Do Mothers Matter? A Comparison of Models of the Influence of Mothers' and Fathers' Educational and Occupational Status on Children's Educational Attainment

The first objective of this article is to clarify which model best captures the structure and trend of the influence of social origin on children's education. The second objective is to analyse how general conclusions on historical trends in educational reproduction change if we add mother's status background to the model. Six contrasting hypotheses are derived fromthe body of literature dealing with models on families' socioeconomic status. All hypotheses are translated into empirical models and their explained variance is compared. A pooled data set is used that contains data from the Netherlands, West Germany, and the USA. The Modified Dominance Model, that distinguishes the influence of the highest from thelowest status parent, has the best model fit. Regarding the second objective we see that adding the mother's influence to that of the father's does not change general conclusions on trends in educational reproduction. Over time the influence of both parents decreases continuously. However, the influence of the mother's education and occupational status on children's educational attainment is substantive.     

Dynamic R&D competition with memory

We consider a differential game of R&D competition and explore the impact of rivalry on the firms' investment behavior over time. Using closed-loop strategies and hence allowing for strategic interactions among rival firms we show that R&D spending by the individual competitor is increased due to competition in the race for priority. This leads us to argue that competitive encounters enhance R&D activities at the same time as increasing efficiency in the race for a technological breakthrough.     

The Effect of Aggregation Bias: An NTB‐modelling Analysis of Turkey's Agro‐food Trade with the EU

We explore how different data aggregation levels affect the gravity estimates of non‐tariff barriers (NTBs) in the agro‐food sector, and we examine their related impacts on policy simulations of an expansion to the European Union (EU) that would include Turkey. We calculate two sets of ad valorem equivalents (AVEs) of NTBs using the gravity approach to disaggregated and aggregated Central Product Classification data for 15 Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) agro‐food sectors. We find that the AVEs of NTBs vary substantially across products and that using aggregated data primarily results in greater effects of NTBs. In a second step, we incorporate the AVEs of NTBs into the GTAP model to evaluate Turkey's EU membership and conclude that aggregation bias has considerable effects on both the estimation of NTBs and the general equilibrium simulation results. Utilising different data aggregation levels leads to a great variability of trade costs of NTBs and, hence, to misleading trade and welfare effects.     

Network embeddedness in the internationalization of biotechnology entrepreneurs

This study investigates how entrepreneurs of biotech enterprises embed in domestic and international networks so as to internationalize. We advance a contextual framework of embeddedness of internationalizing entrepreneurs, providing a contribution (i) by synthesizing and applying existing conceptual insights from the networking literature to provide a more culturally sensitive view of getting embedded for international entrepreneurship in the biotech industry and (ii) by adding insights into the practices and (micro)processes of how and in what ways embeddedness integrates with the internationalization of biotech entrepreneurs. Our study involves six entrepreneurs from Canada, Finland, and New Zealand. Context-specific embeddedness was studied by exploring the (i) type, (ii) strength, (iii) locality, and (iv) importance of the international and national network ties among internationalizing entrepreneurs. We found differences in relation to the locality of universities and research institutes, role and type of financiers, and customer focus in internationalization. For instance, while customers were central to the embeddedness of Canadian and New Zealand entrepreneurs, Finnish entrepreneurs had no focus on their customers, but acted solely through sales channels and partners. The customer focus of New Zealand entrepreneurs was mainly international, whereas it was domestic in the case of Canadian entrepreneurs.     

The power of market mood — Evidence from an emerging market

This article focuses on investor behavior and, consequently, the mood in the market. By using a self-organizing network we develop a model which tries to capture the market mood and serves as an indicator of the reasonableness of selling or purchasing securities. In this sense, the final result of this model is the same as in the model-type prediction of future stock prices, with the only exception being that one is not required to know the concrete future values of the selected security. This will indirectly support the hypothesis that psychological factors are an important (if not key) market driving force.     

Financialisation and the slowdown of accumulation

Over the past decades, the financial investment of non-financialbusinesses has been rising, and the accumulation of capitalgoods has been declining. The first part of the paper offersa novel theory to explain this phenomenon. Financialisation,the shareholder revolution and the development of a market forcorporate control have shifted power to shareholders and thuschanged management priorities, leading to a reduction in thedesired growth rate. In the second part, the link between accumulationand financialisation is tested econometrically by means of atime series analysis of aggregate business investment for theUSA, the UK, France and Germany. Extensive tests of robustnessare performed. For the first three countries, evidence supportingthe negative effect of financialisation on accumulation is found.     

Don't Tax Me? Determinants of Individual Attitudes Toward Progressive Taxation

This contribution empirically analyzes the individual determinants of tax rate preferences. For that purpose, we use representative survey data from the German General Social Survey, which offers information on attitudes toward progressive, proportional and regressive taxation. On the basis of theoretical considerations, we explore the factors which, beyond an individual's financial interest, should drive preferences for progressive taxation. Our empirical results confirm that the narrow redistributive self‐interest does not offer the sole explanation of the heterogeneity in individual attitudes. Rather, we show that the choice of the favored tax rate is also driven by fairness considerations and beliefs on the role of effort for economic success.