Reliable Inference in Categorical Regression Analysis for Non‐randomly Coarsened Observations

In most surveys, one is confronted with missing or, more generally, coarse data. Traditional methods dealing with these data require strong, untestable and often doubtful assumptions, for example, coarsening at random. But due to the resulting, potentially severe bias, there is a growing interest in approaches that only include tenable knowledge about the coarsening process, leading to imprecise but reliable results. In this spirit, we study regression analysis with a coarse categorical‐dependent variable and precisely observed categorical covariates. Our (profile) likelihood‐based approach can incorporate weak knowledge about the coarsening process and thus offers a synthesis of traditional methods and cautious strategies refraining from any coarsening assumptions. This also allows a discussion of the uncertainty about the coarsening process, besides sampling uncertainty and model uncertainty. Our procedure is illustrated with data of the panel study ‘Labour market and social security' conducted by the Institute for Employment Research, whose questionnaire design produces coarse data.     

Family income and children's education: Using the Norwegian oil boom as a natural experiment

Parental income is positively correlated with children's educational attainment. This paper addresses the causality of this observed link. We have a unique data set for Norwegians born in the period 1967–1969, with a measure of permanent family income in the children's adolescence. This enables us to examine the long-term effect of family income on children's educational attainment. The Norwegian oil shock in the 1970s is used as an instrument, because this – in some regions but not in others – implied a general increase in income unrelated to parents' abilities. This variation in income is used to estimate the causal effect of family income on children's educational attainment. We find no such causal relationship. This result is robust with respect to different specification tests.     

Commodity Price Volatility and the Sources of Growth

This paper studies the impact of the growth and volatility of commodity terms of trade (CToT) on economic growth, total factor productivity, physical capital accumulation and human capital acquisition. We use the standard system generalized methods of moments (GMM) approach as well as the dynamic common correlated effects pooled mean group (CCEPMG) methodology for estimation to account for cross‐country heterogeneity, cross‐sectional dependence and feedback effects. Using both annual data for 1970–2007 and 5‐year non‐overlapping observations, we find that while CToT growth enhances real output per capita, CToT volatility exerts a negative impact on economic growth operating mainly through lower accumulation of physical and human capital. Productivity, however, is not affected by either the growth or the volatility of CToT. Our results also indicate that the negative growth effects of CToT volatility offset the positive impact of commodity booms. Therefore, we argue that volatility, rather than abundance per se, drives the ‘resource curse’ paradox. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Elasticity estimates of farmed salmon demand in Spain and Italy

In this paper, estimates of the elasticities that characterize the structure of demand for farmed salmon in Spain and Italy are reported. The demand models are specified using a Box-Cox transformation of the variables and a Hausman test is used to determine price endogeneity in the demand equations. The results show short-run unitary own-price elasticity of demand for farmed salmon in both markets, but long run estimates show significant elastic price response. Short run substitution of salmon for other fish species is not observed and, for both Spain and Italy, farmed salmon is characterized as a luxury good. Interestingly, we show that our a priori expectations about own-price elasticities being lower in smaller market areas is confirmed. Finally, the results obtained are compared to other recent results reported in the salmon demand literature.     

Strong measures of group coherence and the probability that a pairwise majority rule winner exists

A Pairwise Majority Rule Winner (PMRW) exists for a voting situation if some candidate can defeat each of the remaining candidates by Pairwise Majority Rule. The PMRW would be very appropriate for selection as the winner of an election, but it is well known that such a candidate does not always exist. This paper concludes a series of studies regarding the probability that a PMRW should be expected to exist in three-candidate elections, by introducing the notion of a strong measures of mutually coherent group preferences. In order for voting situations to be reasonably expected to fail to have a PMRW in a three-candidate election, voters’ preferences must be generated in an environment that is far removed from the situation in which there is a strong-overall-unifying candidate. So far removed, that it is extremely unlikely that a PMRW will not exist in voting situations with large electorates for a small number of candidates.     

THE IMPACT OF LABOR MARKET REGULATION ON EMPLOYMENT IN LOW‐INCOME COUNTRIES: A META‐ANALYSIS

Controversy over labor market policy often centers on achieving a balance between preventing worker exploitation, and avoiding loss of productivity or employment through excessive regulation. Although the literature documenting the impact of labor market regulation on employment is extensive, there is a dearth of evidence on the impact of such policies in low‐income countries (LICs). Since it is easier for workers, especially women, to slip into the informal sector in LICs, regulations are likely to have stronger impacts on formal employment in these countries (but lower impacts on unemployment). We systematically reviewed available research from countries that are, or were until recently, LICs. Most studies document that more stringent labor regulations are associated with lower formal sector employment and higher informal sector employment. We also conducted a metaregression analysis of the impact of minimum wages on formal and informal employment. After controlling for publication bias, higher minimum wages are associated with lower formal employment and a higher share of informal workers.     

The Endogeneity Problem in Applied Fisheries Econometrics: A Critical Review

Environmental and Resource Economics - The purpose of this essay is to bring attention to some serious problems that exist in econometric application of fisheries economic models. These problems in...     

Elicitation of Expert Opinion in Benefit Transfer of Environmental Goods

Benefit transfer is a method for estimating the value of environmental goods that involves the use of past information on identical or similar goods. This paper considers the extent to which benefit transfer can be based on prior distributions elicited from expert opinion. We propose two alternative methods to elicit the parameters of a prior distribution from experts on environmental valuation. An experiment is carried out on the value of National Parks in Spain. The results from the elicited distributions are compared with the information provided by onsite samples of visitors. The results indicate that individual experts made different predictions about the potential value of the policy areas that were diverse and unable to accurately predict the value for each policy site. However, the average across the elicited distributions approaches the estimated distribution with empirical data and accurately predicts the relative values for the two policy sites considered.     

Term structure and the estimated monetary policy rule in the Eurozone

In this paper we estimate a standard version of the New Keynesian Monetary (NKM) model augmented with term structure in order to analyze two issues. First, we analyze the effect of introducing an explicit term structure channel in the NKM model on the estimated parameter values of the model, with special emphasis on the interest rate smoothing parameter using data for the Eurozone. Second, we study the ability of the model to reproduce some stylized facts such as highly persistent dynamics, the weak comovement between economic activity and inflation, and the positive, strong comovement between interest rates observed in actual Eurozone data. The Sect. 3 implemented is a classical structural method based on the indirect inference principle. We are grateful to Eduardo Ley, two anonymous referees and seminar participants at the XXXI Simposio de Análisis Económico (Oviedo, Spain) and Bank of Spain for their useful comments. Financial support from Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología and Universidad del País Vasco (Spain) and Fundación Séneca through projects SEJ2004-04811/ECON, 9/UPV00035.321-13511/2001 and I02937/PHCS/05, respectively, is gratefully acknowledged. The first author also thanks Fundación Ramón Areces for financial support.     

Employment comovements at the sectoral level over the business cycle

This paper implements the technique suggested by Den Haan (J Monet Econ 46:3–30, 2000) to investigate contemporaneous as well as lead and lag correlations among economic data for a range of forecast horizons. The lead/lag approach provides a richer picture of the economic dynamics generating the data and allows one to investigate which variables lead or lag others, and whether the lead or lag pattern is short term or long term in nature. This technique is applied to monthly sectoral level employment data for the USA and shows that among the ten industrial sectors followed by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, six tend to lead the other four. These six have high correlations indicating that the structural shocks generating the data movements are mostly in common. Among the four lagging industries, some lag by longer intervals than others and some have low correlations with the leading industries. These low correlations may indicate that these industries are partially influenced by structural shocks beyond those generating the six leading industries, but they also may indicate that lagging sectors feature a different transmission mechanism of shocks.