A study on the attributes involved in the hedonic pricing of Brazilian clothing

The objective of this study is to identify the weighted importance of intrinsic and extrinsic attributes. Intrinsic attributes are defined as the specific features of products. Extrinsic attributes refer to other characteristics that are also important for price composition, such as brand, store layout and services, and purchasing experiences. In a survey with 1,923 collected responses, it was possible to identify and quantify intrinsic and extrinsic influencing factors beyond price strategy in the Brazilian fashion market for blue jeans. The statistical analysis was based on the hedonic price method. The idea of expressing the price based on a series of intrinsic and extrinsic variables avoids the problem of using the regression technique. In this research, multiple linear regression and quantile regression were applied. The results show that extrinsic attributes have greater influence than intrinsic features on explaining the final market prices using log-linear and quantile regression statistical methods.     

The effectiveness of advertising alcohol products in sports sponsorship

Studies have shown that exposure to sponsorship can influence behavior. However, evidence of the effectiveness of sports advertising and its influence on alcohol consumption is inconclusive. The goal of this research is to examine whether sponsorship by alcohol products receives the same attention as sponsorship by nonalcohol products depending on their congruence and the way they influence the intention to consume. Using sports posters, an experiment was performed to measure attention through eye-tracking. The results show that attention paid to alcohol brands is no greater than the attention paid to incongruent brands and is no different from the attention paid to congruent brands, regardless of gender and sporting discipline. Attention paid to sponsors has no influence on the intention to consume. These results show the need for further research on the effectiveness of sponsorship and its relationship with alcohol consumption.     

Enhanced Cooperation: the Ultimate Challenge of Managing Diversity in Europe

Diversity in the EU has always been a permanent factor accompanying the European integration process. With the recent enlargement and those in the pipeline this diversity will grow, bringing the ultimate challenge for the continuity and feasibility of the integration process: the management of this increasing variety. The mechanism of enhanced cooperation was established in the Amsterdam Treaty to provide a solution to this challenge. The following article sheds some light on the future utilisation of this mechanism and its consequences and repercussions for the European integration process.*This article was written while the author was a researcher in the Department of International Relations and European Studies, Central European University, Budapest. The paper expresses the personal opinions of the author.     

Leading and Following (Un)ethically in <Emphasis Type=Italic>Limen</Emphasis>

We propose a liminality-based analysis of the process of ethical leadership/followership in organizations. A liminal view presents ethical leadership as a process taking place in organizational contexts that are often characterized by high levels of ambiguity, which render the usual rules and preferences dubious or inadequate. In these relational spaces, involving leaders, followers, and their context, old frames may be questioned and new ones introduced in an emergent way, through subtle processes whose evolution and implications may not be easy to grasp even by those participating in them.     

An assessment of Portuguese banks’ efficiency and productivity towards euro area participation

This paper analyses the production technology of Portuguese banks during the 1992–2006 period through the estimation of a translog cost frontier. This period is of major interest because it covers Portugal’s euro area accession and its impact on the banking system. Hence, critical factors impacting the banking system are identified against the background of increasing financial integration prior to the financial crisis that started in 2007 and later translated into strains in some European sovereign debt markets. Banks are modelled as firms which produce loans and other earning assets, choosing the cost minimizing combination of labour, capital and interest bearing debt, subject to holding a predetermined level of equity. According to the results of this study, technological progress has shifted the cost frontier downwards throughout the period under consideration, whereas the distance at which banks have operated from the frontier seems to have remained constant. Further, increases in production under scale economies have also contributed to the recorded increase in productivity.     

How different is Africa? A comment on Masanjala and Papageorgiou

Masanjala and Papageorgiou (Rough and lonely road to prosperity: a reexamination of the sources of growth in Africa using Bayesian model averaging, Journal of Applied Econometrics 2008; 23 (5): 671–682) use Bayesian model averaging to evaluate the existence of parameter heterogeneity between African and non‐African countries in the framework of cross‐country growth regressions. We show that their results are not robust to the use of a prior over the model space that respects the strong heredity principle put forward by Chipman (Chipman HA. 1996. Bayesian variable selection with related predictors. Canadian Journal of Statistics 24 : 17–36) for models including interaction terms. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Friending the taxman: On the use of social networking services for government eID in Europe

The provision of identities online continues to be a fiercely debated topic in policy circles, with proposals emerging for public sector organizations to leverage pre-existing social networking services for their own identity management purposes. Within the broader context of private sector organizations springing up as identity providers, this article explores — from a socio-legal perspective — the merits and drawbacks of using social networking services for government eID in Europe. It then reviews the present and future European policy environment concerning official use of social networking credentials. We focus specifically on legislative measures currently being proposed in the EU to facilitate the Identification, Authentication and Signature policy, within the scope of the ongoing Electronic Signatures Directive revision process and the launch of the proposed Electronic Trust Services Regulation.     

The Theory of Optimal Law Enforcement

The economic literature on optimal law enforcement is very recent. Becker's seminal paper on crime and law enforcement dates from 1968 and most papers which are the focus of this survey have been published in the last ten years.The core result presented by Becker is the following: the probability and the severity of punishment deter crime. Therefore, the fine should be maximal since it is a costless transfer whereas the probability of detection and conviction is costly. Much of the recent work has attempted to show why Becker's result may not hold.     

Okun's Law Revisited*

In the light of modern theoretical studies, the negative relationship between output and unemployment may take a nonlinear form, in the sense that changes in output can cause asymmetric changes in the unemployment rate. A regime‐dependent specification of Okun's law, where the inverse relationship between cyclical unemployment and cyclical GDP is allowed to differ across recessions and expansions, is estimated for the US economy. Using both the Hodrick–Prescott filter and a bivariate structural time series model to isolate the cyclical component of the variables of interest, the nonlinear specification is highly significant when tested against the linear alternative independently of the method used for extracting the cycle of unemployment and GDP. The estimation results imply that the contemporaneous effect of growth on unemployment is asymmetric and significantly higher in recessions than in expansions, and shocks to unemployment tend to be more persistent in the expansionary regime.