Reducing urban public transport costs by tendering lots: a panel data estimation

Allotment is, for urban authorities, a governance strategy to reduce public transport costs. It consists of dividing a network into several lots, so as to multiply the number of calls for tender. On the one hand, gains should be obtained by increasing competition for the market and reducing the costs of obtaining accurate information. On the other hand, cutting a network into several parts is also expected to have negative consequences on production costs, in terms of lower returns to scale. Many industry stakeholders believe that the latter element more than compensates for the former. In this article, we estimate a translog cost function with a panel of 141 French urban public transport networks. Our main conclusion is that scale economies are exhausted for a production of about 3 million vehicle-kilometres per year. Therefore, as far as returns to scale are concerned, allotment would reduce the costs of public transport services for the main cities of our sample. A second dividend for allotment is then presented and implies that the assumed trade-off between returns to scale and increased competition is irrelevant.     

A Pasinettian approach to international economic relations: the pure labor case

In this paper, the pure labor version of Pasinetti's model of structural change and economic dynamics is extended to consider international economic relations. The conditions for full employment, full expenditure of national income and trade balance equilibrium are established along with solutions for the systems of physical quantities and prices in an open economy. Analytical results concerning the benefits of international trade and learning are studied with formal rigor. Then static and dynamic aspects of the principle of comparative cost advantages are analyzed considering the determinants of the level of specialization and international prices.     

Firm‐Level Collective Bargaining and Wages in Greece: A Quantile Decomposition Analysis

This article analyzes the effect of firm‐level contracting on the wage structure in the Greek private sector. Using a matched employer–employee dataset for 2006, unconditional quantile regressions and relevant decomposition methods, we identify a wage premium associated with firm‐level contracting, which follows a hump‐shaped profile across the wage distribution. Further, the wage differential between workers under firm‐level and broader‐level collective agreements can be primarily attributed to the differences in the regime‐specific wage setting structure, for those below the median of the unconditional wage distribution, and to differences in worker and firm‐specific characteristics for those in the upper tail.     

Attractiveness Analysis of European Tourist Cities

Starting from the field work in seven European countries, the paper identify Europeans’ attitudes towards and preferences for European cities. The purpose here is to show whether a city’s tourist attraction is linked solely with a given holiday format (city-break; 1-2 night stay; short holiday; 3-4 night stay; long holiday; 8-night stay or longer) or not.

The results helped in the interpretation of contemporary urban tourism flows in Europe, offering a broader vision of such flows and furnishing useful data for city strategic planning to boost competitiveness.     

Sudden Stops,Time Inconsistency,and the Duration of Sovereign Debt

We study the sovereign debt duration chosen by the government in the context of a standard model of sovereign default. The government balances off increasing the duration of its debt to mitigate rollover risk and lowering duration to mitigate the debt dilution problem. We present two main results. First, when the government decides the debt duration on a sequential basis, sudden stop risk increases the average duration by 1 year. Second, we illustrate the time inconsistency problem in the choice of sovereign debt duration: governments would like to commit to a duration that is 1.7 years shorter than the one they choose when decisions are made sequentially.     

University entrepreneurship centres as service businesses

In recent years, many universities have created entrepreneurship centres which offer a set of services to students, educators and professionals in order to promote entrepreneurial attitudes. The first part of this work focuses on describing a university entrepreneurship programme as a service business. The second part summarises the results of the empirical study, based on the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ) questionnaire administered to 106 students at the Technical University of Catalonia in Spain who attended the entrepreneurship courses offered by the Innova Programme entrepreneurship centre.     

The Impact of Export Promotion Programs on Firms’ Export Competencies and Performance in a Transition Economy: The Case of Russian Manufacturers

Abstract

This study evaluates the effects of export promotion programs (EPPs) in Russian manufacturers. It examines a multi-dimensional set of subjective and objective indicators including the level of awareness, use, the perception of usefulness, as well as different intermediate export marketing results, and final performance indicators. The results show that most EPPs are successful in attaining their goals as to improving firms’ export marketing competencies. Though, at the same time, they point to clear problems, regarding program awareness, availability, and accessibility. The paper concludes with a discussion about managerial and public policy implications.     

Presenteeism and burnout among teachers in public and private Portuguese elementary schools

This research aims to study the possible relation between presenteeism and burnout in the public and private education sector. Presenteeism – a groundbreaking concept in organizational behaviour literature – refers to productivity losses that occur when employees come to work but under-perform due to physical and psychological causes. Next, we further clarified the burnout criterion with three groups of predictors: personal, contextual and presenteeism. Results from a sample of 281 elementary school teachers from private and public institutions revealed that personal and contextual characteristics as well as presenteeism were predictive of teacher burnout. We also found that public school teachers exhibited higher levels of both presenteeism and burnout. Finally, the implications of these results are discussed and directions for future research in the field are provided.     

Vague lies and lax standards of proof: On the law and economics of advice

This paper analyzes a persuasion game where a seller provides (un)biased and (im)precise advice and may be fined by an authority for misleading the buyers. In the equilibrium, biasing the advice and making it noisier are complements. The advice becomes both more biased and less precise with a stricter standard of proof employed by the authority, a larger share of credulous consumers, and a higher buyers' heterogeneity. The optimal policy of the authority is characterized in terms of a standard of proof and resources devoted to the investigation.