Sexual orientation and household decision making.: Same-sex couples' balance of power and labor supply choices.

This study estimates the effect of intra-household-bargaining on gay and lesbian couples' labor supplies, in order to determine how homosexual and heterosexual decision making compare, in a collective-household framework. Data from the 2000 US Census show that couples of all types exhibit a significant response to bargaining power shifts, as measured by age and non-labor-income differences between partners. Among gay, lesbian, and heterosexual cohabiting couples, a relatively young or rich partner has more bargaining power and supplies less labor, the opposite being true for his/her mate. Among married couples, the older spouse is instead more powerful, or the richer. No such patterns are found among same-sex roommates.     

Strategic manipulation of a pollution permit market and international trade

We consider a framework where firms which compete in an international product market are not all submitted to a pollution permit market. Using the Brander and Spencer’s framework (J Int Econ 18:83–100, 1985), we seek to determine the optimal strategies of both a dominant firm in the pollution permit market and the regulator in a such context. We first show that the dominant firm pursues a strategic manipulation to increase its profit. We also find that the regulator uses a sophisticated strategic policy to increase the domestic welfare by using two instruments: the initial allocation of pollution permits and the pollution cap.     

A test for the too-big-to-fail hypothesis for European banks during the financial crisis

Motivated by the theoretical prediction of the opportunistic behaviour of large banks that face expected public intervention, we test a full and a partial form of the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) hypothesis. The full form of the hypothesis implies the increase in the risk undertakings and profitability of banks that exceed a certain dimension; the partial form of the hypothesis implies only an augmented risk appetite of large banks compared to their smaller counterparts. The examined area is the European banking industry, whose behaviour is observed over the first wave of the present financial crisis (2007/09). The estimation of a quadratic fit that links change in a bank’s credit risk profile and profitability retention rates with a bank’s size suggests the existence of a partial form of the TBTF hypothesis. However, a more precise, local rolling windows estimation of the size sensitivities reveals that large banks – those whose liabilities exceed approximately 2% of the country of origin’s GDP (15% of our sample) – show an increase in credit risk profile and a superior capability of retaining higher ROA scores, vis-à-vis their smaller counterparts. With the caveats of our investigation, we interpret these results as evidence of a full form of the TBTF hypothesis.     

Sex-Typed Service Images: An Empirical Investigation of Self-Service Variables

This article presents a study of sex-typed service images based on gender research in marketing and service encounter theory. The purpose is to address the issues of how and why services as distinct from products acquire a sex-typed image. Two streams of research provide the variables hypothesized to influence sex- image determination: gender research provides individual variables related to the consumer him/herself, and service encounter research provides variables related to the service itself. Consumer variables include an individual's biological and psychological sex image and personal use, while service variables deal with the sex image of the firm's characteristic provider and typical customer. A study conducted to test the hypotheses that both sets of variables influence a service's sex-typed image is presented. Marketing implications for development and promotion of new services and re-positioning of extant ones are discussed.     

Between Flexibility and Regulation: Rights, Equality and Protection at Work

The year 2000 represented the real year of delivery on Labour's proposals for industrial relations and employment rights. This review focuses on the content of the government's legislative programme, taking account of the impact of public policy at European level and its relationship with national legislation. The government's programme included a number of measures designed to target discrimination and promote equality, and the review examines the form and significance of these changes, in the light of continuing discrimination in the labour market. It then turns to examine the most fundamental legal reform of the year, the introduction of the statutory right to recognition.     

Capital indivisibility and tax competition: Are there too many business areas when some of them are empty?

In this paper, we propose a model where local jurisdictions must engage a development cost before competing for hosting a firm with uncertain preferences among possible sites. We first show that even an optimizing central planner managing all the jurisdictions develops more sites than there are plants to host. Doing so, he diversifies his supply and has a higher probability of hosting the firm. Then, we show that, if every jurisdiction is managed by a local government, there are more developed sites than with the central planner, which implies excess supply.     

Role of education and extension in the adoption of technology: a study of upland rice and soybean farmers in Central-West Brazil

This paper explores reduced form determinants of the adoption of certain technologies by upland rice and soybean farmers in the Center-West region of Brazil. We merge community level data on the availability and quality of publicly provided infrastructure, principally extension, to the farm level data containing information on farmer human capital as well as land quantity and quality. By using community level measures of availability and quality of extension, we avoid problems of endogeneity of farm level measures of extension use. We find positive impacts of farmer education on the diffusion process, in accordance with other studies. We also isolate effects of the quality in regional extension investment as measured by the average experience of technical extension staff. These results indicate that investments in human capital of extension workers does have a payoff in terms of farmer adoption of improved cultivation practices.     

Convergence to competitive equilibria and elimination of no-trade (in a strategic market game with limit prices)

The strategic market games literature contains many results that predict Walrasian equilibria in the competitive limit. However, they usually come at the expense of ad hoc assumptions that rule out “pathological” no trade equilibria. This paper studies a strategic market game with limit prices. The set of Nash equilibrium allocations of this game converges to the set containing all competitive equilibria and no-trade, when players are replicated. Moreover, two rounds of iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies eliminate the no-trade equilibria. Hence, replication paired with two rounds of iterated dominance gives a clean prediction of competitive equilibrium.     

The consumer's relational commitment: main dimensions and antecedents

As in business-to-business relationships, consumers often establish and maintain long-term relationships with firms. This article uses a multidisciplinary approach with the aims of describing the process that a consumer follows until committing to a firm and identifying the main dimensions and antecedents of the consumer's commitment. As antecedents of commitment, the proposed model considers dependence and trust through the reduction in uncertainty and in the perception of opportunism. The empirical study for the consumer–garage relationship suggests that the consumer's trust reduces the fear and perception of the firm's opportunism and engenders affective and temporal commitment.