sufficient condition for assuring relationship development. More specifically, customer orientation is the generative mechanism through which listening is able to influence customer retention. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

Creativity and the positive reading of Baumol cost disease

This paper proposes a more positive and useful reading of cost disease. A case is presented for refocussing general attention from the characteristics of cost disease (i.e. widening production cost and price gap between the product of progressive and stagnant industries) to its sources. This is a useful exercise because the most important aspect of cost disease is a fundamental intuition: some types of labour provide particular contributions to various production processes that capital and new technologies are not able to replace. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Welfare Impacts of Cross-Country Spillovers in Agricultural Research

The welfare implications of intellectual property protection (IPP) for private sector agricultural research are analyzed, focusing on the realistic cases where countries provide different IPP levels, technology spills over across countries, and the public sector is involved in research. A model is developed to determine who benefits from, and who should pay for, the associated research. The article contains some interesting results on the implications of a harmonization of IPP policies through multilateral agreements or via technology that allows research firms to prevent the copying of plants and animals that express traits that have emerged from their research.