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Evolving patterns of gender inequality over time and across countries
No full textThe last century has seen significant gains in women’s agency and status, declining gender gaps in labor force participation, education, and wages, and ‘a rising tide’ of increasingly gender egalitarian societies. Many expected this process to continue. Yet, unexpectedly, progress towards gender equality has started to stall in many countries. We can even observe a clear backlash against gender equality in some countries. The optimistic predictions of gender convergence as suggested by modernization theory have not materialized. Moreover, counterintuitively, the most gender egalitarian societies (e.g., Denmark and Sweden) have the highest level of gender segregation in jobs and educational fields, a phenomenon also known as the gender-equality paradox. In these countries, women are less likely to major in STEM and more likely to major in the humanities, with generally important consequences for the gender gap in wages. These observations matter for the field of international business (IB), which has studied cross-country differences in gender equality and the implications for management practices across the world. Our theories in IB cannot explain the gender-equality paradox or the backlash against gender equality observed across countries. The good news is that new theorizing is emerging in sociology and political science, with tremendous opportunities for IB. The purpose of our editorial is to describe how these insights can propel IB research, and to chart an exciting way forward
Comment on Saif’s Survey of Pakistan Construction Industry on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor
No full textThe historic strategy of global resource imperialism, implemented by the 2013 Belt and Road Initiative from the People's Republic of China, has set a new competitive landscape for economic development worldwide, and the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is a priority case study for the impacts of rapidly modernizing local transportation networks, energy infrastructure, and the economy. It is essential to track local attitudes towards these government programs, as in the research by Saif, Meixia, and Saleem (2023) from Dalian Jiaotong University, which provides survey results from construction industry participants in Pakistan during this ongoing massive infrastructure investment program
Domestic Transportation Infrastructure and Gains from Trade in the Vertical Linkages
No full textUsing a two-country Melitz model, we analyze how China's massive railway expansion generates trade gains via vertical linkages. Domestic gains stem from both a composition effect in which improved domestic market access enabled by railway encourages downstream firms to source more inputs domestically and hence raise the domestic value added ratio (DVAR), and a scale effect in which better market access boosts the output level. Intermediate good producers in the foreign country also benefit despite the composition effect, as the scale effect associated with expanded demand from Chinese firms dominates. We test the theoretical predictions with panel data on Chinese manufacturing firms in 2000-2007, addressing endogeneity using a control function approach. Our main empirical findings confirm: (1) Improved upstream access increases exporters' DVAR (explaining 11.57% of its interquantile variation) along with higher value added and revenue; (2) Better access to downstream buyers boosts upstream intermediate producers' value added, profits, and revenue; (3) Foreign intermediate good producers benefit from increased import varieties and quantities of Chinese firms
Algorithmic Job Creation: How AI-Powered Video Platforms Boost Employment
No full textWe provide causal evidence on the job-creating potential of artificial intelligence by examining the rise of AI-powered short-video platforms. Using longitudinal data from the China Family Panel Studies, we exploit the staggered adoption of short-videos in a difference-in-differences design. We find that exposure to short videos increases the probability of employment by
approximately 3 percentage points, an effect robust to instrumental variable and matching strategies. This implies the creation of 19.8 million jobs in China by 2022. The employment gains are concentrated among marginalized groups—including those with low education, low income, rural residents, and mothers—thus reducing employment inequality. However, we document a significant trade-off: short-video exposure negatively impacts physical and mental health, reducing sleep, exercise, and subjective well-being. Our results highlight both the potential for AI to foster inclusive employment and the associated costs for human capita
Work from home and household behavior: Theoretical modelling and results for the United States
No full textThis article examines work from home (WFH) from a household perspective, using the collective framework, which accounts for intrahousehold bargaining, allowing decisions to be understood as interdependent between spouses. The analysis uses representative US data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics for the period 2011-2021, which include detailed information on work hours, WFH, wages, and household demographics. The results reveal that WFH is a coordinated household decision, as spouses’ WFH decisions are positively correlated. Second, WFH is persistent for individuals, with those who had WFH in the past having a higher probability of being WFH in the future. Finally, demographic and economic factors matter little in determining spouses WFH decisions, although wages generally reduce the probability of WFH. These findings suggest that policies should treat the household as the unit of decision and focus on removing structural barriers to initial WFH adoption rather than targeting specific individuals
A Decision-Support Model for Managing Outbound Logistics: Forecasting, Simulation, and Real-Time Operational Control
No full textThis article presents a decision support system developed as part of a Research and Development project undertaken by La Logistica srl, a third-party logistics company specializing in the storage and
distribution of hydro-sanitary products. The approach is methodological and focuses on the comprehensive analysis of a case study related to freight exit processes with the aim of defining and implementing a software application to support the short-term management of picking and loading operations for product delivery. The developed decision support system integrates past data series
analysis and projections, time series simulations, What-If analysis capabilities, and real-time monitoring within a single computational paradigm to anticipate peak points in the freight exit process. The developed decision support system is designed to accumulate and structure operational data from the warehouse management system software, to analyse the periodic rhythms of orders
received to generate graphical projections of expected peak points and working hours based on the analysis of past data series and is able to dynamically review projections via real-time monitoring
capabilities to adapt projections to actual progress made at any given time. Additionally, What-If analytics capabilities facilitate management's use of various workforce combinations to determine the feasibility of the process at any time, while identifying potential bottlenecks before they occur. Test results conducted with the corporate team indicate improvements in workload visibility and readiness for associated short-term programming strategies, while preventing operational disruptions through advance alerts on operational overload points
A Shrinkage Factor-Augmented VAR for High-Dimensional Macro–Fiscal Dynamics
No full textWe propose a ridge-regularized Factor-Augmented Vector Autoregression (FAVAR) for forecasting macro–fiscal systems in data-rich environments where the cross-sectional dimension is large relative to the available sample. The framework combines principal-component factor extraction with a shrinkage-based VAR for the joint dynamics of observed macro–fiscal variables and latent components. Applying the model to Greece, we show that the extracted factors capture meaningful real and nominal structures, while the ridge-regularized VAR delivers stable impulse responses and coherent short- and medium-term dynamics for variables central to the sovereign debt identity. A recursive out-of-sample evaluation indicates that the ridge-FAVAR systematically improves medium-term forecasting accuracy relative to standard AR benchmarks, particularly for real GDP growth and the interest–growth differential. The results highlight the usefulness of shrinkage-augmented factor models for macro–fiscal forecasting and motivate further econometric work on regularized state-space and structural factor VARs
The Insurance Literacy and its Measurement: Some Theoretical Issues
No full textThis study provides an overview of main academic research on insurance literacy. We identify main challenges of quantitative measurement of financial or insurance literacy of the population.
We made an attempt was made to identify the set of factors that determine the level of insurance coverage (with accident and health insurance as an example), which can be used to predict the level of insurance literacy
Disaggregated inflation rates: Some preliminary economic analysis for Greece
No full textThe aim of the current study is to assess the households’ inflation inequality in Greece not only across different income groups but also across other households’ social and economics characteristics, such as, occupational status and household composition, among others, for a more recent period, which is that of 2009 – 2022. The picture that emerges from our results is that there are important inflation differences across different categories of households. More specifically, we find that the main discrepancies are evident at the different household income categories with the poorer household experiencing significant higher inflation. Other factors that lead to inflation gap across households include the size of the household, the profession of the lead member of the household, as well as, the composition of the household. Policy implications of these results are also discussed
External Variables Affecting the Transfer Pricing Decisions: Arm’s Length Basis and Transfer Pricing
No full textTransfer pricing estimations play a crucial role in transactions involving multinational enterprises, and the decisions regarding transfer pricing may be affected by a range of influential factors. This research investigates selected external determinants that impact transfer pricing choices made by multinational enterprises across a sample comprising 95 countries. Panel data covering the years from 2014 to 2023 has been employed for empirical analysis, and using panel data regression techniques, the study assesses the influence of several variables, including effective tax rates, the level of economic development, the extent of trade openness, and the quality of regulatory institutions, which shape the strategies of multinational enterprises concerning profit shifting. The findings indicate that lower levels of taxation, weaker enforcement of legal standards, and greater trade openness contribute to a higher probability of manipulative transfer pricing behavior. The research concludes that practices related to base erosion and profit shifting can be curtailed by improving the strength of legal enforcement mechanisms