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.     

Simultaneous Models for Contingency Tables: A Reanalysis of Heatherton et al. (1997) Data on Eating Behavior

In panel studies, where a categorical response is measured attwo points in time, we can examine two kind of hypotheses regardingthe nature of change. The first is related with change at theindividual level (gross change) through the modelling of joint distributionof responses. The second is related with aggregate change (netchange) through the modelling of marginal distributions of responses.This paper describes a general approach to the analysis of two-wavepanel data based on Lang and Agresti's work (1994) that simultaneouslypermits the modelling of marginal and joint distributions of responses.This approach is illustrated with data from Heatherton et al.(1997) about change in dieting behaviour. These data were originallyanalyzed using the ² statistic to test independenceof responses. This paper shows how it is possible toobtain a better understanding of these data using the proposedmethodological approach.     

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.     

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.

Socioeconomic Index for Income and Poverty Prediction: A Sufficient Dimension Reduction Approach

The present paper introduces a novel method for the construction of Socioeconomic Status (SES) indices that are specific to a target variable of interest. It is based on the Sufficient Dimension Reduction (SDR) paradigm and uses a factorized model-based approach to simultaneously deal with predictor variables of mixed nature (i.e. quantitative, binary, and ordinal), which are usual in microeconomic data. These SES indices also identify relevant predictor variables using a two-step regularized matrix factorization approach. Using data from household surveys for Argentina (Encuesta Permanente de Hogares-EPH), the proposed method is compared with other existing dimension reduction algorithms such as standard Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its version for mixed variables, regression on the full set of variables and Least Absolute Shrinkage and Selection Operator regression (LASSO).     

The effect of presidential election outcomes on alcohol drinking

The growing political polarization and the increasing use of social media have been linked to straining social ties worldwide. The 2016 presidential elections in the United States reflected this trend with reports of fear and anxiety among voters. We examine how election results can be linked to episodes of anxiety through the use of alcohol as self-medication. We analyze a daily dataset of household purchases of alcohol in the weeks following presidential elections. We find that, within 30 days from Election Day, a 10 percentage point increase in support for the losing candidate increases alcohol expenditure by 1.1%. The effect is driven by counties with a higher share of supporters of the losing candidate and is robust to controlling more flexibly for omitted variables related to alcohol consumption. The increase in alcohol consumption is present in the 2016 elections and absent in the previous three presidential elections.     

Contextualizing employment outcomes in family business research: current findings and future research avenues

Management Review Quarterly - The empirical evidence of family business phenomenon in terms of employment outcomes is contradictory highlighting the micro–macro gap in the existing research....