Analysis of household attitudes toward the purchase of livestock products and fish in Cameroon

The need for additional information on household demand for meat and fish in Cameroon is addressed. Probit analysis involving the Heckman selectivity correction procedure is used to estimate the effects of individual and household characteristics on demand for beef, chicken, pork and fish. Results indicate that fish is a relative necessity in Cameroon and is often substituted for beef and chicken by households whose profiles include being of low income levels, having large household sizes, are of middle age and are less educated. Whereas chicken and pork substitute each other, they are each complementary to beef. The profiles of households likely to purchase beef include being married, middle age, educated and of the Muslim faith. Profiles for households most likely to increase their purchases of chicken include being of high income levels and are public sector employed. Some policy implications are provided.     

ARE ALL ECONOMIC FACTS GREATLY EXAGGERATED? THEORY COMPETITION AND SELECTIVITY

Abstract ..There is growing concern and mounting evidence of selectivity in empirical economics. Most empirical economic literatures have a truncated distribution of results. The aim of this paper is to explore the link between publication selectivity and theory contests. This link is confirmed through the analysis of 87 distinct empirical economics literatures, involving more than three and a half thousand separate empirical studies, using objective measures of both selectivity and contests. Our meta–meta‐analysis shows that publication selection is widespread, but not universal. It distorts scientific inference with potentially adverse effects on policy making, but competition and debate between rival theories reduces this selectivity and thereby improves economic inference.     

An Empirical Analysis of the Bias and Rationality of Profit Forecasts Published in New Issue Prospectuses

Our study sets out to assess the accuracy of profit forecasts made by IPOs in Hong Kong. We use a variety of measures and tests to examine the accuracy, bias, rationality, and superiority of earnings estimates. The results show that forecast accuracy compares favourably with the findings from the developed economies of Australia, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand. Forecasts are shown to be superior to the predictions from time series models. IPOs tend to underforecast in the sense that actual profits exceed the forecasts. The rationality tests show mixed results. Cross-sectional analyses of forecast accuracy have poor explanatory power although the Big Six reporting accountants are associated with smaller forecast errors.     

Economies of scale and trade policy: The median voter model revisited

Why do some political economy models perform so poorly in predicting actual trade policy? Do scale economies provide the missing puzzle to our understanding of the anti-trade bias? By integrating economies of scale in production, this paper theoretically reinstates the median voter model as in Mayer [Mayer, W. (1984). Endogenous tariff formation. The American Economic Review, 74, 970–985] as a suitable political economy model in predicting trade policy. The modified model generates the scope for the anti-trade bias and predicts that sometimes economic, rather than political, considerations may lead to restrictive trade.     

A Middle Class Image of Society

We studied undercoverage and nonresponse in a telephone survey among the population of the City ofGroningen, the Netherlands. The original sample, drawn from the municipal population register,contained 7000 individuals. For 37 percent of them, the telephone company was unable to produce a validtelephone number. Of those with a known telephone number, 49 percent did not answer the telephone orrefused to cooperate. As a result, the final respondents comprised merely 32 percent of the originalsample. To study distributional bias, we used individual-level data compiled from municipal records asour benchmark. Bivariate as well as multivariate analyses showed the undercoverage to be stronglyrelated to all sociodemographic variables studied, except gender. Nonresponse was related to age, countryof origin, marital status, and household size and composition, but not to gender, unemployment, socialassistance benefit, and education. Both undercoverage and nonresponse contributed to a strong middleclass bias in the final data set: middle-aged and older, economically secure people, of Dutch origin andliving with others in a household are overrepresented, while persons in disadvantaged and marginalpositions, such as the young, people of foreign stock, the unemployed, persons depending on publicincome support and singles are underrepresented.     

Inequality and endogenous trade policy outcomes

An enduring puzzle in international economics is why trade interventions are biased in favor of import-competing rather than export sectors and therefore restrict trade. In this paper, we show that if the government's objective reflects a concern for inequality then trade policy generally exhibits an anti-trade bias. Importantly, under neutral assumptions, the mechanism that we analyze generates the anti-trade bias independently of whether factors are specific or mobile across sectors. The mechanism also generates an anti-trade bias between large countries even after they sign reciprocal trade agreements that eliminate any terms-of-trade motivation for the use of trade protection.     

Measuring the impact of work reorganization on firm performance: evidence from French manufacturing, 1995–1999

In this paper, we apply the method of selective matching to estimate the causal effect of organizational changes on employment, stock of capital, value added, and factor productivity. Derived from a panel of 2404 French manufacturing firms in 1997, our estimates show that work reorganization improves firm performance overall through a more efficient use of labor and capital, without requiring any increase in the factors of production.     

Euro area inflation persistence

This paper presents evidence on the lag between monetary policy actions and the response of inflation in the euro area as a whole as well as in some of its core countries, notably Germany, Italy and France. In line with previous findings for the US and the UK, results here show that it takes over a year before monetary policy actions have their maximum effect on inflation both in the euro area and in individual countries and that a lag of this length has existed in Europe at least since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, despite the numerous changes in European monetary policy regime thereafter. Results based on alternative definitions of inflation persistence support these findings and indicate, if any, that transmission lags could be in fact much longer for individual countries and the euro area as a whole, although, at the country level, there is strong evidence over time of a drop in German inflation persistence and a sizeable shift in the mean of inflation – particularly in Italy and France. An examination based on results from this paper reveals that euro area inflation persistence could well be an intrinsic phenomenon rather than a ‘statistical fluke’ due to aggregation.This research was conducted during my visit at the European Central Bank Directorate Research, as part of the Research Visitor Programme. I would like to thank Anna Maria Agresti for providing individual country data from the macroeconomic database of the Monetary Transmission Network; Alistair Dieppe for providing data from the ECB area-wide model dataset; and Michele Manna for supplying me with the area-wide M3 data for the period 1970–1980. I thank Gabriel Fagan, Frank Smets, Ignazio Angeloni, Vítor Gaspar, Michael Ehrmann, Guenter Coenen, Oreste Tristani, Tommaso Monacelli, Stephanie Schmitt-Grohe and Gerhard Ruenstler for helpful discussions during my stay at the ECB. I would also like to thank seminar participants at the ECB for their input and I am very grateful to Jeffrey Fuhrer, Edward Nelson and Kenneth West, Bernd Fitzenberger and two anonymous referees for comments on an earlier draft. Any errors and omissions are mine. The views expressed in this paper are those of the author and should not be attributed to the International Monetary Fund, its Executive Board, or its management