WHAT DETERMINES VACATION LEAVE? THE ROLE OF GENDER

Vacation leave is introduced in workplaces to improve the working environment. Surprisingly, it has been observed that a large number of workers do not use all of their entitled vacation days. This paper provides a novel set of facts about the gender differences in taking vacation time using the Canadian Workplace Employee Survey, which is a linked longitudinal employer‐employee dataset. The results show considerable differences between men and women in the estimated effects of some demographic characteristics after controlling for job and workplace characteristics. However, they reveal significant implications of work arrangements (e.g., part‐time work, flexible work schedules, and home‐based work), job promotion, supervisory tasks, and union membership for vacation use, for both men and women. This paper provides further insights on the use of fringe benefits that may be useful to policymakers and businesses.     

A Framework for the Simultaneous Measurement of Spatial Variation and Temporal Movement in Prices in a Heterogeneous Country: The Dynamic Household Regional Product Dummy Model

This paper contributes to the growing literature on spatial prices in large heterogeneous countries. While the literatures on spatial variation and temporal movement in prices have grown in parallel, this study marks a departure by providing a unified treatment and proposing a comprehensive framework that allows both approaches. The proposed model is based on twin extensions of the household version of the “country product dummy model” by allowing for a dynamic stochastic specification and interdependence of spatial prices of geographically adjacent regions. Tests of temporal stability and regional independence of the estimated spatial prices are proposed and applied in this paper. The paper shows that the introduction of an autoregressive error process of order one, AR(1), improves the efficiency of the estimates of parameters, urban‐rural and temporal price indices under certain conditions. The Indian application points to a rich potential for using the proposed framework in cross country comparisons such as the International Comparison Program (ICP) exercises.     

基于多源遥感数据的马铃薯收入保险应用研究

目的 研究面向创新型农业保险业务中缺少及时准确的第三方作物产量结果用于灾损理赔的问题。引入多源卫星遥感测产技术,识别测产关键因子,构建产量模型。方法 文章运用多元线性回归分析方法,选取山西省马铃薯主产县岚县为研究区,计算基于Sentinel2影像的植被指数,结合气象卫星数据与实测单产数据,筛选关键因子,建立马铃薯单产遥感测产经验模型。结果 采用GF-2影像分割与Sentinel2长势时序识别岚县马铃薯种植面积为8 477.65hm²,精度检验Kappa值为0.72。保险公司岚县承保马铃薯面积2 476.37hm²,承保覆盖率为29.21%。测产结果显示,马铃薯单产与区域关键期地表温度参数相关性较好,岚县遥感测产获得平均单产为13.76 t/hm²,实地测产获得平均单产为14.06 t/hm²,误差百分比为2.13%,分乡镇平均误差百分比为22.97%,基本满足理赔业务需求。在2018年保险期结束后一周内,保险公司启动快速赔付,支付赔款125.29万元,赔付率48.46%。结论 遥感测产具有大范围、时效性好、可靠性高等特点,能够迅速为创新型保险产品提供测产理赔结果,提高理赔效率,保障农民收入。     

中国上市商业银行业务结构与盈利能力研究

中国上市商业银行盈利能力与业务结构紧密相关,论文从不同角度考察了商业银行的盈利能力,从资产负债业务结构的差异来分析商业银行盈利能力差异.由于目前国内各商业银行在大多数组织结构和运营模式上大同小异,决定一个商业银行盈利能力的关键可能在于其业务结构的差异.反映商业银行盈利能力的指标主要包括平均资产回报率、平均股东权益回报率、净利差和利息收益率等指标,而成本收入比作为一类占营业收入百分比的指标也可以用来衡量商业银行的盈利能力,本文主要采取成本收入比率和净资产回报率作为考察变量.通过对中国部分上市商业银行业务结构与盈利能力研究,贷款行业结构、区域结构、产品类型结构和存贷款期限结构决定了商业银行的收入空间,而存款的期限结构,特别是3个月以内的活期存款比重对商业银行的成本有着至关重要的影响.     

Sectoral Shocks and Metropolitan Employment Growth

In this paper, we study the sources of industry employment growth in each of five metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). The objective is to understand the relative importance of aggregate disturbances versus local sectoral shocks in generating observed employment fluctuations at the MSA level. The empirical evidence presented in this paper derives from structural vector autoregressions (SVARs), estimated for each of the five MSAs. Estimations use monthly employment data covering nine one-digit industrial categories for the period 1951:1–1999:8, as well as two variables that capture the influences of aggregate (i.e., national) shocks on MSAs. We find that within-MSA industry shocks explain considerably more of the forecast error variance in industry employment growth than do aggregate shocks. Sectoral shocks account for between 87 and 94% of the 36-month-ahead forecast error variance. Among individual local sectors, shocks to MSA-specific government, manufacturing, and service sector employment growth are the predominate sources of variability.     

Estimation of the change point of a distribution based on the number of failed test items

This paper discusses the family of life distributions with failure rate functions which decrease initially until a change point and remain constant thereafter. The paper focuses on the estimation for the change point of the failure rate function. While point estimation of the change point of the failure rate function has been discussed by some authors, one can hardly find any existing work on the interval estimation of the change point. In this paper, a method for constructing approximate confidence intervals for the change point is proposed. The proposed approximate confidence intervals are based on the number of failed test items at or before a fixed inspection time. Received: September 1999     

Declining Discount Rates: The Long and the Short of it

The last few years have witnessed important advances in our understanding of time preference and social discounting. In particular, several rationales for the use of time-varying social discount rates have emerged. These rationales range from the ad hoc to the formal, with some founded solely in economic theory while others reflect principles of intergenerational equity. While these advances are to be applauded, the practitioner is left with a confusing array of rationales and the sense that almost any discount rate can be justified. This paper draws together these different strands and provides a critical review of past and present contributions to this literature. In addition to this we highlight some of the problems with employing DDRs in the decision-making process, the most pressing of which may be time inconsistency. We clarify their practical implications, and potential pitfalls, of the more credible rationales and argue that some approaches popular in environmental economics literature are ill-conceived. Finally, we illustrate the impact of different approaches by examining global warming and nuclear power investment. This includes an application and extension of Newell and Pizer [‘Discounting the benefits of climate change mitigation : how much do uncertain rates increase valuations?’ Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 46 (2003) 52] to UK interest rate data.     

Semiparametric time series models driven by latent factor

We introduce a class of semiparametric time series models (SemiParTS) driven by a latent factor process. The proposed SemiParTS class is flexible because, given the latent process, only the conditional mean and variance of the time series are specified. These are the primary features of SemiParTS: (i) no parametric form is assumed for the conditional distribution of the time series given the latent process; (ii) it is suitable for a wide range of data: non-negative, count, bounded, binary, and real-valued time series; (iii) it does not constrain the dispersion parameter to be known. The quasi-likelihood inference is employed in order to estimate the parameters in the mean function. Here, we derive explicit expressions for the marginal moments and for the autocorrelation function of the time series process so that a method of moments can be employed to estimate the dispersion parameter and also the parameters related to the latent process. Simulated results that aim to check the proposed estimation procedure are presented. Forecasting procedures are proposed and evaluated in simulated and real data. Analyses of the number of admissions in a hospital due to asthma and a total insolation time series illustrate the potential for practical situations that involve the proposed models.     

先易后难?机会新颖性、有用性和创业者机会开发时机选择

创业是面向未来的活动,创业者如何选择创业机会开发时机是个有意义的问题.本文通过整合机会的评价维度,围绕创新性刻画机会特征,基于识解水平理论视角,通过对364名商科学生和228名创业者的两次问卷式实验,分别探究机会特征与创业者近期、远期开发意向之间的关系.结果显示,机会的新颖性和有用性会显著增加创业者的机会开发意向,但二者对应的时间距离不同:有用性对于创业者近期开发意向作用要大于新颖性,而对于远期机会开发意向新颖性的重要性要高于有用性.同时,创业者的决策逻辑会影响这一关系:效果推理能够强化新颖性对近期机会开发意向的影响,因果推理能够弱化新颖性与远期机会开发意向的关系.本文的研究结论补充了创业领域中的时间维度研究,加深了对创业者心理过程的理解,对创业者规避时间决策偏差有一定的指导作用.     

我国土地储备机构发展状况分析

通过对全国土地储备机构相关数据的分析,揭示了我国土地储备机构在时间、区域与不同城市等级上的分布情况,结合土地储备制度发展的背景,推演出我国土地储备制度发展的动力机制,即地方政府的利益诉求与国家政策推动的交互作用,并指出我国土地储备发展的重点应由机构的建立转移到内涵的丰富上。