Migration to the United States and Mexican rural development: a case study

An analysis of the impact of migration to the United States on the sending community and on the labor market in the receiving country is presented based on a case study of Las Animas, Mexico. "As the community becomes increasingly involved in migration, tendencies can be identified regarding changing migration patterns, class differentiation among villagers, impact of migration on village economy, and the changing role of Mexican workers in California labor markets. Results indicate the importance of social networks in determining the outcome of migration; while migration is individually rational, it is a factor of stagnation for village economy, and it helps reproduce segmented California labor markets."     

我国债券市场的改革与发展

改革开放以来,债券市场蓬勃发展,扩大了融资渠道,优化了融资结构,促进了国民经济的健康发展。但与成熟市场经济国家相比,国内债券市场仍处于初级阶段,尚未完全步入规范化、法制化轨道。因此,需进一步推进债券市场的改革,促进债券市场向深度发展。     

论旅游学研究的对象和任务

从旅游学产生的历史和旅游学理论体系的内容两个角度对旅游学的研究对象进行了分析研究,认为旅游学的研究对象就是旅游活动和旅游业,其中又以旅游的三要素——旅游主体、旅游客体、旅游媒体及其相互关系为核心。其任务是找出对旅游活动和旅游业发展的规律性认识,对旅游实践活动起到理论上的指导作用     

Employment response to supply and demand shocks under envy in wage formation

Summary We analyse the impact of wage envy on employment and on its sectorial allocation. A multi-sector general equilibrium model in which externalities among sectors arise through wage envy and decentralized bargaining is presented. In the no externality case, sectorial employment is a function of sectorial productivity and of the disutility of work. In the externality case, sectorial employment is additionally affected by union power in all sectors (with a negative sign even though bargaining is efficient), by the productivity in the other sectors (with an undetermined sign) and by the relative average propensity to consume goods of this sector (with a positive sign).Rijksuniversiteit Limburg, FNRS and Université Catholique de Louvain. I would like to thank Franz Palm for valuable comments on an earlier draft. This paper benefitted also from discussions with Torben Andersen, Jacques Drèze and Henri Sneessens (without implying them in any mistake). The detailed comments of the anonymous referee contributed to a large extent to clarify the exposition of the model.     

IMPERFECT INFORMATION AND THE CHOICE BETWEEN COLLUSION AND HORIZONTAL MERGER

If the payoff obtained by the parties of an agreement depends on the values set for variables the value of which cannot be described precisely or monitored accurately, then the first best outcome may not be achieved. It is shown here that in some cases a second best long term agreement gives the parties a higher payoff, in other cases a short term arrangement is preferred. The interpretation of this result given in the paper is that when a long term contract is preferable, then firms are unable to commit themselves to it through a collusive agreement, and they will try to merge. Vice versa, no need to integrate arises when the preferred second best agreement is the short term one. The last section provides an example, where advertisement effort is non-contractible, while prices are.     

Analyzing online reviews in hospitality: data-driven opportunities for predicting the sharing of negative emotional content

Hospitality is one of the sectors that are nowadays most heavily characterized by consumers’ tendency to share online reviews on dedicated digital platforms. While most past work has focused on understanding the effect of online reviews and ratings on consumers’ evaluation and purchase decisions, this research tackles the issue of what drives the sharing of certain types of online content. Specifically, we investigate the sharing of user-generated content characterized by negative emotional valence, and study the effect of two factors on the extent to which user-generated content contains negative emotions. One such factor is reviewer's expertise, while the other is hotel quality. Our analysis of 1200 TripAdvisor reviews on Italian hotels located in three major Italian cities confirm our hypothesis that expert reviewers might share reviews containing less intense negative emotional content compared to less expert reviewers especially when the hotel is of high quality. To support our hypothesis, we build on the research on psychological antecedents of word-of-mouth behaviour suggesting that expert consumers are particularly reluctant to share negative word-of-mouth to avoid projecting a negative image of themselves in social contexts, thus possibly damaging their reputation.     

Do satisfying walking and cycling trips result in more future trips with active travel modes? An exploratory study

Previous studies have indicated that travel satisfaction - the experienced emotions during, and cognitive evaluation of, a trip - can be affected by travel mode choice and other trip characteristics. However, as satisfactory trips might improve a person's attitude towards the used mode, persons may be more likely to use that same mode for future trips of the same kind. Hence, a cyclical process between travel mode choice and travel satisfaction might occur. In this paper we begin to analyse this process—using a structural equation modelling approach on cross-sectional data—for people who engage in walking and cycling for leisure trips in the Belgian city of Ghent. The focus on walking and cycling reflects recent studies indicating that active travel is often associated with the highest levels of travel satisfaction. Results of this exploratory analysis offer tentative support for the idea of a cyclical process: the evaluation of walking and cycling trips positively affects the respondents' attitude towards the respective mode, which in turn has a positive effect on choosing that mode.     

Composite commodities, housing characteristics and the Hicksian surplus measures of welfare change

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on previous research that deals with the implications of alternative housing concepts for the estimation of the welfare effects of housing programs. We compare one housing concept, which defines housing in terms of a composite good housing services with an alternative in which housing is treated as a bundle of attributes. We extend the analysis in the literature by concentrating on welfare measures that are applicable to a much broader class of government programs than those that have been discussed before. We focus in the Hicksian surplus measures which are particularly suited to handle structure in which constraints on quantity are impused. In the theoretical sections we rigorously show that the Hicksian surplus measures of welfare change based on the composite good housing services will be biased whenever a housing program imposes restrictions on the consumption of attributes. The direction of the bias depends on the nature of the program. Empirical work confirms the predictions of the theoretical analysis.     

Time series approaches to Italian regional convergence

This article investigates the evolution of the gap between Italian regions and Italy as a whole during the period of 1980 to 2007. We tested for the presence of the stochastic and β-convergence hypotheses using different time series approaches. The former was studied, first, for the entire sample period and then, with an exogenous instantaneous break in the series. The presence of β-convergence, instead, was estimated considering a known and an unknown trend break date model. Our results show that most of the regions do not converge in an ‘actual’ way, since they do not present a stochastic and β-convergence simultaneously.