Migration and farm technical efficiency: evidence from Kosovo

This article investigates the effect of migration on farm technical efficiency drawing on a large and representative sample of agricultural households in Kosovo. A two‐stage estimation procedure is applied: a frontier technique to estimate the effect of migration on farm efficiency, followed by a propensity score based matching approach to robustly estimate the sample average effect on efficiency for different levels of migration intensity. Migration is found to have an efficiency decreasing effect, which is amplified for better educated workers. The observed negative effect of migration on efficiency is evident even at low levels of migration intensity.     

Advertising strategy for outbound travel services

When purchasing a travel service, consumers perform multiple information searches. Depending on the accessed information and the type of media for travel service advertisements, consumers make different evaluations on the travel service. Given this context, we propose a consumer persuasion model that reveals the most effective persuasion process for consumers to make purchasing decisions on travel services. For this study, we conducted a comparative analysis to discern effectiveness and limitations between newspapers and TV infomercials; the two major media for travel service advertisements. Based on the results from the analysis, we drew some meaningful managerial implications for travel service advertising strategy.     

Asia's contribution to global rebalancing

Developing Asia remains at the core of global payment imbalances. While the geographical concentration of current account imbalances is significant—with the People's Republic of China accounting for the lion's share of the region's current account surplus—how Asia contributes to global rebalancing also depends critically on the newly industrialising economies and larger Association of Southeast Asian Nations economies. Given the region's huge diversity, the necessary national macroeconomic and structural policies will vary significantly across Asia's emerging economies. Whereas near‐term rebalancing efforts will be driven primarily by macroeconomic and exchange rate policies, structural reforms are essential for boosting domestic and regional demand as sources of economic growth over medium to long‐term. We argue that regional rebalancing will depend critically on the adoption of deeper and more comprehensive structural reforms and further trade liberalisation to unlock the potential of strong domestic and regional spending—thus reducing Asia's high dependence on extra‐regional demand. Priority policies should include infrastructure spending, competition, trade, financial development, investment, immigration, and other social policies to reduce national savings.     

A Marketing Approach to Commodity Futures Exchanges: A Case Study of the Dutch Hog Industry

This paper proposes a marketing strategic approach to commodity futures exchanges to optimise the (hedging) services offered. First, the environment of commodity futures exchanges is examined. Second, the threats and opportunities of commodity futures exchanges are analysed. Our analysis demonstrates that market orientation is an important element in the market strategies of commodity futures exchanges. Our market strategic framework is applied to the Dutch hog futures market. It is concluded that market penetration is an appropriate strategy. Consequently, to identify the variables that distinguish between farmers who initiate futures positions and farmers who do not, we conducted a discriminant analysis on data gathered from 418 Dutch hog farmers. The discriminant analysis shows that latent variables, such as farmers' perceived performance, farmers' reference price and farmers' market orientation, are important discriminating variables. Furthermore, farmers' cash market behaviour (in terms of the frequency of selling in the spot market) is an important discriminating variable as well. The usefulness of these results as input for a penetration policy is demonstrated.     

Woodsy the optimal owl: Environmental campaigns, norms, and implications for public goods policy

Norms regarding private provision of a public good (e.g. cutting down on energy use, not littering) can affect the marginal gains from contributing to a public good and therefore people's decisions about contributing to the public good. A model is proposed in which norms of private contributions to a public good can be influenced by public policy, and these norms affect people's self-image, which derives from a comparison of one's own contribution with the norm contribution. In this context, we examine the conditions under which private contributions to a public good are efficient, and the conditions under which policy affecting these norms improves social welfare. We find that (1) a benevolent social planner who fails to account for private provision norms will underprovide the public good, and (2) public policy that attempts to raise the norm contribution of private provision can increase social welfare if the effect of raising the norm does not have an extreme negative effect - either extremely small or extremely large - on peoples' self-image.     

Incentives and the structure of teams

This paper studies the relationship between moral hazard and the matching structure of teams. We show that team incentive problems may generate monotone matching predictions in the absence of complementarities in the production technology. Second, we analyze how complementarity in the underlying technology affects the matching predictions arising due to moral hazard. We find that (i) even when the production technology is strongly complementary, the incentive problem may lead to formation of negatively sorted teams; (ii) as the degree of complementarity increases, the optimal matching structure may switch from positive to negative, solely due to the need to provide incentives.     

Bibliometry and nanotechnology: A meta-analysis

As in other fields of science, bibliometry has become the primary method of gaging progress in nanotechnology. In the United States in the late 1990s, a period when policy makers were preparing the groundwork for what would become the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), bibliometry largely replaced expert interviews, then the standard method of assessing nanotechnology. However, such analyses of this sector have tended not to account for productivity. We hope to correct this oversight by integrating economic input and output measurements calculating academic publications divided by the number of researchers, and accounting for government investment in nanotechnology. When nanotechnology journal publication is measured in these ways, the U.S. is not the leader, as has been widely assumed. Rather, it lags behind Germany, the United Kingdom, and France.     

Homeownership, dissatisfaction and voting

This article explores the relationships between homeownership, dissatisfaction with city services, and voting turnout in local elections, using original survey data. Homeowners are more likely than renters to vote, but the pure effect of ownership is not robust to either basic socio-economic controls or an instrumental variable strategy. However, dissatisfaction has a positive, significant and robust effect on likelihood of voting. When interacting homeownership and dissatisfaction, the author finds that dissatisfied homeowners are significantly more likely to vote than both satisfied homeowners and all renters. This finding is consistent with Fischel’s (2001) homevoter hypothesis.     

A new class of asymptotically efficient estimators for moment condition models

In this paper, we propose a new class of asymptotically efficient estimators for moment condition models. These estimators share the same higher order bias properties as the generalized empirical likelihood estimators and once bias corrected, have the same higher order efficiency properties as the bias corrected generalized empirical likelihood estimators. Unlike the generalized empirical likelihood estimators, our new estimators are much easier to compute. A simulation study finds that our estimators have better finite sample performance than the two-step GMM, and compare well to several potential alternatives in terms of both computational stability and overall performance.