Econometrics

In the context of underlying stability in female participation rates, the gender wagegap, measured by the log of monthly wages, more than doubled in Belarus from 1996 to 2006. In this respect, the country has experienced a variant of the transition which occurred in the former Soviet Union where relative female wages fell by more than female participation. We have used the Machado and Mata (2005) analysis of the gender gap distribution. This reveals that the effect of coefficients on observed characteristics in widening the gap was increasing over time, especially in the lower and middle deciles of the wage distribution. At the same time, the effect of the characteristics themselves in reducing the gap was shrinking. The decomposition of changes in the gap over time, based on Juhn et al. (1991), confirms that the contraction of women’s relative wages has been caused both by a deterioration in the observed characteristics of female workers and by the associated remuneration. Changes in the residual wage distribution tend to slightly reduce the gap rather than, as is the case elsewhere, to increase it. The analysis carried out in line with Neuman and Oaxaca (2004) suggests that the increased gap was not caused by sample selection. Instead, two observed factors are found to be mainly responsible for the results: hours of work have increased for men more than for women and women have experienced segregation in low-wage industries.

"In this paper, we analyze firms' pricing behavior using a full informative micro dataset that accounts for a large part of Italian firms. In our view, “the black boxes” to examine are the relations between price setting, market structure and spatial disparities. The paper aims to extend the empirical literature in several directions. A first goal of the research is to investigate the link between heterogeneity in price changes and spatial dependence. Besides, we compare the price dynamics among sectors, namely manufacturing vs. service. It is irrefutable that prices stickiness is linked to good market rigidities. Consequently, these issues have extremely important policy implications; for instance, the Monetary Authority considers the macro price indexes in order to determine the right policy to stabilize the economy and to improve social welfare. However, the Central Bank does not distinguish the likely aggregation bias source from the cross sector–region–country heterogeneities.

Overall, the purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of survey data that allows us to collect important aspects for Economic Policy analysis, which could not be drawn from analysis with “mesoeconomic” or aggregate data. Finally, we provide empirical evidence that price dynamic heterogeneity across geographical areas, as well as disparities across industries, are statistically significant in our microeconometric models. Indeed, the probability that industries in the backward areas change prices is 30% less than in more developed regions (Northeast). In addition, we find that sectoral diversity counts especially across goods and service industries, even if this outcome is not always robust across microeconometric specifications."

The article first describes characteristics of major infrastructure projects. Second, it documents a much neglected topic in economics: that ex ante estimates of costs and benefits are often very different from actual ex post costs and benefits. For large infrastructure projects the consequences are cost overruns, benefit shortfalls, and the systematic underestimation of risks. Third, implications for cost–benefit analysis are described, including that such analysis is not to be trusted for major infrastructure projects. Fourth, the article uncovers the causes of this state of affairs in terms of perverse incentives that encourage promoters to underestimate costs and overestimate benefits in the business cases for their projects. But the projects that are made to look best on paper are the projects that amass the highest cost overruns and benefit shortfalls in reality. The article depicts this situation as ‘survival of the unfittest’. Fifth, the article sets out to explain how the problem may be solved, with a view to arriving at more efficient and more democratic projects, and avoiding the scandals that often accompany major infrastructure investments. Finally, the article identifies current trends in major infrastructure development. It is argued that a rapid increase in stimulus spending, combined with more investments in emerging economies, combined with more spending on information technology is catapulting infrastructure investment from the frying pan into the fire.

""With New Zealand’s "knowledge wave" in view, along with its near synonyms "knowledge society’ and ‘knowledge economy," we consider the "pedagogy" of contemporary capitalism.

Here, the education system, and in particular the university, has become the key social institution, and concern, for the enterprise of innovation-oriented techno-capitalism. Its pedagogical design imperative, or structural determination, demands that educational institutions embody and transmit the value of knowledge qua innovation.

Looking at work organisation in terms of the "deep communication" of design principles, evident in enhanced systems of measuring space, time and value, we show that the built environment today favours a "transcendental" capitalist culture.""

In this paper we introduce a linear programming estimator (LPE) for the slope parameter in a constrained linear regression model with a single regressor. The LPE is interesting because it can be superconsistent in the presence of an endogenous regressor and, hence, preferable to the ordinary least squares estimator (LSE). Two different cases are considered as we investigate the statistical properties of the LPE. In the first case, the regressor is assumed to be fixed in repeated samples. In the second, the regressor is stochastic and potentially endogenous. For both cases the strong consistency and exact finite-sample distribution of the LPE is established. Conditions under which the LPE is consistent in the presence of serially correlated, heteroskedastic errors are also given. Finally, we describe how the LPE can be extended to the case with multiple regressors and conjecture that the extended estimator is consistent under conditions analogous to the ones given herein. Finite-sample properties of the LPE and extended LPE in comparison to the LSE and instrumental variable estimator (IVE) are investigated in a simulation study. One advantage of the LPE is that it does not require an instrument.

Does volatility reflect a continuous reaction to past shocks or do changes in the markets induce shifts in the volatility dynamics? In this paper, we provide empirical evidence that cumulated price variations convey meaningful information about multiple regimes in the realized volatility of stocks, where large falls (rises) in prices are linked to persistent regimes of high (low) variance in stock returns. Incorporating past cumulated daily returns as an explanatory variable in a flexible and systematic nonlinear framework, we estimate that falls of different magnitudes over less than two months are associated with volatility levels 20\% and 60\% higher than the average of periods with stable or rising prices. We show that this effect accounts for large empirical values of long memory parameter estimates. Finally, we show that while introducing more realistic dynamics for volatility, the model is able to at least retain or improve overall out of sample performance in forecasting when compared to standard methods. Most importantly, the model is more robust to periods of financial crises, when it attains significantly better forecasts.

Strong and weak leadership exist everywhere, in every profession, and academia is not an exception. This verse is dedicated to all men and women academics who at some point in their professional life felt oppressed, frustrated or marginalized for one reason or another by the powers that be in their respective institutions.