¿Conduce la flexibilización a menor desempleo? Un análisis empírico del mercado laboral español

En España se llevaron a cabo dos grandes reformas laborales (2010 y 2012) bajo el supuesto de que la flexibilización del mercado laboral y la descentralización de la negociación colectiva conducirían mecánicamente a reducir el desempleo (hipótesis flexibilizadora). Este artículo destaca la centralidad de la demanda y de la composición sectorial de la economía para explicar el comportamiento de esta variable (hipótesis estructural). Mediante un análisis con datos de panel a escala subnacional, evaluamos la capacidad de ambas hipótesis para explicar la evolución del desempleo. Nuestros resultados cuestionan los supuestos de la hipótesis flexibilizadora y subrayan la importancia de los factores cíclicos y estructurales.     

Is advertising helpful for organic businesses? Differential effects of packaging claims

What claims should companies use to improve consumer perceptions of their certified organic products and help consumers differentiate them from conventional products? This study focuses on advertising – specifically, on packaging claims that differ in their degree of explicitness and message topic. A laboratory experiment shows that a single claim positively influences perceptions of organic products, though additional claims can cancel out this positive effect. Different claims have distinct impacts on consumer perceptions. This study, thereby, reveals an effect of thematic scope: messages related to the environment have greater scope than those related to health, and they influence both environmental and health perceptions strongly.     

Intensive Horticulture in Almería (Spain): A Counterpoint to Current European Rural Policy Strategies

Much of the recently published literature in Europe on rural development tends to focus on de‐agrarianization and multifunctionality in rural livelihoods as a way to generate employment and incomes. This paper analyses the case of Almería (Spain), an exception to this general rule. Almería, once one of the poorest Spanish provinces, has become the most affluent province in Andalusia and ranks now about average in Spain. This fast growth rate was achieved thanks to the development of intensive horticulture and its processes of change from the 1970s to the present day, due to the factors reviewed in the present study. This success story is a counterpoint to current European rural development strategies that consider the promotion of agriculture a mistake and advocate instead the economic diversification of farms.     

Public expenditure,income distribution,and growth in OECD countries

Economic growth and the several topics related to it have been studied by economists since their earliest publications. Two different approaches to this area can be found in Neoclassical and Endogenous growth models. The economic growth analysis has focused its attention on the factors that influence the growth of nations, such as fiscal policy or improvement of human capital. Nevertheless, it is also interesting to study the effects of income distribution on economic growth to determine if it has positive effects on growth. The aim of this paper is to study these effects. The authors will develop a theoretical model in which they will introduce public capital in a typical Cobb-Douglas production function. They will estimate OLS, GLS, and SUR fixed effects models for time series and cross-sectional data.     

Health-related quality of life and compensating income variation for 18 health conditions in Iceland

ABSTRACT

Using data from an Icelandic health and well-being survey, carried out in 2007, 2009, and 2012, we estimate the value of health-related suffering in two different ways. Our primary aim is to obtain the monetary compensation needed to maintain the same level of well-being with and without 18 health conditions using the compensating-income-variation approach. This method employs individual well-being measures with no hypothetical situations involved, thus offering a solution to biases of frequently used methods to value non-marketed goods. We also use zero-one normalization of regression coefficients to estimate health-related quality-of-life weights. Results from monetary valuations indicate that 1,685,594 USD are needed per year to compensate for the presence of melancholy, 206,273 USD for frequent headaches, 153,396 USD for severely low vision, and 80,824 USD for severe monthly menstrual cramps. This research adds to the literature by employing two rarely used methods to a range of health conditions. By valuing several different conditions with the same sample and methodology this research provides a ranking between the conditions, aiding policy makers in prioritizing scarce resources. We do however advise against using the normalization method for policy purposes at this point, due to the deviation of results from the general literature.     

ESTIMATION AND INFERENCE BY THE METHOD OF PROJECTION MINIMUM DISTANCE: AN APPLICATION TO THE NEW KEYNESIAN HYBRID PHILLIPS CURVE*

The stability of the solution path in a macroeconomic model implies that it admits a Wold representation. This Wold representation can be estimated semi‐parametrically by local projections and used to estimate the model's parameters by minimum distance techniques even when the stochastic process for the solution path is unknown or unconventional. We name this two‐step estimation procedure “projection minimum distance” and investigate its statistical properties for the broad class of models where the mapping between Wold coefficients and parameters is linear. This includes many situations with likelihood score functions nonlinear in the parameters that would otherwise require numerical optimization routines.