1,720,978 research outputs found
Testing Rational Addiction: When Lifetime is Uncertain, One Lag is Enough
Full text linkThe rational addiction model is usually tested by estimating a linear second-order difference Euler equation, which may produce unreliable estimates. We show that a linear first-order difference equation is a better alternative. This empirical specification is appropriate under the reasonable assumption that people are uncertain about the time of their death, it is based on the same structural assumptions used in the literature, and it retains all policy implications of the deterministic rational addiction model. It is also empirically convenient because it is simple, it allows using efficient estimation strategies that do not require instrumental variables, and it is robust to the possible non-stationarity of the data. As an application we estimate the demand for smoking in the US from 1970 to 2016, and we show that it is consistent with the rational addiction model
Productivity Crowding-out in Labor Markets with Motivated Workers
Full text linkWhen workers' intrinsic motivation matters, a wage increase has mixed consequences on applicants' productivity and motivation, as shown in public service, healthcare, education and politics. In a simple theoretical framework where ability and motivation are workers' private information, we rationalize these differentiated responses and identify intuitive conditions for higher wages inducing self-selection of more (or less) productive and motivated workers. The selection patterns depend both on the statistical association between workers' characteristics and on the difference between the incentivised returns to ability across sectors. We emphasize a crowding-out effect of wage on workers' productivity that has not been analyzed in the theoretical literature before
When Fiscal Discipline meets Macroeconomic Stability: the Euro-stability Bond
Full text linkWe describe a new Euro-stability bond that implies sovereign debt mutualization in the
Eurozone without any significant short-term redistribution across countries or perverse
incentives to fiscal profligacy. In a simple structural model of the economy, we theoretically
show that the proposed Euro-stability bond is able to reproduce the market fiscal discipline
while increasing the social welfare of all countries with respect to real market discipline.
Relying on a GVAR model including the Eurozone countries, the U.S., Japan and China, we
then analyze the future evolution of public debt (and other key macroeconomic variables) over
time by comparing the predicted forecast in the baseline scenario and in a counterfactual
scenario with the Euro-stability bond. We find no significant differences in the future path of
interest expenditures and public debt-to-GDP ratios in the two scenarios, but a consistent
reduction in the uncertainty of the estimates in the counterfactual scenario (around 68 % on
average after 5 years). The reduced uncertainty of forecasts of public debt and other
macroeconomic variables highlights the capacity of the Euro-stability bond to immunize the
Eurozone from classical macroeconomic instability shocks that derive by the very existence of
high sovereign debts and the related significant rollover risk in a framework of decentralized
fiscal policies. To this extent, we finally exploit the results of the GVAR model to assess the
capacity of the proposed scheme to reduce the probability of adverse macroeconomic event
Solving the Milk Addiction Paradox
Full text linkThe milk addiction paradox refers to an empirical finding in which commodities that are typically considered to be non addictive, such as milk, appear instead to be addictive. This result seems more likely when there is persistence in consumption and when using aggregate data, and it suggests that the AR(2) model typically used in the addiction literature is prone to produce spurious result in favor of rational addiction. Using both simulated and real data, we show that the milk addiction paradox disappears when estimating the data using an AR(1) linear specification that describes the saddle-path solution of the rational addiction model. The AR(1) specification is able to correctly discriminate between rational addiction and simple persistence in the data, to test for the main features of rational addiction, and to produce unbiased estimates of the short and long-run elasticity of demand. These results hold both with individual and aggregated data, and they suggest that, for testing rational addiction, the AR(1) model is a better empirical alternative than the canonical AR(2) model
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Social learning and higher order beliefs: A structural model of exchange rates dynamics
Full text linkThis paper proposes a structural model of exchange rates where agents formulate their one-step ahead predictions based on social learning process and higher order beliefs. Individual choices are then aggregated and plugged into a rather standard macroeconomic model to derive the dynamics of exchange rates. Bayesian estimation of the structural parameters is implemented exploiting Foreign exchange Consensus Survey data of heterogeneous forecasts and fundamentals. Results show that higher order beliefs accounts for a large part of the total value, while public information play the most important role in determining individual expectations. Although the precision of the private signal is larger than the public one, information publicly revealed does exert a disproportionate influence, and differences in the estimated signals determine the equilibrium strategy of each agent as a combination between personal beliefs and higher order expectations
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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