Household Adoption of Water-Efficient Equipment: The Role of Socio-Economic Factors,Environmental Attitudes and Policy

Using survey data of around 10,000 households from 10 OECD countries, we identify the driving factors of household adoption of water-efficient equipment by estimating Probit models of a household’s probability to invest in such equipment. The results indicate that environmental attitudes and ownership status are strong predictors of adoption of water-efficient equipment. In terms of policy, we find that households that were both metered and charged for their water individually had a much higher probability to invest in water-efficient equipment compared to households that paid a flat fee.     

Cross-Border Shopping: A Survey

The aim of this paper is to undertake a review of the most important literature on the phenomenon of fiscally induced cross-border shopping. Following the presentation of the principal theoretical models, the study concentrates on applied literature. Firstly, the elements common to the diverse applications are described, and then, a detailed analysis of the research undertaken into cross-border shopping for alcoholic drinks, tobacco, fuel, and lotteries is provided, concluding with a reference to the interaction between cross-border purchases and those effected over the internet. The results achieved by the empirical research coincide and support the principal result of the theoretical literature: the tax differentials between neighboring territories induce consumers to purchase in the territory where taxation is lower, on the condition that the tax saving compensates for the transport costs associated with the travel made by the purchaser in order to take advantage of the lower taxation.     

The impact of working conditions on sickness absence: a theoretical model and an empirical application to work schedules

This paper explores how poor working conditions impact sickness absence through their effect on health. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we develop a static theoretical model based on the concept of health capital, wherein poor working conditions are partially compensated by higher wages. According to our model, the effect of working conditions on sickness absence is ambiguous. Second, we apply our model to the case of working time arrangements and test the effect of working irregular schedules or work around the clock on sickness absence, using data from the French Labor Force Survey on a specific population (male manual workers in private sector). As heterogeneity may lead to severe bias, we use propensity score matching methods. Our estimates show that working irregular schedules has a significant impact on sickness absence. The results are more mitigated for work around the clock. In any case, the extent crucially depends on age.     

Weather Index Drought Insurance: An Ex Ante Evaluation for Millet Growers in Niger

In the Sudano-Sahelian region, which includes South Niger, the inter-annual variability of the rainy season is high and irrigation is limited. As a consequence, bad rainy seasons have a massive impact on crop yield and regularly result in food crises. Traditional insurance policies based on crop damage assessment are not available because of asymmetric information and high transaction costs compared to the value of production. We assess the risk mitigation capacity of an alternative form of insurance which has been implemented at a large scale in India since 2003: insurance based on a weather index. We compare the efficiency of various weather indices to increase the expected utility of a representative risk-averse farmer. We show the importance of using plot-level yield data rather than village averages, which bias results due to the presence of idiosyncratic shocks. We also illustrate the need for out-of-sample estimations in order to avoid overfitting. Even with the appropriate index and assuming substantial risk aversion, we find a limited gain of implementing insurance, which roughly corresponds to, or slightly exceeds, the cost observed in India for implementing such insurance policies. However, when we separately treat the plots with and without fertilisers separately, we see that the benefit of insurance is slightly higher in the former case. This suggests that insurance policies may slightly increase the use of risk-increasing inputs such as fertilisers and improved cultivars, and hence improve average yields, which remain very low in the region.     

The impact of science and technology parks on firms’ product innovation: empirical evidence from Spain

Science and Technology Parks (STP) have attracted considerable attention and public funds in recent years. However, the conclusions on their effectiveness remain mixed. This work evaluates the impact of STP on firm product innovation in the Spanish context, as an example of a less developed innovation system in which regional and national governments are prioritizing STP initiatives. This work draws on a large sample of firms provided by the Spanish Survey on Technological Innovation that is conducted annually by the National Statistical Institute. We explore alternative econometric methods to obtain average treatment effects for firms located in 22 Spanish STPs. Our results show that Spanish STPs have a strong and positive impact on the probability and amount of product innovation achieved by STP located firms. These results hold when the endogeneity of STP location is taken into account.     

Country Differences in Material Deprivation in Europe

This paper assesses to what extent differences in the characteristics of individuals (micro‐level perspective) and country‐specific factors (macro‐level perspective) can explain country differences with respect to material deprivation levels. Thus, our work aims to simultaneously consider the macro dimension and the predominantly individually‐oriented study field of material deprivation using multilevel techniques. We make use of the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions. Our results show that country‐specific factors seem to be much more relevant than individual effects in explaining country differences in material deprivation. We estimate that the introduction of country‐specific factors reduces the proportion of total variance due to between‐country differences in deprivation by 72.7 percent, while individual‐level variables reduce this proportion by only 9.4 percent. We also show, through interaction variables, that the effect of sociodemographic characteristics can be shaped by institutional and structural factors, especially by the level of GDP.     

Nonlinear models with panel data

Panel data play an important role in empirical economics. With panel data one can answer questions about microeconomic dynamic behavior that could not be answered with cross sectional data. Panel data techniques are also useful for analyzing cross sectional data with grouping. This paper discusses some issues related to specification and estimation of nonlinear models using panel data.JEL Classification: C230The research behind this paper was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Gregory C. Chow Econometric Research Program at Princeton University, and Danish National Research Foundation (through CAM at the University of Copenhagen). The author thanks Ekaterini Kyriazidou, Hong Li, Marina Sallustro, and the editors for helpful suggestions.     

Conditional ordering extensions

We produce a solution to the problem of extending a quasiordering conditional on a finite list of ex-ante comparisons between pairs. This constitutes yet another extension of the classical Szpilrajn’s theorem. Some examples of use of our result follow.     

Returns from social capital in open source software networks

Open Source Software projects base their operation on a collaborative structure for knowledge exchange in the form of provision or reception of information, expertise and feedback on the creation of source code. Here, we address the direction of these knowledge flows among projects throughout social networks and their impact on project success. We identify the roles of membership or contribution that individuals play within projects. We found that connections through contributors who bring their knowledge to the project, improve project success, and that connection through members, who transfer their knowledge towards other projects, enhance project success. Finally, we found that ties through shared membership and contributions hamper project success. The analysis of knowledge flows and their impact on project success imply a translation of returns from investment in social capital, where investment takes the shape of knowledge flows and the returns mean the projects’ diffusion over the network.

How do epidemics induce behavioral changes?

This paper develops a theory of optimal fertility behavior under mortality shocks. In an OLG model, young adults determine their optimal fertility, labor supply and life-cycle consumption with both exogenous child and adult mortality risks. We show that a rise in adult mortality exerts an ambiguous effect on both net and total fertility in a general equilibrium framework, while child mortality shocks unambiguously lead to a rise in total fertility, leaving net fertility unchanged. We complement our theory with an empirical analysis using a sample of 39 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the 1980–2004 period, examining the overall effects of the child and adult mortality channels on both total and net fertility. We find child mortality to exert a robust, positive impact on total fertility but no impact on net fertility, whereas a rise in adult mortality is found to negatively influence both total and net fertility. Given the particular demographic profile of the HIV/AIDS epidemic (killing essentially young, active adults), we then conclude in favor of an unambiguous negative effect of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on net fertility in SSA.