A Middle Class Image of Society

We studied undercoverage and nonresponse in a telephone survey among the population of the City ofGroningen, the Netherlands. The original sample, drawn from the municipal population register,contained 7000 individuals. For 37 percent of them, the telephone company was unable to produce a validtelephone number. Of those with a known telephone number, 49 percent did not answer the telephone orrefused to cooperate. As a result, the final respondents comprised merely 32 percent of the originalsample. To study distributional bias, we used individual-level data compiled from municipal records asour benchmark. Bivariate as well as multivariate analyses showed the undercoverage to be stronglyrelated to all sociodemographic variables studied, except gender. Nonresponse was related to age, countryof origin, marital status, and household size and composition, but not to gender, unemployment, socialassistance benefit, and education. Both undercoverage and nonresponse contributed to a strong middleclass bias in the final data set: middle-aged and older, economically secure people, of Dutch origin andliving with others in a household are overrepresented, while persons in disadvantaged and marginalpositions, such as the young, people of foreign stock, the unemployed, persons depending on publicincome support and singles are underrepresented.     

Have Employment Relationships in the United States Become Less Stable?

There has been considerable debate as to whether job stability has declined in the United States. This paper uses data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine the incidence of labor market turnover between 1986 and 1993. Specifically, we calculate one- and two-year separation rates and then analyze turnover by the source of separation. We find that the incidence of job separations did not increase over the period under investigation, but appears to have declined somewhat. When analyzing separations by reason, conditional on separating from an employer, we find little evidence of temporal changes in the composition of turnover that would indicate greater employment instability. Therefore, we do not find conclusive evidence that employment relationships have become more unstable in the recent past.      

Extending the SAM with Social and Environmental Indicators: An Application to Bolivia

Extending economic accounts with sets of social and environmental indicators is a first step towards a more integrated analysis of aspects of sustainability problems. In this article, therefore, a proposal is made to nest social and environmental indicators into an existing economic accounting framework. The Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) is taken as a basis, because of its flexibility regarding extensions with non-monetary data addressing social and environmental concerns. The main thrust of the paper is methodological. From the discussion of methodological issues and the application to the SAM for Bolivia for the year 1989, it is concluded that it is, in principle, feasible and relatively simple to extend the SAM with the two sets of indicators. However, additional data will have to be collected to be able to address, more adequately, the problems of sustainability.     

Real-life cost of vitamin K antagonist treatment in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation in France in 2013

Aims: Data highlighting the cost drivers for non-valvular atrial fibrillation (NVAF) patients in terms of vitamin K antagonist (VKA) treatment and monitoring are lacking in France. This study aimed to evaluate the real-life daily cost of VKA treatment in 2013, in French patients suffering from NVAF.

Methods: This longitudinal observational study was performed using the EGB (Echantillon Généraliste des Bénéficiaires) database, a random sample of the French national insurance (NHI) database, which covers 80% of the population. All adult patients whose first NVAF anticoagulant treatment in 2013 was a VKA were analyzed. Costs were calculated for the duration of follow-up and then divided by the number of days of therapy. The analysis was performed both from the French NHI perspective (amount reimbursed by the NHI) and from a collective perspective.

Results: In this study, 3,254 NVAF patients treated with VKA in 2013 were included, and this sample comprised 52.6% males. The mean daily cost of VKA treatment was €1.13 (±1.18) according to the collective perspective (89.4% of this cost was associated to INR measurement) and €1.05 (±1.16) according to the NHI perspective.

Limitations: As diagnoses associated with procedures are not available in the EGB database, proxies were used, and an algorithm was created to define the AF population.

Conclusions: This analysis is the first to consider an exhaustive spectrum of the costs of VKA treatment in France using EGB data. VKA medication requires exhaustive follow-up, and, thus, associated costs are important. The results of the present study confirmed this close follow-up for VKA patients, making the cost of treatment by VKA nearly 10-times more expensive than the cost of medication itself.     

Heterogeneous Impact of Soil Contamination on Farmland Prices in the Belgian Campine Region: Evidence from Unconditional Quantile Regressions

We estimate a hedonic-pricing model using geo-coded farmland-transaction data from the Campine region, situated in the north-east of Belgium. Unlike previous hedonic studies, we use the method of unconditional quantile regression (Firpo et al., in Econometrica 77(3):953–973, 2009). An important advantage of this new method over the traditional conditional quantile regression (Koenker and Bassett, in Econometrica 46(1):33–50, 1978) is that it allows for the estimation of potentially heterogeneous effects of cadmium pollution along the entire (unconditional) distribution of farmland prices. Using a threshold specification of the hedonic-pricing model, we find evidence of a U-shaped valuation pattern, where cadmium pollution of the soil has a negative and significant impact on prices only in the middle range of the distribution, insofar as cadmium concentrations are above the regulatory standard of 2 parts per million for agricultural land. Results obtained from a probit model to classify land plots into different price segments further suggest that the heterogeneous impact of soil pollution on price can be directly related to the variety of amenities that farmland provides.     

The EU ETS and corporate environmental abatement

This article studies the relationship between firm-level emissions-to-cap ratio (ETC) and environmental abatement, by using a unique and extensive data set of 10 762 installations covered by the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) matched to 5931 firms. We find that a shortage of emissions allowances is related to more abatement in later years while a surplus of emissions allowances results in worse subsequent environmental performance. This finding underscores the importance of reducing the global amount of allowances in the ETS system. Our results also suggest that stakeholder pressure and the creation of transparency concerning corporate environmental performance are likely to support the effectiveness of the system.     

On-duty and Off-duty: Employee Right to Privacy and Employer’s Right to Control in the Private Sector

The changing legal landscape of the right of the employer to control and monitor employee behavior is examined. Two distinct areas are defined: behavioral monitoring and behavioral restrictions. Relevant statutory laws and the developing common law are discussed. We also examine potential employee reactions to such policies by evaluating the reactions of graduate students to six employer policies including weight restrictions, grooming requirements, use of GPS locators, drug testing, ban on off-duty smoking, and email and internet monitoring. Students responded to these policies by determining the reasonable interest of the employer in the behaviors being monitored or controlled and the manner in which policies were implemented. Their comments suggest that employees may accept some level of monitoring or behavioral restrictions if the employer can make a convincing social account of the need for a policy. Additionally, the policy must be clearly communicated and properly implemented. However, restrictions on off-duty behavior were typically poorly received with the exception of illegal drug use.     

A critical test of the choice questionnaire for collecting informed public opinions

In the Choice Questionnaire (Neijens et al. 1992) respondents have to choose between several policy options. Within this questionnaire they are provided with information about the consequences of each option. Until now, only indirect evidence as to whether or not respondents base their preferences on the information provided was available and plausible alternative explanations for the Choice Questionnaire's effect could not be ruled out. In the present study, we demonstrate that Choice Questionnaire respondents do base their preferences on the information provided: different information resulted in significantly different choices.     

A never-decisive and anonymous criterion for optimal growth models

We address in this paper the question of the existence of a Social Welfare Function that would be sustainable and would allow us to obtain solutions to optimal growth models. We define sustainability by two new axioms called Never-decisiveness of the present and Never-decisiveness of the future. We first show that a SWF which has Never-decisiveness properties cannot be defined on a ball of $l_{\infty }^{+}$ . We must (i) restrict to the set of utility streams for which the value of the SWF is finite and (ii) introduce additional assumptions in order to obtain the Never-decisiveness properties. Our main result in this paper is therefore to show that the undiscounted utilitarian criterion is an anonymous and never-decisive criterion for optimal growth models. We consider the set of utilities of consumptions which are generated by a specific technology, namely a technology with decreasing returns for high levels of capital, and restrict ourselves to good programs, i.e., any program for which intertemporal utility is well defined.