Endogenous innovations in the pharmaceutical industry

This paper addresses the creation of new products in the US pharmaceutical sector, during the second half of the 20th century. We indicate that the continuous increases in population, and thus in the market size of this sector, play a fundamental role in explaining the large creation of new drugs during that period. We also argue that population and market size can be endogenously determined through the impact of drugs over the mortality rate. Hence, these two effects reinforce each other, producing decrements in the mortality rate and increments in the stock of drugs over time. We obtained the set of new molecular entities approved by the FDA during the second half of the 20th century and we decomposed the data in a panel of 15 therapeutic categories over time. Using this data, we tested our hypotheses using different econometric methods. The results support the hypothesis and are consistent across methods.

The antecedents of complaint behaviour for Brazilian and French consumers of services

Using a cross‐cultural approach, this study investigates customer satisfaction after a service failure and recovery experience, considering (i) the influence of perceived justice on satisfaction; (ii) the impact of satisfaction on consumer repurchasing and complaint intentions; (iii) the moderating role of the customer cultural orientation; and (iv) the relevance of contextual variables. Based on a survey of 298 consumers from Brazil and France, the results indicated that (i) distributive and interactional justice influenced satisfaction; (ii) satisfaction was a significant predictor of repurchase intentions; (iii) satisfaction influenced third‐party, private and voice responses; and (iv) the level of the customer relationship, the severity of the failure and the responsiveness of the firm were significant contextual variables. Moreover, the individual‐level analysis suggested that only power distance cultural orientation was a significant moderator.     

Can The World Trading System Accommodate More East Asian Style Exporters?

A CGE model of world trade is used to examine whether many developing countries can simultaneously expand manufactures exports along East Asian lines without suffering serious terms of trade decline and consequent welfare loss. Experiments are performed in which manufactures exports are expanded for each developing region in turn and for all regions simultaneously. When driven by productivity gains in manufactures exports production, welfare gains are found to be significant and stable, even enhanced by parallel advances in other developing regions: i.e. export growth is mutually reinforcing as a result of extensive South-South manufactures flow, a pattern that is intensifying. [F 17]     

Altruism,fertility, and the value of children: Health policy evaluation and intergenerational welfare

This paper accounts for the value of children and future generations in the evaluation of health policies. This is achieved through the incorporation of altruism and fertility in a “value of life” type of framework. We are able to express adults' willingness to pay for changes in child mortality and also to incorporate the welfare of future generations in the evaluation of current policies. Our model clarifies a series of puzzles from the literature on the “value of life” and on intergenerational welfare comparisons. We show that, by incorporating altruism and fertility into the analysis of the recent U.S. experience, the estimated welfare gain of a young adult from reductions in mortality easily doubles.     

Modeling fertilizer externalities around Palo Verde National Park,Costa Rica

Irrigated rice farming in Costa Rica involves use of agrochemicals that pollute important wetlands ecosystems, such as the Palo Verde National Park in the northeastern province of Guanacaste. We characterize rice farming in this region, apply duality theory to estimate conditional factor demand for fertilizer, and then simulate the impacts of alternative policies on fertilizer use. Using a normalized profit function, we also estimate policy impacts on farmer profits. As expected, prices of rice seeds and fertilizer significantly affect use of fertilizer. Price incentives or taxes could encourage farming practices that reduce the threat to downstream ecosystems.     

Factors influencing hedging decision: evidence from Brazilian citrus growers

The purpose of this study was to analyse the hedging behaviour of 98 citrus growers from the State of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Marketing behaviour was modelled as a choice between spot market, short and long‐term forward contracts. A multinomial logistic regression model was used to evaluate the role of behavioural, personal and managerial variables in the choice. Results indicated that the factors which explain the use of forward contracts by citrus growers are the following: risk propensity; trade with juice processing companies; farming diversification; overconfidence in management; participation in pools; use of management tools; and technical assistance. The results can be useful for farmers, policymakers, government agencies, traders and extension agents.     

A dynamic multiple equation approach for forecasting PM2.5 pollution in Santiago,Chile

This paper proposes a methodology based on a system of dynamic multiple linear equations that incorporates hourly, daily and annual seasonal characteristics for predicting hourly ${\text{pm}}_{2.5}$ pollution concentrations for 11 meteorological stations in Santiago, Chile. It is demonstrated that the proposed model has the potential to match or even surpass the accuracy of competing nonlinear forecasting models in terms of both fit and predictive ability. In addition, the model is successful at predicting various categories of high concentration events, between 53% and 76% of mid-range events, and around 90% of extreme-range events on average across all stations. This forecasting model is considered a useful tool for helping government authorities to anticipate critical episodes of poor air quality so as to avoid the detrimental economic and health impacts of extreme pollution levels.     

Understanding domestic savings: an empirical approach

ABSTRACT

There are two unusual and important features in the evolution of the savings rate in Chile. First, the economy increased the average savings rate by 11 percentage points in the period 1985–2013 compared to 1960–1984, mainly due to a large change in private savings rate (10 percentage points), and an additional 1 percentage point from the public sector. The second feature is related to the change in the composition of private savings. After several years of nearly no corporate savings, this component became an important part of total savings reaching an average of almost 10% of Gross National Disposable Income (GNDI) during the period 1986–2012. Our results show that the 1984 tax reform, the boost in the marginal productivity of capital and the deepening of the financial market were the main drivers that explain the dramatic increase in corporate savings. We also found that the reduction in personal income tax after the tax reform and the higher income per capita growth helped to explain the increase in household savings, while the structural balance rule helped to explain the increase in public savings.     

DOES SOCIAL SECURITY AFFECT RETIREMENT AND LABOR SUPPLY? EVIDENCE FROM CHILE

This paper explores the effects of the social security system on retirement and labor supply decisions. Due to the regulations established by Chilean social security law reform, two social security systems coexist in Chile: the “Pay‐As‐You‐Go” and the individual account system. The coexistence of the systems allows us to better understand the effects of both social security systems on retirement and labor supply. We find that (1) larger benefits in any social security system induce earlier retirement and (2) larger variance of benefits in the individual account system induces later retirement. We do not find major impacts of social security on labor supply of individuals in the labor force.     

Measuring and forecasting retail trade in real time using card transactional data

We build big data retail trade indicators for Spain using high-dimensional card transaction data from one of the country’s biggest banks. The resulting indicators replicate the dynamics of the Spanish retail trade indices (RTI), regional RTIs (Spain’s autonomous regions), and RTI by retailer type (distribution classes) released by the Spanish National Statistics Institute. The new indicators not only have a higher frequency (daily data) and higher geographical and sectorial breakdown but are also shown to improve nowcasting and forecasting power for the official RTI, making them key variables to monitor consumption.