Media freedom and gender equality: a cross-national instrumental variable quantile analysis

We investigate the impact of media freedom on gender equality in education for a sample of 63 countries taken over the period 1995–2004. Our analysis is motivated by the idea that the impact of media freedom on gender equality may differ over the conditional distribution of the response variable. Using instrumental variable quantile regression to control for endogeneity in per capita income, we find that greater freedom of the media improves gender equality only in the 0.25 and 0.50 quantiles of the conditional distribution. Countries with the greatest disparities in gender outcomes experience no significant impact of media freedom.     

Reinsurance premium principles based on weighted loss functions

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we propose new reinsurance premium principles that minimize the expected weighted loss functions and balance the trade-off between the reinsurer's shortfall risk and the insurer's risk exposure in a reinsurance contract. Random weighting factors are introduced in the weighted loss functions so that weighting factors are based on the underlying insurance risks. The resulting reinsurance premiums depend on both the loss covered by the reinsurer and the loss retained by the insurer. The proposed premiums provide new ways for pricing reinsurance contracts and controlling the risks of both the reinsurer and the insurer. As applications of the proposed principles, the modified expectile reinsurance principle and the modified quantile reinsurance principle are introduced and discussed in details. The properties of the new reinsurance premium principles are investigated. Finally, the comparisons between the new reinsurance premium principles and the classical expectile principle, the classical quantile principle, and the risk-adjusted principle are provided.     

农民工性别工资差距的分位数回归分析——基于浙江农民工调查的经验研究

本文利用浙江省农民工调查的微观数据,通过分位数回归和分位数分解的方法,研究了男性和女性农民工在整个工资分布上的差异及其影响因素。研究结果表明,随着收入水平的提高,农民工群体间的性别工资差异呈逐步扩大的趋势,但性别工资歧视程度在不断降低。在收入分布的低分位数上,歧视是造成农民工性别工资差距的主要原因;而在高分位数上,个人资源禀赋造成的差异则成为性别工资差距的主要来源。     

Technological Change and Returns to Education: The Implications for the S&E Labor Market

Abstract

This paper analyzes the earnings effect of skill-biased technological change (SBTC), focusing on the comparison of science and engineering (S&E) and non-S&E occupations. In the analysis, we assert that S&E occupations and non-S&E occupations differ in the nature of skill requirements and their susceptibility to technological change; and consequently the earnings effects of SBTC also demonstrate a similar impact. For the empirical analysis, the modified Mincerian earnings equations are estimated by quantile regressions as well as the ordinary least squares (OLS) and two-stage estimation method.

Fitted to Korean panel data, the earning-enhancing effect of SBTC is observed for male workers, not only for those in S&E occupations but also for those in non-S&E occupations. Such an effect is not observed for women in S&E occupations, and rather turns even negative for women in non-S&E occupations; envisaging a relatively large occurrence of work interruption of married women in Korea, we conjecture that this may reflect women workers’ skill deterioration taking place during a work interruption. The earnings effect of SBTC is most apparent for male workers in the higher quantiles of earnings distribution, implying that those who are highly educated and have high unobserved ability gain most from SBTC.     

住房需求和住房供给——基于多重多元回归、分位数回归方法

利用因子分析、多重多元回归和分位数回归方法研究了全国房地产行业的住房需求和住房供给,结果表明房价与住房需求和供给均呈正相关关系,并随着分位数的不同而变化,房价对住房需求的影响比对住房供给的影响大而显著等,并提出了一些建议,为有关部门制定相关政策提供依据。     

高科技业高管人力资本与企业绩效关系的实证研究

以我国2012年64家高科技上市公司为研究对象,利用分位数回归模型,检验了不同绩效水平的企业中高管人力资本对企业绩效的影响关系。实证结果表明不同企业绩效水平下各高管人力资本指标对企业绩效有不同的影响,并提出了一些相应的建议和对策。     

Entry and pricing on Broadway

This article investigates the pricing decisions of Broadway shows. We find evidence that incumbent Broadway shows lower prices several weeks prior to the opening of a new show. In addition, prices are lower when the threat of competition, due to more entrants, is larger. A decomposition suggests that prices are more important than quantities for changes in revenue prior to entry and that this pattern reverses after entry occurs.     

The management of sustainable development: A longitudinal analysis of the effects of environmental performance on economic performance

The literature on sustainable development has largely focused on investigating the relationship between companies' environmental and economic performance. However, many aspects remain unexplored, and empirical studies are far from reaching a consensus due to the heterogeneity of the environmental and economic measures and methodologies used. This study contributes to the literature on sustainable development by considering a panel of 998 US companies observed over the period 2003–2017 using both traditional panel data methods and an unconditional quantile regression technique. The empirical evidence confirms that environmental performance, measured in terms of environmental orientation and environmental innovation, positively affects returns on assets and equity. It also demonstrates that these returns change across quantiles and depend on the capacity of green companies to generate the same streams of income as nongreen companies but with less capital. In other words, green firms tend to be more efficient in generating future wealth.     

Detecting learning‐by‐exporting effects on firms' productivity distribution by accounting for heterogeneous macrofactors and panel attrition

This paper aims to verify the presence of the learning‐by‐exporting effect on total factor productivity growth. The study starts, as is typical in this context, by addressing the pre‐entry selection bias at firm level but differs from the literature by focusing on the distribution of the outcome and considering the presence of the different influences of macroeconomic factors on exporters and non‐exporters. Additionally, the paper addresses the panel attrition, a current source of estimation bias in longitudinal studies. The analysis is based on a panel of Italian manufacturing firms in the 1998–2007 period. We design an experiment by aligning and pooling cohorts of firms that allow us to obtain a sufficiently large group of firms entering the international market. Our results show that internationalisation affects firms' productivity and that the effect is heterogeneous over total factor productivity distribution and larger for the firms at the bottom section of the distribution itself. Furthermore, we observe that the learning‐by‐exporting effect may be confounded without (a) considering that domestic and exporter firms may afford heterogeneous demand cycles and (b) managing the dropout of some firms from the panel.     

A New Perspective on Returns to Scale for Truckload Motor Carriers

Understanding how motor carriers' size affects their productivity (e.g., miles per power unit) is of fundamental importance to carrier managers, shippers, and investors, because the nature of this relationship should influence carriers' strategies with regard to growth. In the truckload (TL) sector, the prevailing assumption is that TL carriers face constant returns to scale such that productivity differs little between large and small carriers. While empirical findings from several studies conducted since deregulation are consistent with this assumption, we contend that the true relationship between carrier size and productivity is more nuanced and is contingent on carriers' level of technical efficiency. Specifically, we develop and test middle range theory that predicts increasing returns to scale for carriers with low technical efficiency, constant returns to scale for carriers with average technical efficiency, and decreasing returns to scale for carriers with high technical efficiency. We test our theory by estimating production functions using quantile regression for data collected from the U.S. Department of Transportation for 1,068 TL carriers. Results from our analyses corroborate our predictions. Our findings hold valuable implications for the logistics literature as well as TL carrier management, shippers, and other industry stakeholders.