Spatial models of logrolling in the European Union

This paper presents spatial models of logrolling in the EU. It analyzes the Commission appointment, logrolling and policy-making processes under the EU's principal legislative procedures: the consultation, cooperation and codecision procedures. The theory characterizes equilibrium EU policies and sets of successful policies, i.e., sets of policies that can become EU policy during the logrolling and policy-making processes. It also determines countries' optimal nomination strategies and countries' and legislators' optimal voting strategies during the Commission appointment process. It concludes that the EU institutions provide opportunities for efficient and stable exchanges of votes.     

Staggered Wage Setting in Normal and Real Terms: A Comparative Analysis*

This paper analyses the behaviour of an economy characterized by staggered wage contract rules specified in nominal and in real terms. It is shown that staggered contracts in real terms imply complex eigenvalues which cause oscillatory paths both for output and unemployment and stonger output losses in response to an unexpected and permanent fall in the growth rate of money supply.     

Ceo Locus of Control and Small Firm Performance: an Integrative Framework and Empirical Test*

Previous research on the impact of chief executive officer (CEO) locus of control is mainly based on simple and partial mappings of bivariate associations between CEO locus of control and organizational outcomes. In addition, distinct substreams have emerged in which intricately related phenomena are studied separately. to overcome this fragmentation and polarization, we provide and empirically test an integrative framework based on previously tested hypotheses on the impact of CEO locus of control. Our approach differs from prior research in two ways. First, it simultaneously takes account of strategic choice and firm performance in order to assess the extent to which strategy mediates the relationship between CEO locus of control and organizational performance. Second, we consider the CEO to be both a formulator and implementor of organizational strategies. Besides the observation that CEO locus of control seems to matter a lot in terms of explaining organizational performance in the present sample, our results demonstrate that an integrative approach increases our insight into the impact of CEO locus of control by revealing why some CEOs achieve higher organizational performance than others.     

Top Management Team Functional Diversity and Firm Performance: The Moderating Role of CEO Characteristics

Past research indicates that the effect of TMT functional diversity on firm performance is equivocal. We address this issue by focusing on the integrative role of the CEO, postulating that the CEO's expertise and background characteristics affect the TMT functional diversity–firm performance relationship, because of their impact on the exchange and integration of distributed knowledge within the TMT. Using a dataset of 33 Dutch and Belgian Information Technology firms we investigate the moderating role of three sets of CEO characteristics (functional background, status as founder, and shared experience with the other TMT members) on the relationship between TMT functional diversity and firm performance. Our results reveal that CEO and TMT characteristics do interact in realizing the potential advantages of distributed TMT functional expertise.     

Robust explicit estimators of Weibull parameters

The Weibull distribution plays a central role in modeling duration data. Its maximum likelihood estimator is very sensitive to outliers. We propose three robust and explicit Weibull parameter estimators: the quantile least squares, the repeated median and the median/Q _n estimator. We derive their breakdown point, influence function, asymptotic variance and study their finite sample properties in a Monte Carlo study. The methods are illustrated on real lifetime data affected by a recording error.     

Censored Quantile Regressions of Chronic and Transient Seasonal Poverty in Rwanda

It is crucial for social policy in Less Developed Countriesto identify correlates of poverty at the household level. Thishas been done in the literature by estimating household povertyequations typically with Tobit and Probit models. However, whenthe errors in these equations are non-normal and heteroscedastic,which is usually expected, these models deliver biased estimates.Using quarterly data from Rwanda in 1983, we reject the normalityand homoscedasticity assumptions for household chronic and transientlatent poverty equations. We treat this problem by estimatingcensored quantile regressions. Our results of censored quantileregressions and of inconsistent Tobit regressions are substantiallydifferent. However, in the case of chronic poverty the signsof the apparently significant coefficients are generally inagreement, while for seasonal transient poverty different variableshave significant effects for the two estimation methods. Oursecond contribution is to study, for the first time, correlatesof poverty indicators based on quarterly consumptions. Our resultsshow that in Rwanda different correlates are significant forchronic poverty and for transient seasonal poverty. The effectsof the main inputs (land and labour) are more important forthe chronic component of poverty than for the transient one.Household location and socio-demographic characteristics playimportant roles that are consistent with usual explanationsof poverty in the literature.     

Multidimensional inequality comparisons: A compensation perspective

We provide a unified treatment of the two approaches pioneered by Atkinson and Bourguignon (1982, 1987) [3], [4] by resorting to compensation principles in the bivariate case. We treat the attributes of individual utility asymmetrically by assuming that one attribute can be used to compensate another. Our main result consists of two sufficient second-order stochastic dominance conditions. In the case where the compensated variable has a discrete distribution, the distribution of the compensating variable must satisfy a condition which degenerates to the Sequential Generalized Lorenz test for identical marginal distributions of the compensated variable. Furthermore, the distributions of the compensated variable must satisfy the Generalized Lorenz test.