Workers’ tenure and firm productivity: New evidence from matched employer-employee panel data

Using rich longitudinal matched employer-employee data on Belgian firms, we explore the impact of workers’ tenure on firm productivity. To do so, we estimate production functions augmented with firm-level measures of tenure. We deal with the endogeneity of standard inputs and tenure, which arises from unobserved firm heterogeneity and reverse causality, by applying a modified version of Ackerberg et al.’s (2015) control function method, which explicitly removes firm fixed effects. Consistently with recent theoretical predictions, our analyses point to positive, but decreasing, returns to tenure. We also find that the impact differs widely across several firm dimensions. Tenure is particularly beneficial for productivity in contexts characterized by a certain degree of routineness and low job complexity. Along the same lines, our findings indicate that tenure exerts stronger positive impacts in industrial and capital-intensive firms, as well as in firms less reliant on ICT-intensive and knowledge-intensive processes.     

Is international tourism responsible for the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic? A cross-country analysis with a special focus on small islands

This article aims at analysing the role of international tourism attractiveness as a potential factor for the outbreak and the early spread of the recent COVID-19 disease across the world (also called the first wave) with a special focus on small Island economies. Econometric testing is implemented over a cross-country sample including 205 countries/territories (with 59 small islands) after controlling for several usual suspects. The results state a positive and significant relationship between COVID-19 prevalence and inbound tourism arrivals per capita. Thus in the early stages of the spread (before travel restrictions), international tourism could be seen as one of the main responsible factors for the recent pandemic, validating the “tourism-led vulnerability hypothesis”. Accordingly, considering that such health shocks should be more frequent in the near future, this finding suggests that the tourism specialization model in the context of small islands is too vulnerable to be considered as sustainable in the medium and long-run. Policymakers must opt for economic diversification when possible. Otherwise, building up a strong public-health system alongside a specialized tourism sector is required.

     

The resurrection of earlier imprints post mortem: Explaining the Turkish agricultural cooperative movement with an imprinting theory lens, 1888–1937

This study aims to extend the cooperative lifecycle theory, which builds on consecutive degeneration and regeneration of ideal cooperative values such as democracy, self-help, and solidarity by offering a new regenerative mechanism. In this respect, the study imports multilevel imprinting theory from the organizational ecology domain to explicate the punctuated evolutionary pattern of Turkish agricultural credit cooperatives, which displayed significantly different characteristics from Raiffeisen cooperatives that cooperative discourse in Türkiye used for a long as a benchmark. The archival research undertaken in the study asserts that the imprints of Ottoman Memleket Sandiks (OMS) have stamped agricultural credit cooperatives of the Republican era long after their erosion. The resurrection of imprints was enabled by Ziraat Bank, which acted as an intermediary organization and took over the remnants of OMSs. Our analyses also suggest that the State's polity and policy transformations culminate in selective activation of past imprints within the Ziraat Bank, which, in turn, shaped the Turkish agricultural cooperative field.     

Quid pro quo harassment,contracts and liability

This paper identifies two channels through which contracts induce performance and contain quid pro quo harassment: a disincentive effect raises the cost for harassers and a selection effect that attracts whistleblower types raises potential victims' resistance. An effective employer liability generates a negative relationship between wages and harassment risk. If liability is ineffective, however, employers can opt for low-wage contracts that induce high harassment and minimum internal complaints. In such environments, wages compensate exogenous harassment risks. Thus the wage-harassment risk equation can signal effectiveness of employer liability.     

Working time reduction and employment in a finite world*

We study the consequences of a working time reduction (WTR) in a growth model with efficiency wages and an essential natural resource (natural capital), and in which technical progress cannot reduce the resource content of final production to zero. We show that if natural capital is scarce enough, a WTR increases the long-term levels of the hourly wage and employment. A numerical analysis of the transitory impacts of a WTR confirms that when natural capital is scarcer, a WTR increases employment more and the hourly wage less, with a less negative initial impact on output.     

On the economic impacts of COVID-19: A text mining literature analysis

The COVID-19 outbreak has affected everyday lives worldwide. As governments started to implement confinement and business closure measures, the economic impact was felt by entire societies immediately. The urgency of such a theme has led researchers to study the phenomenon. Accordingly, the purpose of this research is to provide the state of the art on relevant dimensions and hot topics of research to understand the economic impacts of COVID-19. In this survey, we conduct a text mining analysis of 301 articles published during 2020 which analyzed such economic impacts. By defining a set of relevant dimensions grounded on existing literature, we were able to extract a set of coherent topics that aggregate the collected articles, characterized by the predominance of a few sets of dimensions. We found that the impact on “financial markets” was widely studied, especially in relation to Asia. Next, we found a more diverse range of themes analyzed in Europe, from “government measures” to “macroeconomic variables.” We also discovered that America has not received the same degree of attention, and “institutions,” “Africa,” or “other pandemics” were studied less. We anticipate that future research will proliferate focusing on several themes, from environmental issues to the effectiveness of government measures.     

COLLECTIVELY GARDENING THE URBAN PUBLIC SPACE IN MEXICO CITY: When Informal Practices Interact with the State

In recent years, a growing number of citizen-led gardens have appeared in the urban public spaces of large cities across the world. While many of these projects are initially launched informally without any support from the state, they gradually become integrated into the social fabric of the city. To understand the evolution of the formal–informal boundaries of the practice, we argue that we should be paying attention to the specific institutional contexts that frame gardeners’ interactions with public authorities. Drawing from a study of citizen-led gardens in Mexico City, we show that informal urban gardening becomes a disconnected-from-the-state practice. On the one hand, the Mexico City government has shown a growing interest in regulating urban agriculture. On the other hand, gardeners are increasingly trying to find their own ways to formalize and perennate their practice. We suggest that this disconnection between gardeners and the state is best explained by the weakness of the institutional context in which their interactions take place. A top-down policymaking process, along with the incapacity and unwillingness of the multi-leveled city government to implement policies effectively, reinforces norms of mistrust and generates low expectations among gardeners as they interact with local authorities.     

Climate change and spatial agricultural development in Turkey

This paper investigates the impact of climate change on the spatial distribution of agricultural production in Turkey between 2004 and 2019. Our findings show that climate change has a pervasive impact on agricultural development. The empirical results show that the average temperature is negatively associated with agricultural land use, grain, and legume production. Moreover, regional variability analyses reveal the nonmonotonic relationships between climatic factors and agricultural output. Climate change hurts agricultural production in northern and central regions the most. This finding points out the ineffectiveness of one-size-fits-all-type policies for mitigating the adverse effects of climate change in topography with sizeable spatial dissimilarities. Overall, our results suggest that climate change will significantly threaten the evolution of agricultural activities that are critical for regional development. In addition, findings show that spatial spillovers and heterogeneity will be crucial for designing climate change policies for rural and agricultural development.     

EFFECTS OF THE REAL EXCHANGE RATE ON OUTPUT AND INFLATION: EVIDENCE FROM TURKEY

This paper assesses the effects of real depreciation on the economic performance of Turkey by considering quarterly data from 1987:I to 2001:III. The empirical evidence suggests that, contrary to classical wisdom, the real depreciations are contractionary, even when external factors like world interest rates, international trade, and capital flows are controlled. Moreover, the results obtained from the analyses indicate that real exchange rate depreciations are inflationary.     

Effects of Policy Reforms on Firm Innovation

Review of Industrial Organization - The regulatory environment in a country is an important factor that affects firm performance. This study investigates the impact of a particular...