What explains the performance of students in a heterogeneous environment? Conditional efficiency estimation with continuous and discrete environmental variables

Efficiency estimations which do not account for the operational environment where production units are operating in may have only a limited value. This article presents a fully nonparametric framework to estimate relative performance of production units when accounting for continuous and discrete background variables. Using insights from recent developments in nonparametric econometrics, we show how conditional efficiency scores can be estimated using a tailored mixed kernel function with a data-driven bandwidth selection. The methodology is applied to the sample of Dutch pupils from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment (OECD PISA) data set. We estimate students' performance and the influence of its background characteristics. The results of our application show that several family- and student-specific characteristics have a statistically significant effect on the educational efficiency, while school-level variables do not have impact on performance.     

Eine kleine Politische Ökonomie der Wohnungsmieten und -leerstände in Ostdeutschland

Aktuellen Sch?tzungen zufolge stehen etwa 1 Mio. Mietwohnungen in Ostdeutschland leer, ohne dass die ostdeutschen Wohnungsmieten sinken würden. Vielmehr stagnieren die Mieten weiterhin knapp unterhalb des westdeutschen Niveaus. Nur wenige M?rkte dürften auf ein überschussangebot so unelastisch reagieren wie die ostdeutschen Wohnungsm?rkte. Warum hat der enorme überhang an leerstehenden Wohnungen nicht l?ngst zu einem dramatischen Verfall der Mieten geführt?     

Understanding Empirical Boundaries: A Systems-Theoretical Avenue in Border Studies

The aim of this contribution is to present a conceptual framework with potential application across the interdisciplinary field of border studies. This framework should embrace interdisciplinarity and the contextual nature of borders. Based on the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann, it elaborates an understanding of borders as being related to a dynamic process of social bordering/bounding processes that involves spatial, social, and conceptual boundaries. By introducing the notion of ‘empirical boundary’, our framework aspires to bridge the gap between (radical) constructivist theorising and the analysis of physical realities involved in the (re)production of boundaries.     

Housing Policy in a Nongrowth Era: Problems of the Northeast United States

The ambivalent results of the federal government's large-scale subsidization of low- and moderate-rent housing production in the early 1970s have produced new preoccupations about the directions federal housing programs should take in the light of sharply divergent growth trends among Regions that have become apparent in 1977. As economic and demographic growth in the South and West Regions poses classic problems of adaption to growth, the Northeast and North Central Regions are faced with either nongrowth or decreases in population and employment. This paper discusses adaptions designed to conserve and improve existing housing resources in areas that require only minimal new residential construction. These adaptions include new levels of state-federal housing coordination to make more intense use of private financing in conjunction with the federal Section 8, Coinsurance, and Section 233(f) programs.     

A consistent multidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle

The unidimensional Pigou-Dalton transfer principle demands that a regressive transfer in income—a transfer from worse-off (poor) to better-off (rich)—decreases social welfare. In a multidimensional setting the direct link between income (or any other attribute) and individual well-being is absent. We interpret the social welfare level of a distribution in which each individual has the same bundle as the individual well-being level. We define regressivity on the basis of this individual well-being ranking. In a setting with both transferable and non-transferable attributes, the imposition of the ensuing “consistent” Pigou-Dalton principle forces individual well-being to have a quasi-linear structure in the transferable attributes. Since we allow for transferable and non-transferable attributes, our result provides a normative underpinning for criteria in the distinct literatures of multidimensional inequality measurement (only transferable attributes) and of needs (one transferable and one non-transferable attribute).     

Labour market consequences of a high school diploma

This article compares the labour market outcomes of high school dropouts to high school graduates who did not enrol into higher education, but immediately entered the labour market. Using parental educational background as an instrument on a rich administrative dataset in the Flemish Region of Belgium, we find no returns to a high school diploma on average. However, these results hide considerable heterogeneity by gender and educational track. While females and individuals in vocational education may benefit from a diploma, male graduates and students holding a general education diploma may even be worse off on the labour market than dropouts. We show that sectoral heterogeneity acts as an underlying mechanism in the returns to a high school diploma.     

Investments in consumer relationships: a critical reassessment and model extension

This study is a critical reassessment and extension of De Wulf et al.'s (2001) framework investigating retail investments in consumer relationships. Their initial model relates four types of relationship marketing efforts to perceived relationship investment, in turn influencing relationship quality and ultimately behavioural loyalty. Based upon signalling theory, we extend this model by introducing product and service efforts as additional antecedents. Moreover, in contrast to the use of self-reported measures in the initial model, we apply customer database information in order to measure the construct of behavioural loyalty. Based upon 187 consumers reporting on their relationship with a Belgian apparel retailer, the SEM results provide guidelines for retailers how to increase the quality of their relationships with consumers by strengthening consumers' perceptions of relationship investment.