1,720,990 research outputs found
Multinational versus national firms on capital adjustment costs: A structural approach
Full text linkThis paper provides a different perspective on the firm-level empirical analysis of the relation between foreign ownership and capital demand adjustment in host countries. The author estimates a dynamic structural model of investment on a sample of 4672 Belgian firms observed between 2003 and 2010 that permits to distinguish the 'ownership status' of firms. He considers a dynamic discrete choice model of a general specification of adjustment costs including convex and nonconvex components. He uses the method of simulated moments procedure to estimate the structural parameters. The results indicate that multinational's affiliates face lower capital adjustment costs than national firms
The effect of COVID-19 confinement policies on community mobility trends in the EU
Full text linkAll EU Member States were affected by the coronavirus outbreak. In response, national governments implemented containment measures such as closure of schools, cancelation of public events, limit to the number of people that can meet in public and private spaces, closure of public services and facilities, change in policies around prisons to mitigate the spread of the disease, limitations to the populations living in camps and/or camp like conditions, partial and full lockdowns.
These non-pharmaceutical interventions focus on reducing peoples’ mobility and social interactions.
However, the causal impact of different COVID-19 confinement policies on how mobility trends have changed after the spread of the epidemic has not been studied for the EU Member States. This is crucial also for answering the question when and how the confinement measures can be relaxed, besides avoiding unpreparedness to possible new wave of cases and introduction of new measures if needed.
In this report, we adopt a quasi-experimental approach to measure the impact of COVID-19 confinement policies on peoples’ presence at home and their mobility in different types of public and private places.
Our empirical findings indicate that reductions in out-of-home social interactions and visits to public and private places are driven by a combination of restrictive measures introduced by Member States. Not surprisingly, the analysis suggests that partial and full lockdowns
have the strongest causal impact on increasing presence at home and reducing visits to workplaces, public transport hubs, grocery, pharmacies, open public spaces, restaurants, cafes, shopping centres, theme parks, museums, libraries, and movie theatres. The impact
of public services closure and schools closure is significant but of a smaller magnitude. At the COVID-19 outbreak in EU, policy measures such as large gathering bans and changes in prison policies seem to have had no significant causal impact on communities’ overall mobility trends, but may have had some impact upon social distancing behaviour. We cannot measure the “pairwise” distance between individuals via this data set and so cannot use it to measure social distancing trends in a direct sense. Interestingly, our results also show that the lockdown of people living in camps and/or camp like conditions, such as refugees and other minorities, had a statistically significant negative effect on visits to places like national parks, public beaches, marinas, dog parks, plazas, and public gardens.
However, it should be noted here that this result is attributed to two countries: Greece and Malta are the only Member States that implemented this confinement policy.
This is a preparatory study and when more data will become available (we utilize daily changes in mobility trends), we will update this report with better estimates. In the future, we also intend to estimate the causal effect of social interactions and presence at home on the reported cases and deaths in the EU.JRC.I.1 - Monitoring, Indicators & Impact Evaluatio
The effect of the Internet on economic sophistication: An empirical analysis
No full textBacked by empirical results obtained from dynamic panel data analysis, this letter contends that the Internet has a positive effect on the sophistication of exported products after controlling for potential covariates.JRC.I.1 - Modelling, Indicators and Impact Evaluatio
Labour adjustment costs: Estimation of a dynamic discrete choice model using panel data for Greek manufacturing firms
No full textIn this paper we estimate a dynamic structural model of employment at firm level. Our dataset consists of a balanced panel of 2790 Greek manufacturing firms. The empirical evidence of this dataset stresses three important stylized facts: (a) there are periods in which firms decide not to change their labour input, (b) there are periods of large employment changes (lumpy nature of labour adjustment) and (c) the commonality is employment spikes to be followed by smooth and low employment growth periods. Following Cooper and Haltiwanger [Cooper, R.W. and Haltiwanger, J. "On the Nature of Capital Adjustment Costs", Review of Economic Studies, 2006; 73(3); 611-633], we consider a dynamic discrete choice model of a general specification of adjustment costs including convex, non-convex and "disruption of production" components. We use a method of simulated moments procedure to estimate the structural parameters. Our results indicate considerable fixed costs in the Greek employment adjustment.Labour adjustment costs Employment growth Dynamic discrete choice model Structural estimation Panel data Method of simulated moments
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
The role of networks in firms’ multi-characteristics competition and market-share inequality
Full text linkWe develop a location analysis spatial model of firms’ competition in multi-characteristics space, where consumers’ opinions about the firms’ products are distributed on multilayered networks. Firms do not compete on price but only on location upon the products’ multi-characteristics space, and they aim to attract the maximum number of consumers. Boundedly rational consumers have distinct ideal points/tastes over the possible available firm locations but, crucially, they are affected by the opinions of their neighbors. Our central argument is that the consolidation of a dense underlying consumers’ opinion network is the key for the firm to enlarge its market-share. Proposing a dynamic agent-based analysis on firms’ location choice we characterize multi-dimensional product differentiation competition as adaptive learning by firms’ managers and we argue that such a complex systems approach advances the analysis in alternative ways, beyond game-theoretic calculations
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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