Obesity of politicians and corruption in Ukraine in 2000–2020– Reply

We collected 469 frontal face images of Ukrainian cabinet ministers who were in office in 2000–2020. For each image, the minister's body mass index was estimated using a computer vision algorithm. The time series of median estimated body mass index of cabinet ministers co-moves over time with two existing measures of corruption – World Bank worldwide governance indicator Control of Corruption, and the discrepancy between the quantity of luxury wristwatches exported from Switzerland to Ukraine (reported by Swiss statistics) and the corresponding quantity imported by Ukraine from Switzerland (reported by Ukrainian statistics).     

An empirical note about estimation and forecasting Latin American Forex returns volatility: the role of long memory and random level shifts components

Portuguese Economic Journal - A set of RLS-type models with ARMA and ARFIMA dynamics is estimated and compared in a forecasting exercise with ARFIMA, GARCH and FIGARCH models. It is an extension of...     

Inequality and entrepreneurial thresholds

We explore the relationship between inequality and entrepreneurial activity. Drawing on cross-sectional data from a largescale survey of the economic conditions of individuals across India, we develop a number of dimensions of inequality to explore empirically how inequality interacts with entrepreneurship, operationalized as self-employment or as employing other people. We find compelling evidence that there are thresholds to becoming self-employed, and even more so to assembling the combinations of resources and personal attributes required to become an employer. Greater inequality leaves more people unable to make the transition to self-employment, leaving casual laboring as the occupation of necessity. At the same time, inequality increases the number of employers in a society, by concentrating resources - particularly land and finance - enough for significant numbers of people to be able to cross this higher threshold. Lastly, greater differentiation into social or religious groups curtails the ability to cross either entrepreneurial threshold, presumably by limiting the extent and benefits of social networks of value for entrepreneurship.     

Productivity Growth: Technological Progress and Technical Efficiency

Atlantic Economic Journal -     

Analytical approximations of local‐Heston volatility model and error analysis

This paper studies the expansion of an option price (with bounded Lipschitz payoff) in a stochastic volatility model including a local volatility component. The stochastic volatility is a square root process, which is widely used for modeling the behavior of the variance process (Heston model). The local volatility part is of general form, requiring only appropriate growth and boundedness assumptions. We rigorously establish tight error estimates of our expansions, using Malliavin calculus. The error analysis, which requires a careful treatment because of the lack of weak differentiability of the model, is interesting on its own. Moreover, in the particular case of call–put options, we also provide expansions of the Black–Scholes implied volatility that allow to obtain very simple formulas that are fast to compute compared to the Monte Carlo approach and maintain a very competitive accuracy.     

Who do you care about? Scientists’ personality traits and perceived impact on beneficiaries

We investigate the roots of scientists' perceptions of the impact of their work by examining stable psychological characteristics such as personality traits. An analysis of personality traits highlights the effects of policies related to gender equality, allocation of research time and skills acquisition. It improves our understanding of the conflicts related to scientists’ perceptions of the impact of their research on beneficiaries. For example, conscientiousness increases the perceived impact on clinical beneficiaries, but reduces the perceived impact on industrial beneficiaries. Organizational scientific freedom increases the effects of personality traits on perceived impact on beneficiaries such that scientists affiliated to a university are less likely than colleagues working in other research settings to perceive the simultaneous impact of their work on both industrial and clinical beneficiaries.     

Human resource management practices and voluntary turnover: a study of internal workforce and external labor market contingencies

We tested relationships between employee quit rates and two bundles of human resource (HR) practices that reflect the different interests of the two parties involved in the employment relationship. To understand the boundary conditions for these effects, we examined an external contingency proposed to influence the exchange-based effects of HR practices on subsequent quit rates – the local industry-specific unemployment rate – and an internal contingency proposed to shape employees’ conceptualization of their exchange relationship – their employment status (i.e. full-time, part-time and temporary employment). Analyses of lagged data from over 200 Canadian establishments show that inducement HR practices (e.g. extensive benefits) and performance expectation HR practices (e.g. performance-based bonuses) had different effects on quit rates, and the former effect was moderated by unemployment rate. The effects of HR practices on quit rates did not differ between FT and PT employees, but a different pattern of main and interactive effects was found among temporary workers. These findings suggest that employees’ exchange-based decisions to leave may be less affected by the number of hours they expect to work each week, and more by the number of weeks they expect to work.     

Family firm’s management composition: the role played by family members’ age in TMT and supervisor levels

Quality & Quantity - Family firms (FFs) are the backbone of entrepreneurial fabric in many countries. Management of such businesses is complex because of their features: the overlap between...