What future for health futures in Latin America and the Caribbean?

The Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), Regional Office of the World Health Organization, is a United Nations agency specializing in providing technical cooperation in health to the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean. A futures approach has much to offer in this endeavour, and PAHO is making health futures tools available to its Member States through a variety of activities. The purpose of promoting futures thinking and the application of futures tools is to improve health-policy planning and public health action within the framework of the ‘Health for All’ vision and PAHO's current Strategic and Programmatic Orientations.     

Stock Price and Volume Effects Associated with Compositional Changes in European Stock Indices

This paper provides further evidence of price and volume effects associated with index compositional changes by analysing the inclusions (exclusions) from the French CAC40 and SBF120 indices, as well as the FTSE100. I find evidence supporting the price pressure hypothesis associated with index fund rebalancing, but weak or no evidence for the imperfect substitution, liquidity and information hypotheses. The results improve on recent evidence from the S&P500 index. The evidence for the FTSE100 additions shows, in particular, that markets learn about an imminent inclusion and incorporate this information into prices, even before the announcement date.     

Environmental protection versus economic growth

This paper presents and analyses the differences in the eco-models implemented worldwide （such as whether and how carbon taxes being ＂recycled＂）, or in their efficiency parameters （inconsistent parameter values that account for different results）. This is the assumption that a real tradeoff exists between the production of environmental goods. The present article empirically proves that something must be given up in order to gain something else, and once equations are specified to trace out the path of the economy over time, the natural economic formulation of such equations will embody the notion of economic and bio-tradeoffs.     

INTEREG: A Twenty-region Input–Output Model for Italy

Since the regional scale turns out to be the scale at which fiscal devolution is likely to be accomplished in Italy, and that at which trade and growth interdependencies as well as regional convergence can be most conveniently investigated, a new 20-region input–output model for Italy seems to be a useful tool of analysis. Although various regional and interregional models have been constructed since the 1950s, none has been implemented for the whole system of 20 Italian administrative regions considered in their tight mutual dependence; also, the pool approach has not been greatly favoured, even in situations where direct information on regional trade is lacking. The main purpose of this paper is to report on the structure of the model, the rather complex procedure used in the model construction and the adopted solution technique. Some space is devoted to the problems encountered in handling regional trade endogenously in an input–output setting and to a comparison between the pool approach, used in the Italian model, and other current techniques. The paper also reports on some preliminary results regarding the regional impact of fiscal policy.     

Can negative interest rates really affect option pricing? Empirical evidence from an explicitly solvable stochastic volatility model

The profound financial crisis generated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the European sovereign debt crisis in 2011 have caused negative values of government bond yields both in the USA and in the EURO area. This paper investigates whether the use of models which allow for negative interest rates can improve option pricing and implied volatility forecasting. This is done with special attention to foreign exchange and index options. To this end, we carried out an empirical analysis on the prices of call and put options on the US S&P 500 index and Eurodollar futures using a generalization of the Heston model in the stochastic interest rate framework. Specifically, the dynamics of the option’s underlying asset is described by two factors: a stochastic variance and a stochastic interest rate. The volatility is not allowed to be negative, but the interest rate is. Explicit formulas for the transition probability density function and moments are derived. These formulas are used to estimate the model parameters efficiently. Three empirical analyses are illustrated. The first two show that the use of models which allow for negative interest rates can efficiently reproduce implied volatility and forecast option prices (i.e. S&P index and foreign exchange options). The last studies how the US three-month government bond yield affects the US S&P 500 index.     

Do institutional investors drive corporate transparency regarding business contribution to the sustainable development goals?

Institutional investors show increasing interest in how companies align their corporate social responsibility strategies with the sustainable development goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations (UN). The information disclosed in this regard is essential to know and monitor business contribution to the 2030 Agenda. In this paper, we analyze the influence that institutional investors have on the adoption of the disclosure strategy established by UN and the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)—GRI‐SDG Compass. The results obtained for a sample of 989 international companies, which prepare their sustainability reports following the GRI guidelines, show that ownership by foreign investors, pension funds, and “other” investors boosts the relevance of the information disclosed in relation to the 2030 Agenda. On the contrary, government, financial institutions, and cross holdings have no impact on the information systems developed.     

Intermediate units in multinational corporations: A resource dependency view on coordinative versus entrepreneurial roles

Due to the dispersion of headquarters’ activities across organizational and geographical boundaries, intermediate units (IUs) are emerging as a key actor of international business. IUs are intermediate structural layers between headquarters (HQ) and local subsidiaries with specific HQ responsibilities. Our study relies on original data of 67 IUs and, taking on a Resource Dependence approach, explores empirically the two HQ roles attributed to IUs: coordinative versus entrepreneurial. According to our results, the main differences between both roles relate to external network embeddedness, internal network position and autonomy. We argue that these differences arise from the dominant sources of power in each role. These findings have signi?cant relevance for theory development and managerial practice as we provide a starting point for understanding the dispersion of complex HQ systems as well as how those systems are discharged and add value.     

Microeconometric Analysis of Residential Water Demand

This paper develops a structural model for obtaining price elasticities and evaluating consumer’s response to changes in nonlinear tariffs when only panel data on household consumption are available. The model and the empirical strategy address problems implied by nonlinear tariffs, existence of a fixed cost, and use of limited data, giving rise to a random effects model with a nonlinear individual effect. Results show that the estimated model does well at fitting data and demand is inelastic, although elasticity varies by initial consumption block. Then, I estimate welfare consequences of implementing several demand policies.     

Measuring image: shopping centre case studies

The first goal of the paper is to define the concept of micro-marketing, overcoming the 'specialized' perspectives and definitions that have prevailed so far. Micro-marketing relates to ways of controlling environment complexity, facilitated by information technology and required by highly competitive markets. Such control has three forms: segmentation , which reduces complexity to a controllable number of variables; organization , which absorbs a certain amount of complexity by modelling the structure onto the environment; technology , which explores complexity and dominates it through simplification. The second goal is to demonstrate that micro-marketing can build a sustained competitive advantage. Finally, the theoretical implication of the diffusion of a micromarketing approach in the retailing industry is discussed. The areas of strategy, organization, channel relationships, and customer satisfaction are examined. Should micro-marketing become widespread in the retailing industry, we argue that its final result would be increased welfare for the consumer, as long as retailers capitalize on the power of information and stand as a 'countervailing power' to suppliers in the channel.