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Estimating food and drink demand elasticities
Get PDFWe compute price and income elasticities of demand for food and drink for the UK and draw policy implications
The Precautionary Principle when project implementation capacity is congestible
Get PDFThe precautionary principle justifies postponing the implementation of development projects to await better information about their environmental impacts. But if implementation capacity is congestible, as is often the case in practical settings, a postponed project may have to vie for implementation priority with projects that arrive later. Limitations of implementation capacity create two risks. First, it may never make sense to go back to a postponed project, even if it is later revealed to be a good one. Second, the planner may find it worthwhile to go back to it, but at the expense of undesirable delay of future projects. We update Arrow and Fisher (1974) with a planner facing a sequence of projects varying stochastically in their (1) importance and (2) improvability, but knowing that implementation capacity is congestible. The scope for congestion implies a `bonus' for earlier-than-otherwise decisions, in common parlance ``keeping the desk clear'' that works against the well-understood option value that encourages delay. The optimal decision rule depends upon the stochastic environment whereby future projects are generated, in ways that are not obvious. The value of the bonus is increasing in the expected importance of future projects but decreasing in their expected improvability. Higher variability of the importance of projects, in the sense of mean-preserving spread, increases the size of the bonus, but variability in their improvability has a generally ambiguous impact. We characterize the adjusted decision rule and note its implications for the conduct of cost-benefit informed policy
John-Michael Rivera, Undocuments
No full textReview of Rivera, John-Michael 2021, Undocuments, University of Arizona Press, Tucso
Uncovering missing voices: invisible aspects of idiosyncratic deals (i-deals)
Get PDFTo provide context for this special issue’s eight articles, we review the lenses adopted in i-deals research and its findings and then address under-studied aspects of i-deals. Part of the societal trend toward customization of employment arrangements, the i-deals workers negotiate for themselves are the subject of a growing body of research. We observe that i-deals research investigates both antecedents and consequences of i-deals at levels from the individual and dyad to team and organization. Numerous theories have been applied to explain i-deal phenomena beginning with social exchange theory in its initial research to social comparison and diverse theories regarding human needs and values. Employers are known to use i-deals to attract, motivate, and retain workers, while employees pursue i-deals to better their work lives and career opportunities. Although the positive effects of i-deals for organizations and i-dealers alike are well-documented, potential negative effects are under-studied. Moreover, white collar workers in developed countries are the recurrent focus in i-deals research to the neglect of other occupations and societies. In this article and special issue, we seek insights regarding understudied aspects of i-deals to deepen investigation into their myriad manifestations and effects
Enhancing legal argument mining with domain pre-training and neural networks
Get PDFThe contextual word embedding model, BERT, has proved its ability on downstream tasks with limited
quantities of annotated data. BERT and its variants help to reduce the burden of complex annotation
work in many interdisciplinary research areas, for example, legal argument mining in digital humanities.
Argument mining aims to develop text analysis tools that can automatically retrieve arguments and
identify relationships between argumentation clauses. Since argumentation is one of the key aspects
of case law, argument mining tools for legal texts are applicable to both academic and non-academic
legal research. Domain-specific BERT variants (pre-trained with corpora from a particular background)
have also achieved strong performance in many tasks. To our knowledge, previous machine learning
studies of argument mining on judicial case law still heavily rely on statistical models. In this paper,
we provide a broad study of both classic and contextual embedding models and their performance on
practical case law from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). During our study, we also explore
a number of neural networks when being combined with different embeddings. Our experiments provide
a comprehensive overview of a variety of approaches to the legal argument mining task. We conclude that
domain pre-trained transformer models have great potential in this area, although traditional embeddings
can also achieve strong performance when combined with additional neural network layers
Investment and the long swings of unemployment
No full textWe estimate the medium-term relationship between investment and unemployment over the period 1960-2017 in 20 OECD countries, a period that includes the years of the Great Recession. While neoclassical growth theory typically assumes full employment – with no effect of investment on unemployment– and New-Keynesian models assume that such a relationship only exists in the short term at business cycle frequencies, we find that over our sample period covering more than five decades a statistically significant negative relationship does exist: in decades when investment fell, unemployment increased. Panel estimation, using a measure of stock market volatility as an instrument for investment, confirms the negative relationship between investment and unemployment. High stock market volatility and low investment are associated with high unemployment, other things equal. The evidence supports both Keynes’ ideas about an unemployment equilibrium as well as more recent investment-based theories of the natural rate of unemployment
Introductory essay to "Beyond Caring"
No full textBook synopsis: The Inequalities combines three plays from British author and director Alexander Zeldin into a trilogy that tells new stories of love, compassion and resilience for our time of austerity.
Contextualised with an essay before each play and an in-depth interview with the author, Zeldin's three pieces present intimate stories of work, home and community in a radical form of realism. Written after extensive research across the United Kingdom, and involving people affected by the central themes of the plays, The Inequalities goes beyond social chronicle, achieving a timeless portrait of humanity under duress. This is theatre that goes behind the mirror of our time to reveal the core of the collective human experience of being alive
Is bank resilience affected by unconventional monetary policy in the Euro area?
Get PDFThis paper examines whether euro area unconventional monetary policies have influenced the overall resilience of the banking industry. We proxy bank resilience with a Z-score measure that reflects the size of banks’ loss-absorbing buffers. We employ two alternative strategies to construct instruments that allow us to identify the effect of monetary policy in this context. First, within a two-stage least squares framework, we rely on ECB balance sheet data to capture the effect of the broad array of programmes used by the ECB to implement quantitative easing, while we control for the effect of conventional and negative, or very low, interest rate policy. Second, relying on high-frequency identification methods on narrow time windows around ECB policy announcements, we compute three factors reflecting different types of monetary policy surprises and examine their impact on bank resilience. With both methodologies we find that loosening the monetary policy stance through UMPs had an overall positive impact on euro-area banks’ shock absorbing buffers. The first approach, the only one that allows us to consider the level of interest rates, suggests that such effect is moderated when policy rates approach and breach the nominal zero-lower bound. The second strategy, which allows us to analyse forward guidance surprises, indicates that looser forward guidance has a positive impact on resilience. Balance sheet easing policies also seem to enhance resilience in the full sample, according to both strategies. The results are heterogeneous across subsamples, with contrasts between banks headquartered in core countries of the euro area vis-à-vis banks in the periphery of the euro-area. The contours of this heterogeneity differ in both methodologies and shows that balance sheet easing policies is detrimental for euro-area periphery banks. We also study the differential impact of monetary policy tools on banks, depending on their specific business model and their strength (i.e., their position within the distribution of loss-absorbing buffers); and the timing and persistence of monetary policy effects, which also varies with policy tools and jurisdictions
Diversity or exclusion? Psychoanalysis ‘Explains’
Get PDFThis paper is concerned with how boundaries and exclusions are made and can be overcome. The pre-recorded lecture addresses the issue of the relationship between antisemitism and antiblack racism as seen through the prism of psychoanalysis. For Jews, psychoanalysis has been a kind of ‘home’: familiar, sharing in certain assumptions and practices, but also marginal, subjected to prejudice and antisemitism and consequently not (exactly) ‘white’. For black communities, psychoanalysis has often been pathologising and colonial, yet also at times emancipatory either as a practice of socially reformist mental health intervention or as a set of concepts that offer potential leverage for self-emancipation
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