Farmers’ Willingness to Pay for a Tuberculosis Cattle Vaccine

We use contingent valuation (CV) and choice experiment (CE) methods to assess cattle farmers’ attitudes to and willingness to pay (WTP) for a bovine tuberculosis (bTB) cattle vaccine, to help inform vaccine development and policy. A survey questionnaire was administered by means of telephone interviews to a stratified sample of 300 cattle farmers in annually bTB‐tested areas in England and Wales. Farmers felt that bTB was a major risk for the cattle industry and that there was a high risk of their cattle getting the disease. The CE estimate produced a mean WTP of £35 per animal per single dose for a vaccine that is 90% effective at reducing the risk of a bTB breakdown and an estimated £55 for such a vaccine backed by 100% insurance of loss if a breakdown should occur. The CV estimate produced a mean WTP of nearly £17 per dose/per animal/per year for a vaccine (including 100% insurance) which, given the average lifespan of cattle, is comparable to the CE estimate. These WTP estimates are substantially higher than the expected cost of a vaccine which suggests that farmers in high risk bTB ‘hotspot’ areas perceive a substantial net benefit from buying the vaccine.     

疫情改变了我国FDI流入的影响因素吗?

根据联合国贸发会的统计数据,疫情对FDI的影响程度已经远超2008年全球金融危机。在此背景下,本文通过理论分析和实证检验探讨疫情对中国FDI流入的影响、疫情是否改变了我国FDI流入的影响因素和疫情常态化下我国FDI流入恢复的支撑因素等。断点回归模型结果显示,新冠疫情对各样本省市FDI流入的影响属于中短期效应,疫情并没有导致影响样本省市FDI流入的因素发生本质变化,且各样本省市FDI流入受疫情影响不同、恢复快慢也不同。进一步的统计分析和实证检验显示,FDI流入在样本省市均具有较强的惯性,中部地区的湖北和江西FDI流入受经济变量的影响比较显著,而东部地区的广东、江苏和上海FDI流入的影响因素应更多地考虑营商环境、产业结构特征和人力资本等,此外基础设施对样本省市FDI流入的影响并不显著。     

城镇化发展与居民消费 ——基于工业生产率地区差异视角

为探究城镇化发展与居民消费之间的内在作用机制,本文基于工业生产率地区差异视角展开深入研究。结果表明:城镇化率与居民消费率之间不存在自发产生的“U”型演变关系,但工业生产率水平对两者的影响具有明显的地区异质性。因此,必须立足于中国经济发展实际,提高工业生产率水平。同时,加快推进城乡“二元”经济结构向城乡融合发展的转变,实现城镇化发展对居民消费的拉动作用。     

Banking sector reactions to COVID-19: The role of bank-specific factors and government policy responses

This paper examines the impact of bank-specific factors and variations in the context of stringency of government policy responses on bank stock returns because of the COVID-19 pandemic. A sample of 1,927 publicly listed banks from 110 countries is used for the period of the first major wave of COVID-19, that is, January to May 2020. Our findings indicate that stock returns of banks with higher capitalization and deposits, more diversification, lower non-performing loans, and larger size are more resilient to the pandemic. While banks’ environment and governance scores do not have a significant impact, higher social and corporate social responsibility strategy scores intensify the negative stock price reaction to COVID-19. We further observe that the pandemic-induced reduction in bank stock prices is mitigated as the strictness of government policy responses increases, mainly through economic responses such as income support, debt and contract relief, and fiscal measures from governments.     

How the COVID-19 pandemic affected hotel Employee stress: Employee perceptions of occupational stressors and their consequences

This study sought to examine the impacts of the global coronavirus pandemic on hotel employees’ perceptions of occupational stressors and their consequences. Paired t-tests and structural equation modeling were applied to examine the responses of 758 hotel employees in the United States. The findings showed that occupational stressors after the outbreak of the pandemic consisted of three domains: traditional hotel-work stressors, unstable and more demanding hotel-work-environment stressors, and unethical hotel-labor-practices-borne stressors. The impacts of these stressors differed from the hypothesis that traditional hotel-work stressors positively affect job satisfaction and organizational commitment. The findings showed that job satisfaction and organizational commitment significantly explained job performance, subjective well-being, and prosocial behavior, but they did not significantly influence turnover intention. Hotel employees’ pre-pandemic perceptions of occupational stressors and their consequences also differed significantly from their perceptions after the pandemic had broken out.     

COVID-19: The effects of job insecurity on the job engagement and turnover intent of deluxe hotel employees and the moderating role of generational characteristics

COVID-19 has caused an unprecedented crisis in all industries around the world. This study sought to verify that job insecurity, as perceived by deluxe hotel employees, significantly affects their job engagement and turnover intent and to determine the moderating effect of generational characteristics. The finding showed that perceptions of job insecurity had negative effects on the engagement of deluxe hotel employees. Also, employees’ job engagement can decrease turnover intent. The engagement of employees fully mediated the relationship between perceptions of job insecurity and turnover intent, and job insecurity caused by COVID-19 had a greater influence on Generation Y than Generation X in reducing job engagement, indicating that the negative impact of job insecurity is higher in Generation Y.     

Verification results for age-structured models of economic–epidemics dynamics

In this paper we propose a macro-dynamic age-structured set-up for the analysis of epidemics/economic dynamics in continuous time.The resulting optimal control problem is reformulated in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space framework where we perform the basic steps of dynamic programming approach.Our main result is a verification theorem which allows to guess the feedback form of optimal strategies. This will be a departure point to discuss the behavior of the models of the family we introduce and their policy implications.     

Air-travelers' concerns emerging from online comments during the COVID-19 outbreak

This research aims to assess air travelers' concerns affected by the Coronavirus pandemic, expressed in the comments they wrote online. A sample of 639 comments written on the Italian National Consumer Union website and related to the airline industry was assessed through an automated sentiment analysis in this study. The achieved results showed that travelers' concerns were directed mainly towards compensations, cancellations, and COVID-19 and at the same time, they had mixed and unpredictable feelings. This element suggests that consumers may have understood that airline companies are facing unsustainable cash-flow and revenue situations. Moreover, all our hypotheses, grounded on existing literature, were refuted. Accordingly, we argue that the actual context prevents assessments based on previous assumptions, and studies related to the impact of COVID-19 need to be conducted anew.     

Adaptive market hypothesis: The story of the stock markets and COVID-19 pandemic

Since the level of markets’ information efficiency is key to profiteering by strategic players, Shocks; such as the COVID-19 pandemic, can play a role in the nature of markets’ information efficiency. The martingale difference and conditional heteroscedasticity tests are used to evaluate the Adaptive form of market efficiency for four (4) major stock market indexes in the top four affected economies during the COVID-19 pandemic (USA, Brazil, India, and Russia). Generally, based on the martingale difference spectral test, there is no evidence of a substantial change in the levels of market efficiency for the US and Brazilian stock markets in the short, medium, and long term. However, in the long term, the Indian stock markets became more information inefficient after the coronavirus outbreak while the Russian stock markets become more information efficient. Intuitively, these affect the forecastability and predictability of these markets’ prices and/or returns. Thereby, informing the strategic and trading actions of stock investors (including arbitrageurs) towards profit optimization, portfolio asset selection, portfolio asset adjustment, etc. Similar policy implications are further discussed.