Women and economic development

This article relates some experiences of local authority interventions in Wolverhampton which have contributed to effective economic development work with women. The intention is to highlight approaches and actions which we believe need to be incorporated into local authority economic strategy in order to address women's needs. We also aim to identify certain limiting factors arising from the national context. The paper is based on work undertaken by the authors whilst working for Wolverhampton Council.     

Derivation of netput shadow prices under different levels of pest pressure

In this paper, we propose a framework to derive agricultural netput shadow prices that assign values to netputs in terms of their contribution to technical and environmental efficiency. Our modeling approach is based on the dual representation of an event-specific data envelopment model and is applied to a panel dataset of Dutch arable farms. Results show that netput shadow prices vary significantly across pest pressure events, suggesting the relevance to consider the event-specific nature of the production technology when computing them. By revealing the relative importance of pesticides in terms of their contribution to environmental efficiency, this study provides a potential framework for constructing penalties aiming to internalize some portion of the social cost of pesticide use.     

National labor markets, international factor mobility and macroeconomic instability

We consider a standard two-country environment, where one of the two countries has a rigid labor market, and analyze how global economic integration affects the economies with respect to expectations-driven cycles and steady state welfare. We show that by allowing free capital mobility, equilibrium indeterminacy is exported from the rigid wage country to the world economy. If further liberalization is permitted, by allowing free movements of labor, the scope for indeterminacy is reduced and open labor markets may produce a stabilizing effect on the global macro-economy. Whether this also implies higher welfare in the long run depends on differentials in average firm size across countries, which determines the direction of migration flows.     

Price transmission and asymmetric adjustment in the Spanish dairy sector

Asymmetric threshold vector error correction models are applied to monthly price data to analyse price relationships and patterns of transmission among farm and retail markets for a variety of dairy products in Spain. The results suggest that asymmetries affect a conspicuous part of the raw milk processed in Spain. Implications for the organizational structure of Spanish dairy markets are offered.     

Long-run income and price elasticities of demand for Colombian nontraditional exports: a multivariate cointegration framework

A long run income and price elasticities of demand is estimated for Colombian nontraditional exports through a multivariate cointegration analysis. Based on the combination of cointegration and exogeneity concepts and the inclusion of the complete dynamic system, the paper shows the existence of a long-run relationship among nontraditional exports, relative price and foreign demand, and higher long-run elasticities than those provided by the long-run cointegration vector coefficients that are usually reported in the trade literature.     

An evaluation of the management of the Finnish employment service

This paper analyses the efficiency of the Finnish Employment Service's management in selecting unemployed individuals who are offered a job. The database used considers short-term unemployed individuals who face the same labour market conditions in 1996. Duration analysis with a Weibull model has been performed in order to study the determinants of the transition probability from unemployment into employment and the impact of receiving job offers through the Employment Service (ES). In order to carry this out, it has been taken into account that the reception of such job offers may be endogenous because the ES selects the individuals who will receive the offers. The empirical results suggest that the decisions made by the ES are adequate in the sense that they increase the benefit of society, compared with a random assignment of the vacancies offered through the ES. Moreover, the effects of the other determinants depend on whether the individual receives offers. The results also point out that individuals who receive no offers through the ES are more likely, as time passes by, to be discouraged in searching for a job than those who do.     

Job exit of men: new job destination versus unemployment destination

Job exit of men over the age of forty is described and analysed using monthly observations derived from the 1988-89 UK Retirement Survey. A competing risks model is described and estimated. The results show that tenure and age determine transitions from a job to a new one, whereas those transitions from a job to unemployment are also determined by business cycle variables.     

On the determinants of local government performance: A two-stage nonparametric approach

This article analyzes the efficiency of local governments in the Comunitat Valenciana (Spain) and their main explanatory variables. The analysis is performed in two stages. Firstly, efficiency is measured via (nonparametric) activity analysis techniques. Specifically, we consider both Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Free Disposable Hull (FDH) techniques. The second stage identifies some critical determinants of efficiency, focusing on both political and fiscal policy variables. In contrast to previous two-stage research studies, our approach performs the latter attempt via nonparametric smoothing techniques, rather than econometric methods such as OLS or Tobit related techniques. Results show that efficiency scores, especially under the nonconvexity assumption (FDH), are higher for large municipalities. Thus, there is empirical evidence to suggest that resources may be better allocated by large municipalities. However, the inefficiency found is not entirely attributable to poor management, as second-stage analysis reveals both fiscal and political variables to be explicably related to municipality performance. Moreover, the explanatory variables’ impact on efficiency is robust to the chosen technique—either convex DEA or nonconvex FDH.     

Nonparametric estimation of convergence of interest rates: Effects on bond pricing

We present and estimate a model of short term interest rate dynamics where we incorporate the convergent behavior of interest rates implied by the transition to EMU. We apply this model to data of two EMU countries - Spain and Italy - and compare the performance, in terms of accuracy of bond pricing, of this two-factor convergence model with alternative specifications. Nonparametric techniques are used for the estimation of the processes. The two-factor model which accounts for the convergence with Europe of the domestic economies, obtains better results, especially for short-term assets, than alternative models. The results of the nonparametric specifications are shown to be significantly better than those of parametric alternatives.JEL Classification: E43, C14We would like to thank Adrian Pagan and Eduardo Schwartz for their invaluable feedback, encouragement and patience. We also would like to thank the editor, two anonymous referees and participants at the Symposium of Economic Analysis (Barcelona, December 1999), the Australasian Meeting of the Econometric Society (Sydney, July 1999), the 2000 European Meeting of the Financial Management Association (Edinburgh, July 2000) and seminars at the Australian National University, Canberra, and at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, for their comments and suggestions. All errors remain our sole responsibility. Financial assistance from the Fundación Ramó n Areces, Madrid, Spain, and the Asociación de Amigos de la Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain, is gratefully acknowledged.