Patterns of Rural Development: A Cross‐Country Comparison using Microeconomic Data

This article proposes a general pattern of rural development in which increases in per capita income are associated with a decline in the importance of agricultural production and a rise in the importance of non‐agricultural income sources. Following the approach to examining Engel’s Law, we use data from 15 developing countries and a merged dataset to test whether such a pattern emerges. The analysis shows a strong, positive relationship between per capita income and the share of income earned from rural non‐agricultural wage employment and a negative relationship between per capita income and agricultural production.     

Board diversity,firm risk,and corporate policies

We examine the effects of diversity in the board of directors on corporate policies and risk. Using a multidimensional measure, we find that greater board diversity leads to lower volatility and better performance. The lower risk levels are largely due to diverse boards adopting more persistent and less risky financial policies. However, consistent with diversity fostering more efficient (real) risk-taking, firms with greater board diversity also invest persistently more in research and development (R&D) and have more efficient innovation processes. Instrumental variable tests that exploit exogenous variation in firm access to the supply of diverse nonlocal directors indicate that these relations are causal.     

A stochastic model to evaluate pricing distortions in indemnity insurance methods for MTPL insurance

Direct compensation or the direct reimbursement scheme is an indemnity insurance method that many European and American countries use to manage motor liability claims in which the driver that suffers an accident is paid by his/her insurance company that possibly later receives a flat-rate reimbursement (known as forfeit). Using non-life actuarial methodologies, this article analyses the distortion effects due to the direct compensation mechanisms and the effects of different forfeit reimbursement systems on policyholder tariffs in the management of motor liability claims involving vehicles in two different sectors, i.e. automobile and motorcycle. We empirically analyse and formalize the distortion effects resulting from the mechanism that different direct reimbursement systems produce, and explore the correlation between increasing tariffs for motorcycle policyholders and decreasing tariffs for other vehicle policyholders. We propose some alternative methods to overcome these distortion effects, evaluating their pricing impact through a stochastic model applied to a case study.

     

Understanding Investor Sentiment: The Case of Soccer

We examine the extent to which the stock market's inefficient responses to resolutions of uncertainty depend on investors’ biased ex ante beliefs regarding the probability distribution of future event outcomes or their ex post irrational reactions to these outcomes. We use a sample of publicly traded European soccer clubs and analyze their returns around important matches. Using a novel proxy for investors’ expectations based on contracts traded on betting exchanges (prediction markets), we find that within our sample, investor sentiment is attributable, in part, to a systematic bias in investors’ ex ante expectations. Investors are overly optimistic about their teams’ prospects ex ante and, on average, end up disappointed ex post, leading to negative postgame abnormal returns. Our evidence may have important implications for firms’ investment decisions and corporate control transactions.     

International migration and nutritional outcomes in Tajikistan

Tajikistan is the country with the largest share of remittances to GDP in the world. At the same time it suffers from stubbornly high levels of child malnutrition against which only very slow progress has been made. This paper investigates the relationship between international migration and child malnutrition, using data from a recent nationally representative household survey. There are theoretical reasons to expect that migration may be exerting both positive and negative effects on nutrition and food security, so that understanding what the net effect may be is essentially an empirical question. Our results indicate that migration appears to be playing a positive role in enhancing child growth patterns (as measured by height-for-age z-scores) in the country. We explore some of the possible channels through which this effect might be operating and find that one such channel is by increasing households’ kilocalorie consumption.     

Sustainable urban mobility: evidence from three developed European countries

Quality & Quantity - The importance acquired by private cars as the leading travel mode in most advanced countries has drawn attention to concerns related to pro-environmental travel behaviour....     

Structure of the labour market and wage inequality: evidence from European countries

The aim of this paper is to explore how the structural changes that have occurred in the labour market, in terms of employment composition by skill levels, affect wage inequality in three developed countries of Western Europe that are in close geographical proximity but have disparities in their labour market characteristics. More precisely, the analysis compares, from an international perspective, France, Germany—whose labour markets have been characterised in recent years by job polarization and the upgrading of occupations, respectively—and Italy, where neither of the two phenomena can be clearly identified. Using EU-SILC (European Union—Survey on Income and Living Conditions) data, in the first step, RIF-regression (Recentered Influence Function) enables an exploration on the primary factors that are likely to explain the differences in generating personal labour earnings and, in the second step, a decomposition of the change in wage inequality between 2005 and 2013 to evaluate how much of the overall gap is accounted for by the endowments in employees’ individual characteristics (composition effect) rather than the capability of labour markets to transform these characteristics into job opportunities and earnings (wage structure). Regarding France and Germany, the main results highlight how the endowment effect plays a key role in decreasing or, at least, not increasing wage inequality, whereas in Italy the rising inequality may be due to the lower efficiency of the country’s labour market in creating job opportunities, better job-related careers, and higher-salaries for employees.     

Urban agriculture,poverty, and food security: Empirical evidence from a sample of developing countries

Urban agriculture may have a role to play in addressing urban food insecurity problems, which are bound to become increasingly important with the secular trend towards the urbanization of poverty and of population in developing regions. Our understanding of the importance, nature and food security implications of urban agriculture is however plagued by a lack of good quality, reliable data. While studies based on survey data do exist for several major cities, much of the evidence is still qualitative if not anecdotal. Using a recently created dataset bringing together comparable, nationally representative household survey data for 15 developing or transition countries, this paper analyzes in a comparative international perspective the importance of urban agriculture for the urban poor and food insecure. Some clear hints do come from our analysis. On the one hand, the potential for urban agriculture to play a substantial role in urban poverty and food insecurity reduction should not be overemphasised, as its share in income and overall agricultural production is often quite limited. On the other hand, though, its role should also not be too easily dismissed, particularly in much of Africa and in all those countries in which agriculture provides a substantial share of income for the urban poor, and for those groups of households to which it constitutes an important source of livelihoods. We also find fairly consistent evidence of a positive statistical association between engagement in urban agriculture and dietary adequacy indicators.     

The Asymmetric Impact of War: Resilience,Vulnerability and Implications for EU Policy

Intereconomics - In 2019, over 96% of EU27 oil needs, nearly 90% of natural gas and over 43% of solid fuels were met by net imports, with the largest share coming from Russia (35% of oil, 40% of...