Long and Short Run Determinants of Small and Medium Size Enterprise Share: The Case of Venezuelan Manufacturing

Two recent studies of SME share determination have employed a partial adjustment model which specifies disequilibrium as the sole means of explanation. Contemporaneous information is found to be crucial in both analyses and suggests forward looking behaviour in the equilibrium specification. Time series data available for Venezuela allows the testing of such an equilibrium using the Engle and Granger (1987) error correction methodology. We find that current dated variables are important in the short rather than long run determination of SME shares and that only information known at the time the equilibrium is formed enters the long run component. The primary factors explaining equilibrium share are barriers to entry, factor mix, enterprise modernisation and a new exogenous proxy variable, GDP. The main determinants of short run movements are factor mix and enterprise modernisation. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

‘Leisure’ in the writings of Walter Benjamin

The work of Walter Benjamin has achieved belated recognition in the social sciences as one of the most prescient accounts of modernity. However, it is not generally recognized that Benjamin also provides the first theory of leisure as an inevitably politicized type of activity. By tying the expansion of leisure to the rise of consumer culture and the development of modernity, Benjamin showed why leisure is fated to become beset with conflict. At the root of this is the idea that the increasing reflexivity produced by the growth of leisure time and space exposes the political fetters on leisure experience in capitalist society. In this paper the essential features of Benjamin's analysis as they pertain to understanding and studying leisure are considered. These are taken to be his concepts of modernity, phantasmagoria, aura and flanerie. The meaning of each concept is addressed and related to the wider theme of leisure experience. An attempt to show the value of Benjamin's approach compared with current influential positions in the field of leisure theory is made.     

A bounds analysis of school completion rates in Australia

Official estimates of school completion rates in Australia increased in the 1980s, peaked in 1992, and fell immediately thereafter before stabilizing. The official estimates were a specific focus of Australian education policy. The decline caused concern at the time. We use data from the Australian Youth Survey (AYS) to gain insight into the behavior of the official estimates. The AYS suffers from nonrepresentativeness, attrition and nonresponse, which means that parameters of interest are not identified. Our bounds analysis is suggestive that school completion was overstated in the official estimates at their peak. Our analysis points to repetition as a key factor in inflating the official estimates. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Publication Bias in the Economic Freedom and Economic Growth Literature

Abstract.  The impact of institutions on economic performance has attracted significant attention from researchers, as well as from policy reformers. A rapidly growing area in this literature is the impact of economic freedom on economic growth. The aim of this paper was to explore publication bias in this literature by means of traditional funnel plots, meta‐significance testing, as well as by bootstrapping these meta‐significance tests. When all the available estimates are combined and averaged, there seems to be evidence of a genuine and positive economic freedom – economic growth effect. However, it is also shown that the economic freedom – economic growth literature is tainted strongly with publication bias. The existence of publication bias makes it difficult to identify the magnitude of the genuine effect of economic freedom on economic growth. The paper explores the differences between aggregate and disaggregate measures of economic freedom and shows that selection effects are stronger when aggregate measures are used.     

Delivering quality accommodation for small businesses in London despite market difficulties

Public policy on the subject of small business support generally concentrates on tackling market failures in delivering finance, innovation, technical development, skills and entrepreneurship. However, in growing city regions such as London, the difficulty in obtaining good quality fit-for-purpose accommodation can be an important factor inhibiting the growth of otherwise successful business. The rate of business formation is very high in London, but paradoxically, the very vibrancy of the economy creates a real estate market that can be hostile to the needs of small businesses, particularly those which achieve rapid growth. This article will consider the factors that cause this situation and will then outline some practical examples of how they can be overcome by smart public sector intervention.     

Market structure and the efficiency of European insurance companies: A stochastic frontier analysis

This paper is motivated by the progressive liberalisation of the European insurance market in recent years. It uses stochastic frontier analysis to estimate Flexible Fourier cost functions for European insurance companies. Separate frontiers are estimated for life, non-life and composite companies. We adopt a maximum likelihood approach to estimation in which the variance of both one-sided and two-sided error terms is modelled jointly with the frontiers. This approach allows us to simultaneously control for the impact of heteroskedasticity on the estimation of scale economies as well as estimating the effect of firm size and market structure on X-inefficiency. The study draws on Standard & Poor’s Eurothesys data set of financial reports for the period 1995 to 2001. This provides technical and non-technical accounts at year-end for life, non-life and composite insurance businesses in 14 major European countries. Our estimates suggest that over this period most European insurers were operating under conditions of decreasing costs (increasing returns to scale), and that company size and domestic market share were significant factors determining X-inefficiency. Larger firms, and those with high market shares, tend to have higher levels of cost inefficiency.     

Income, Cohort Effects, and Occupational Mobility: A New Look at Immigration to the United States at the Turn of the 20th Century

How did turn-of-the-20th-century immigrants perform in the American economy relative to native-born Americans? This article reassesses this question using data from the 1900 and 1910 American census files. I find in both cross sections that American immigrants perform well in blue-collar and white-collar occupations, with either faster growth in earnings or an outright earnings advantage over native-born Americans in the same occupational sector. Estimates of within-cohort growth reveal that the cross-sectional results do not overstate immigrant progress due to cohort effects. Immigrants also exhibit a high degree of mobility into the well-paid white-collar sector of the American economy, and the progress of the immigrant population as a whole was not slowed by the emergence of the “new” immigration.