Economic Implications of Demographic Change: Diversity Dividend or Deficit?

The economic implications of demographic change depend on steadfast investments in research and development; replenishment of the human capital stock diminished by retiring Baby Boomers; and raising college attainment rates. This way the United States can leverage its diverse, fast-growing population to harness a demographic dividend—the productivity boost enabled by declining fertility—while also fueling economic growth, restocking the Social Security system, and bolstering global competitiveness.     

Top executive commitment to the status quo: Some tests of its determinants

Some top executives are more committed to the status quo—particularly to their organization's current strategy and leadership profile—than are others. Most empirical research on upper echelons treats psychological phenomena as a ‘black box’—the unobserved intervening mechanisms—that causes associations between more observable executive characteristics and organizational outcomes. In contrast, this paper attempts to directly examine the determinants of an important element of an executive's psychological orientation—commitment to the status quo (CSQ). We focus on a select set of variables which have been posited in prior research as determinants of executive CSQ, but which have not been directly tested for such a relationship. Based on a large-scale survey methodology, results suggest that an executive's tenure in an industry is a pronounced determinant of CSQ, and has significantly more impact than organizational tenure. As expected, the firm's current performance was found to be positively related to CSQ; this relationship was stronger in high-discretion than in low-discretion industries. Finally, the project reaffirms a well known human tendency: incumbent CEOs tend to believe that their eventual successors should be just like them.     

Fishing Technology and Optimal Distribution of Harvest Rates

This paper examines the problem of the optimal management of a joint-ownership fishing exploitation, where agents use different fishing gears. We consider a model in which the fishing activity may affect resource growth, not only through the harvest function but also through the natural growth rate of the resource. This allows us to capture the fact that some fishing gears alter the natural growth rate of the resource. We find that when the natural growth of the resource is altered by the fishing technology, the optimal stock is not independent of how harvest quotas are distribute among the agents. As a result, a fishing policy that firstly determines the optimum stock and, secondly, decides how to distribute the harvest among the different agents, will not be efficient. We also analyze the joint determination of optimal stock and harvest quotas and show that positive harvest quotas will only be optimal when countries are characterized by certain asymmetries.     

Branching,lending and competition in Italian banking

With the liberalization of legal barriers to the opening of bank branches in 1990, both market structure and competitive conditions in Italy changed profoundly as banks expanded their branching networks. This paper provides novel empirical evidence on how changes of the branch network structure at the province level affect the performance and lending activity of banks across the period 1993–2011. In particular, we adopt two modes of analysis. The first focuses on the impact of diversification strategies on performance, lending and funding strategies at the province level. The second one examines how the increase of big banks' local presence affects single-market bank performance and lending strategies. Our results show that geographical diversification strategies can reduce performance, the adjusted Lerner Index of banks and lending activities, but increase the Lerner Index in deposit markets. Furthermore, we find that the expansion of branches by large-medium sized banks in concentrated markets can reduce the Lerner Index for the deposit market and the amount of loans offered by single-market banks.     

Approximate equilibrium in pure strategies for a two-stage game of asset creation

The paper studies a two-stage economy where consumers choose first the asset structure and then use it in a standard general equilibrium framework to transfer wealth across time and states of nature. The financial structure is chosen by maximizing indirect utility functions, using continuous random selections from the second-stage equilibrium correspondence. We depart from Bisin (J Econ Theory 82:19–45, 1998) where an endogenous beliefs approach was used and the asset creation was left to financial intermediaries. Moreover, our approach allows us to go beyond a mixed strategies result as we obtain an approximate equilibrium in pure strategies for the economy with incomplete information about future endowments.     

Wage differentials by sector and gender: a quantile analysis for the Spanish case

This paper analyses existing wage differentials between workers in the public and private sectors and by gender in Spain. This analysis is run throughout the entire earnings distribution and observed wage differentials are decomposed into a part explained by differences in productive characteristics and a part due to differences in returns to such characteristics. Our results show that public sector workers tend to earn higher wages than private employees, although most of this sector wage gap is due to better public workers’ productive characteristics. A wage premium in favour of men is also found in both the public and private sectors, with the gender wage gap greater at the top of the earnings distribution.     

A possible explanation of the gender gap among accounting academics: evidence from the choice of research field

Despite the significant increase in the number of women in accounting research over past decades, the percentage of female full professors in accounting is still low. One of the problems may relate to the research area(s) they choose to specialize in. Is the relatively slow promotion of women due to their decision to concentrate in ‘nonmainstream’ fields of research? In this study, we collect data on 1,042 male and female accounting academics. Using the research interests declared on each academic web page, we find that accounting researchers show no significant gender differences in their choice of research fields. Hence, we conclude that the underpromotion of women cannot be attributed to their choice of ‘nonmainstream’ fields.     

Technical efficiency in the Italian performing arts companies

This paper evaluates the determinants of firms’ technical efficiency in the Italian Performing Arts (PA) sector, by estimating a stochastic production frontier for an unbalanced panel of 107 firms over the period 2005–2012. The panel data setting allows us to control for both unobserved and observed heterogeneity of PA firms, reaching several interesting and robust findings. Firstly, it finds that the Italian PA firms are scale inefficient as they generally operate in either an increasing or decreasing returns to scale landscape. This result is reinforced by the fact that the smaller firms (10–49 employees) are the most technically efficient firm size class. Secondly, this research proves that the efficiency score is on average 66%, demonstrating that PA firms’ output could be substantially increased without the use of new inputs. Thirdly, it confirms that the quality matters and competences increase the efficiency in the sector. Finally, the environmental factors (especially the quality of institutions) have a strong impact on technical efficiency of PA firms, supporting that regional differences also exist in this sector.     

Health expenditure and socio-economic determinants of life expectancy in the OECD Asia/Pacific area countries

Recent economic research is focused on the study of the relationship between socio-economic factors and health outcomes. In this study, the relationship in the OECD Asia/Pacific area countries regarding life expectancy is explored. Data from the World Bank and OECD Health Statistics (2015) have been used to build a panel data during the period 1995–2013. On the one hand, it was found that per capita income, unemployment and exchange rates improve health outcomes. On the other hand, poor performance, in terms of government expenditures for the countries-sample, comes across. Empirical results highlight the importance of cost-effectiveness analysis.