The impact of climate change on China's agriculture

This article examines how expected changes in climate are likely to affect agriculture in China. The effects of temperature and precipitation on net crop revenues are analyzed using cross-sectional data consisting of both rainfed and irrigated farms. Based on survey data from 8,405 households across 28 provinces, the results suggest that global warming is likely to be harmful to rainfed farms but beneficial to irrigated farms. The net impacts will be only mildly harmful at first, but the damages will grow over time. The impacts also vary by region. Farms in the Southeast will only be mildly affected but farms in the Northeast and Northwest will bear the largest damages. However, the study does not capture the indirect effects on farms of possible changes in water flow, which may be important in China.     

Analysis of wage flexibility across the Euro Area: evidence from the process of convergence of the labour income share ratio

This article analyses wage flexibility as a factor in the unemployment rate across 12 Euro Area countries. We use extensive evidence pertaining to the countercyclical behaviour of the labour income share ratio to estimate its equilibrium value in the long run. This measure is calculated using a hybrid New Keynesian Phillips curve. Additionally, by using spatial econometrics, we can incorporate into the study the interdependence in the inflation among the countries. As a result, we identify countries that might see an improvement in their employment rates by improving their wage flexibility. We also identify countries with high unemployment that is not a consequence of a lack of wage flexibility.     

Overreaction of country ETFs to US market returns: Intraday vs. daily horizons and the role of synchronized trading

In this paper we study the intraday price formation process of country Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs). We identify specific parts of the US trading day during which Net Asset Values (NAVs), currency rates, premiums and discounts, and the S&P 500 index have special effects on ETF prices, and characterize a special intraday and overnight updating structure between these variables and country ETF prices. Our findings suggest a structural difference between synchronized and non-synchronized trading hours. While during synchronized trading hours ETF prices are mostly driven by their NAV returns, during non-synchronized trading hours the S&P 500 index has a dominant effect. This effect also exceeds the one that the S&P 500 index has on the underlying foreign indices and suggests an overreaction to US market returns when foreign markets are closed.     

EU data protection reform: Opportunities and concerns

Last year, the European Commission proposed a comprehensive reform of the EU’s data protection rules. The proposed regulation has been surrounded by fi erce controversy and has been the subject of frenzied lobbying by global corporations, industry groups, research centres and privacy campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic. This Forum applies cool economic reasoning to this heated issue. What are the potential economic benefi ts of EU harmonisation? Will the proposed regulation negatively impact the competitiveness and innovation of European fi rms in the global marketplace? Or could it jeopardise attempts to protect privacy as a fundamental right in civil societies?     

Performance evaluation,public management improvement and democratic accountability

The results-oriented management reforms fostered by the New Public Management movement are often argued to emphasize the search for efficiency, quality and other typical market values at the expense of democratic accountability. On the other hand, challenging this view, some authors claim that results-based management reforms have the potential to enhance political accountability and representative democracy. There is however, limited empirical evidence of this relationship. This article uses some of the findings from a comparative study of public management evaluation systems in four Latin American countries to illuminate this relationship in practice. We discuss the fact that, in two of the four countries surveyed, the design features of the new systems were based on the explicit search for increased political accountability and the deepening of democracy. We also discuss the possible causes for the finding that the outcome and performance information generated is not being applied for decision-making purposes yet, as expected.     

Does consumption buy happiness? Evidence from the United States

We examine the association between various components of consumption expenditure and happiness in the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), a nationally representative sample of older Americans. We find that only one component of consumption is positively related to happiness—leisure consumption. In contrast, consumption of durables, charity, personal care, food, health care, vehicles, and housing are not significantly associated with happiness. Second, we find that leisure consumption is associated with higher levels of happiness partially through its effect on social connectedness, as indexed by measures of loneliness and embeddedness in social networks. On one hand, these results counter the conventional wisdom that “material goods can’t buy happiness.” One the other hand, they underscore the importance of social goods and social connectedness in the production of happiness.     

Super‐replication in fully incomplete markets

In this work, we introduce the notion of fully incomplete markets. We prove that for these markets, the super‐replication price coincides with the model‐free super‐replication price. Namely, the knowledge of the model does not reduce the super‐replication price. We provide two families of fully incomplete models: stochastic volatility models and rough volatility models. Moreover, we give several computational examples. Our approach is purely probabilistic.     

Private irrigation investment in Colombia: effects of violence,macroeconomic policy,and environmental conditions

This paper identifies and estimates the effects of several determinant, on private investment in irrigation in Colombia. It attempts to quantify macroeconomic policy, environment, and violence variables that have been identified in previous studies as significantly affecting investment, in agriculture in genera., and in irrigation in particular. Variables such as violence, climate, and governmental price credit policies are used to explain changes in private investment in irrigation across regions and over time. Violence negatively affects private investment. Climate affects the investment such that in regions with favorable climate condition, investment in irrigation is less attractive, and appropriate government crop-price and credit policies promote investment in irrigation.     

Choosing the two finalists

This paper studies a decision maker who for each choice set selects a subset of (at most) two alternatives. We axiomatize three types of procedures: (i) The top two: the decision maker has in mind an ordering and chooses the two maximal alternatives. (ii) The two extremes: the decision maker has in mind an ordering and chooses the maximal and the minimal alternatives. (iii) The top and the top: the decision maker has in mind two orderings and he chooses the maximal element from each.