Wasted Positive Intentions: The Role of Affection and Abundance on Household Food Waste

This qualitative study, grounded theory oriented, identifies familial affection and preference for abundance as major drivers of wasted food in lower-middle income American families. These positive intentions provide an improved understanding of household food waste, a problem with high environmental impact and moral implications. Based on empirical data collected with twenty caregivers via in-depth interviews, observations, and analysis of photos, this study provides novel explanations, such as on how stockpiling comfort foods in abundance – a form of both boosting positive self-emotions and showing affection for kids – can promote more wasted food. Other antecedents identified include multiplicity of choices, convenience, procrastination and unplanned routines. In sum, this research identifies a negative outcome of affection and food abundance in the family context, while providing a theoretically relevant general framework to help understand the food waste phenomenon. Authors suggest increasing the awareness of nutritional gatekeepers through behavioral economics principles.     

Is Petrobras Options Market Efficient? A Study Using the Delta-Gamma Neutral Strategy

This study aims to verify if the Petrobras options market is efficient in its weak form. For this purpose, this work tries to make profits on a systematic basis through delta-gamma neutral strategies using the firm’s stocks and options. In order to simulate the strategy as it would be used in the real world, we built order books every five minutes considering all buy and sell orders sent for both the underlying asset and its options. We apply the strategy when we observe distortions between implied volatilities extracted from the options. The results show evidence that the Petrobras options market is not efficient, since in 371 day-trade transactions (with an average investment of R$81,000 and an average holding time of one hour and thirteen minutes), 85% of the options strategies were profitable and the average return was 0.49%, which corresponds to more than 1600% of the highest interbank interest rate for the period.     

Recent decline in wage inequality and formalization of the labour market in Argentina

Labour market conditions improved during the 2000s in Latin America, a process that included a reduction in the magnitude of informal employment. A decline of wage inequality was another feature of this period. Both dynamics were particularly intense in Argentina. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the role played by the process of formalization of the labour market that occurred in Argentina during that period on the reduction of income inequality, while additionally taking into account other factors that might have also contributed to such dynamics of income inequality. The method employed is a decomposition proposed by Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux, which allows extending the Oaxaca-Blinder approach to decompose some distributive statistics of income between a ‘composition effect’ and a ‘returns effect’. The study concludes that the process of increasing labour market formalization had an equalizing effect over the period, a finding that had not been emphasized in previous studies.     

A fair rule in minimum cost spanning tree problems

We study minimum cost spanning tree problems and define a cost sharing rule that satisfies many more properties than other rules in the literature. Furthermore, we provide an axiomatic characterization based on monotonicity properties.     

Corporate financing decisions, managerial market timing, and real investment

Both market timing and investment-based theories of corporate financing predict under-performance after firms raise capital, but only market timing predicts that the composition of financing (equity compared with debt) should also forecast returns. In cross-sectional tests, we find that the amount of net financing is more important than its composition in explaining future stock returns. In the time series, investment-based factor models explain abnormal stock performance following a variety of corporate financing events that previous studies link to market timing. At the aggregate level, the amount of new financing is also more important for future market returns than its composition. Overall, our joint tests reveal that measures of real investment are correlated with future returns and measures of managerial market timing are not.     

Dividends, Share Repurchases, and the Substitution Hypothesis

We show that repurchases have not only became an important form of payout for U.S. corporations, but also that firms finance their share repurchases with funds that otherwise would have been used to increase dividends. We find that young firms have a higher propensity to pay cash through repurchases than they did in the past and that repurchases have become the preferred form of initiating a cash payout. Although large, established firms have generally not cut their dividends, they also show a higher propensity to pay out cash through repurchases. These findings indicate that firms have gradually substituted repurchases for dividends. Our results also suggest that before 1983, regulatory constraints inhibited firms from aggressively repurchasing shares.     

A class of flat prior distributions for the Poisson‐gamma hierarchical model

A wide class of prior distributions for the Poisson‐gamma hierarchical model is proposed. Prior distributions in this class carry vague information in the sense that their tails exhibit slow decay. Conditions for the propriety of the resulting posterior density are determined, as well as for the existence of posterior moments of the Poisson rate of either an observed or an unobserved unit.     

THE FISCAL POLICY RESPONSE TO PUBLIC DEBT IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES

Theoretical models on fiscal sustainability hypothesize that indebted governments can lower their current debt by generating future primary surpluses, ceteris paribus. While both developed and developing countries struggle with the issue of debt stabilization, the latter, in particular face heightened sensitivity from creditors, which provides them an impetus to respond more strongly to stabilize their debt. Based on a panel of 53 developing countries, we examine the fiscal response of these countries to changes in their debt‐to‐gross domestic product ratio. We find evidence of a positive relationship between the debt and primary surplus and that countries adjust along both the revenue and expenditure margins at roughly the same rate. (JEL E62, H50, O11)     

From scratch to efficiency gains after a financial crisis? A tale of a restructured banking system

We study the efficiency of the Argentine banking system after the 2001–2002 crisis. The financial system had to be restructured from scratch and recovered jointly with the economy, but its productivity and average cost levels have been stagnant since 2007. The analysis includes efficiency frontier estimations for retail banks and a comparison of subsamples for different categories of banks for the period 2005–15. We try to determine whether public banks are more efficient than private ones, whether privatized are more efficient than always private, as well as national versus foreign entities. Our findings show a modest average efficiency of the system and quite similar efficiency rankings for the different groups of banks. On average, public tend to be slightly more cost efficient than private, and national are slightly more efficient than foreign.     

Additivity in minimum cost spanning tree problems

We characterize a rule in minimum cost spanning tree problems using an additivity property and some basic properties. If the set of possible agents has at least three agents, these basic properties are symmetry and separability. If the set of possible agents has two agents, we must add positivity.