National culture and the configuration of public pensions

This paper explores the determinants of public pension plan configurations. It is argued that the level of intragenerational redistribution in public pension plans is related to a country's cultural background. The level of intragenerational redistribution is measured by Krieger and Traub's Bismarckian factor. The countries’ cultural background is operationalized using cultural dimensions developed by Hofstede. The empirical results are in line with our hypotheses. Uncertainty avoidance appears to have a significant, positive association with the Bismarckian factor (low intragenerational redistribution in public pensions), whereas the relation with individualism is negative (high intragenerational redistribution). Moreover, a positive association is found between the Bismarckian factor and inflation shocks in the first half of the 20th century. While the sample size is limited, the results are robust to the inclusion of different economic, institutional, and demographic control variables as well as to using alternative model specifications. These findings have important public policy implications. We argue that pension reform proposals suggesting a transformation of public to private pension provision should consider the cultural background of countries.     

Neighbourhood influences on organic buying

Past studies have explained organic buying as a function of sociodemographic or attitudinal consumer's traits and/or as a result of marketing influences. However, in view of mounting evidence of social effects on sustainable consumption, this paper aims to enrich our understanding of the determinants of organic demand by introducing neighbourhood effects in buying models; in particular, using scanner data from Nielsen household panelists of 2012–2013, this study tests the influence on demand of both structural variables (collapsed into a factor labelled “neighbourhood class”) and geographical location of a household, controlling for the influence of household characteristics and other marketing‐related influences (e.g., price). This paper concludes that structural class, rather than household class, positively influences organic milk purchasing. It also shows that relative class can also explain the likelihood of organic buying.     

Determinants of contract duration in outsourced services in the defense sector

In this article we analyze the contract duration using Transaction Cost Theory with a sample of 283 outsourced services in the Spanish Army during the period 2009–2014.The analysis results show that the greater the specificity of the service, the greater the duration of the contract. In addition, it is obtained that the greater the uncertainty about the behaviour of the provider, the lower the duration of the agreement. These results are consistent with existing literature and empirical works.

However, in the case of external uncertainty and incompleteness of the contract, they do not affect the contract duration. This may be because less complex services for shorter terms can be specified better and are less affected by external circumstances. Therefore, the uncertainty should be decomposed and analyzed according to their sources.     

Inequality Stagnation in Latin America in the Aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis

Between 2003 and 2010, Latin America experienced a solid record of economic growth, coupled with a notable reduction in income inequality. The regional Gini coefficient fell from 0.556 to 0.521 and declined in all 15 out of 17 countries in which frequent data are available. However, previous studies have warned about problems in the sustainability of the decline in income inequality and this study presents evidence of stagnation on this front between 2010 and 2013. The results are robust to various measures of income inequality, but differ across the region. While largely attributable to the recovery from the global financial crisis in Mexico and some countries in Central America, the results are also supported by the demonstrated slowdown in inequality reduction in other countries, including Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia.     

Adapting and testing the Fama and French model,with some variations of company characteristics

We examine whether the Fama and French (1992) (F&F) model can be adapted to become a more versatile and flexible tool, capable of incorporating variations of company characteristics in a more dynamic form. For this, the risk factors are reconstructed at the end of each reading of monthly data. We argue that, over time, the evaluation of a company may change as a result of variations in its market price, size or book price, and we are aware that the F&F model does not accurately reflect these dynamics. Our results show that the adapted model is able to capture the behaviour of a greater number of stocks than the original F&F model and risk factors are more significant when building them through our procedure. In addition, we carry out these adaptations during a period of instability in financial markets.     

Unintended Effects of Targeting an Environmental Rebate

When designing schemes such as conditional cash transfers or payments for ecosystem services, the choice of whom to select and whom to exclude is critical. We incentivize and measure actual contributions to an environmental public good to ascertain whether being excluded from a rebate can affect contributions and, if so, whether the rationale for exclusion influences such effects. Treatments, i.e., three rules that determine who is selected and excluded, are randomly assigned. Two of the rules base exclusion on subjects’ initial contributions. The third is based upon location and the rationales are always explained. The rule that targets the rebate to low initial contributors, who have more potential to raise contributions, is the only rule that raised contributions by those selected. Yet by design, that same rule excludes the subjects who contributed the most initially. They respond by reducing their contributions even though their income and prices are unchanged.     

The growth of university spin-offs: a dynamic panel data approach

Evidence suggests that a significant percentage of the university spin-offs (USOs) have a low growth capacity, putting in question the use of public funds to promote this kind of entrepreneurship. In addition, previous studies of the USOs’ growth have not dealt with the dynamic nature of firm growth, which might have led to questionable results. This paper analyses whether the university origin of a firm conditions its growth by applying a methodology which captures this dynamic nature of growth. Using a sample of 469 Spanish USOs and an equivalently matched group of 469 Spanish non-USOs over the period 2001–2010, we find that USOs have more growth than non-USOs, both in terms of sales and employment. In addition, the USOs’ growth is influenced by a set of determinants that differ from those of non-USOs. On the basis of the results, we propose some policies to foster the USOs.     

New unit-consistent intermediate inequality indices

This paper introduces a class of intermediate inequality indices that is, at the same time, ray-invariant and unit-consistent. These measures allow us to make possible keeping some of the good properties of Krtscha’s (Models and measurement of welfare and inequality. Springer, Heidelberg, 1994) index while maintaining the “centrist” attitude no matter howmuch the income increases.By doing so, we approach the intermediate inequality concept suggested by Del Río and Ruiz-Castillo (Soc Choice Welfare 17:223–239, 2000) and generalize it in order to extend the range of income distributions that are comparable according to this ray-invariance criterion.