Pro-poor trade policy in Sub-Saharan Africa

This paper examines the presence of a pro-poor bias in the existing structure of protection of six Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Ethiopia, Gambia, and Madagascar. We build on a simple agricultural household production model and we propose an extension to include adjustments in labor income. Our approach, which can be implemented without repeated cross-sections of household level data, suits well the data constraints in SSA. It also allows us to capture the heterogeneity in trade protection at the tariff line level. The pro-poor bias indicators suggest that SSA's trade policies tend to be biased in favor of poor households, as these policies redistribute income from rich to poor households. This is because protection increases the agricultural prices of goods that are sold by African households and this effect dominates both the impacts of higher consumption prices and the strong Stolper–Samuelson effects that benefit skilled over unskilled workers.     

Rumors

A Kyle (1985) model with private information diffusion is used to examine the motivation to spread stock tips. An informed investor with limited investment capacity spreads imprecise rumors to an audience of followers. Followers trade on the advice and move the price. Due to the imprecision of the rumor, the price overshoots with positive probability. This gives the rumormonger the opportunity to trade twice: First when she receives information, then when she knows the price to be overshooting. In equilibrium, rumors are informative and both rumormongers and followers increase their profits at the expense of uninformed liquidity traders.     

Short Selling and Intraday Price Pressures

We study episodes of significant intraday downward price pressures in individual stocks and find that price declines during such episodes are driven mainly by liquidity demanding nonshort volume. Although short sellers during these price pressure episodes are also active and somewhat exacerbate the magnitude of price declines, their influence on prices is secondary to that of nonshort sellers. As such, our findings are inconsistent with the recently reignited allegations of systematic trading abuses caused solely by short sellers and might shed light on the debate regarding the need to reinstitute short selling restrictions.     

Wrapped input selection using multilayer perceptrons for repeat‐purchase modeling in direct marketing

In this paper, we try to validate existing theory on and develop additional insight into repeat‐purchase behavior in a direct marketing setting by means of an illuminating case study. The case involves the detection and qualification of the most relevant RFM (Recency, Frequency and Monetary) variables, using a neural network wrapper as our input pruning method. Results indicate that elimination of redundant and/or irrelevant inputs by means of the discussed input selection method allows us to significantly reduce model complexity without degrading the predictive generalization ability. It is precisely this issue that will enable us to infer some interesting marketing conclusions concerning the relative importance of the RFM predictor categories and their operationalizations. The empirical findings highlight the importance of a combined use of RFM variables in predicting repeat‐purchase behavior. However, the study also reveals the dominant role of the frequency category. Results indicate that a model including only frequency variables still yields satisfactory classification accuracy compared to the optimally reduced model. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Measuring the Cost‐Effectiveness of an R&D Tax Credit for the UK

This paper investigates the economic impact of the government's proposed new UK R&D tax credit. We measure the benefit of the credit by the effect on value added in the short and long runs. This is simulated from existing econometric estimates of the tax‐price elasticity of research and development (R&D) and the effect of R&D on productivity. For the latter, we allow R&D to have an effect on technology transfer (catching up with the technological frontier) as well as innovation (pushing the frontier forward). We then compare the increase in value added to the likely exchequer costs of the programme under a number of scenarios. In the long run, the increase in GDP far outweighs the costs of the tax credit. The short‐run effect is far smaller, with value added only exceeding cost if R&D grows at or below the rate of inflation.     

Do Mothers Matter? A Comparison of Models of the Influence of Mothers' and Fathers' Educational and Occupational Status on Children's Educational Attainment

The first objective of this article is to clarify which model best captures the structure and trend of the influence of social origin on children's education. The second objective is to analyse how general conclusions on historical trends in educational reproduction change if we add mother's status background to the model. Six contrasting hypotheses are derived fromthe body of literature dealing with models on families' socioeconomic status. All hypotheses are translated into empirical models and their explained variance is compared. A pooled data set is used that contains data from the Netherlands, West Germany, and the USA. The Modified Dominance Model, that distinguishes the influence of the highest from thelowest status parent, has the best model fit. Regarding the second objective we see that adding the mother's influence to that of the father's does not change general conclusions on trends in educational reproduction. Over time the influence of both parents decreases continuously. However, the influence of the mother's education and occupational status on children's educational attainment is substantive.     

MONETARY VALUATION OF INSURANCE AGAINST FLOOD RISK UNDER CLIMATE CHANGE*

Climate change is projected to increase the risk of natural disasters, such as floods and storms, in certain regions. This is likely to raise the demand for natural disaster insurance. We present a stated preference survey using choice modeling with mixed logit estimation methods in order to examine the effects of climate change and the availability of government compensation on the demand for flood insurance by Dutch homeowners. Currently, no private insurance against flood damage is offered in the Netherlands. The results indicate that there are opportunities for the development of a flood insurance market.     

Municipal welfare functions

In this paper the concept of a municipal welfare function is defined. It reflects the evaluation by local authorities of several levels of local expenditures. On the basis of an extensive survey among all Dutch municipal authorities these functions are estimated for about 550 Dutch municipalities with respect to total expenditures and differentiated with respect to several portfolios, like public works, education, etc. The variation of the estimated municipal welfare parameters is explained by objectively measurable municipal characteristics like the number of the inhabitants, age distribution of inhabitants and houses, number of unemployed, regional situation.     

A note on measuring political participation in comparative research

This article presents an application of Prezeworski and Teune's so-called “identity-equivalence method” to a large set of indicators of political participation. By relaxing commonly held assumptions about necessary distinctions among types of participation, it is found that the distinction between “conventional” and “unconventional” modes of participation is unnecessary, while the distinction between “government” and “nongovernment” has some merit. The findings also lend further support to the claims of Prezeworski and Teune that the identity-equivalence method is preferable to the identical indicator method.     

Relative wage concern: the missing piece in the contract multiplier?

Recent research has cast serious doubts on the explanatory power of staggered wage/price setting to account for both output and inflation persistence following money shocks. This paper extends a dynamic general equilibrium model with wage staggering by incorporating relative wage concern on the part of workers. In sharp contrast to previous analyses, in this model both output and inflation dynamics exhibit substantial persistence. Moreover, persistence results hold for a wide range of parameterisations. Our results suggest that relative wage concern may be the missing piece in the money shock persistence puzzle.