In this paper, I analyze the association between workplace sex ratios and partnership formation and dissolution. I find that the risk of dissolution increases with the fraction of coworkers of the ...opposite sex at both the female and male workplace. On the other hand, workplace sex ratios are not important for the overall transition rate from singlehood to partnership. The results suggest that the workplace constitutes a more important marriage market segment for individuals who are already in a partnership, presumably due to higher search cost for (alternative) partners in general.
We seek to understand how firms learn about what adjustments they need to make in their organization structure at the workplace level. We define four organizational systems: traditional (the simplest ...system), high‐performance (the most complex system), decision‐making oriented, and financial‐incentives oriented (intermediate complexity). We analyze (1) learning‐by‐doing on adoption of more or less complex systems, (2) the performance–experience learning curves associated with different systems, (3) the match between perceived organizational capabilities and the choice of systems, the influence of (4) other firms’ systems and performance on a firm’s adjustment decisions, and of (5) a firm’s location on its decisions.
This paper investigates the determinants and consequences of subjective well-being. Although there is an extensive literature on well-being there are few panel studies which measure well-being ...frequently and over a long time period. The Australian Youth in Transition panel data is used to examine several aspects of well-being: the influence of sociodemographic and labour market characteristics, the dynamics of well-being and its determinants; the isolation of aging, cohort and contextual effects, and the effects of well-being on marital status and labour market outcomes. Women and those married or in de facto relationships show higher levels of well-being. The effect of being in a de facto relationship is sensitive to age. The presence of children decreases subjective-well-being and again this effect is age-specific. Income and occupational status also influence well-being with income having consistent effects and status effects declining. The unemployed consistently show substantially lower levels of well-being. Contextual effects were identified, increases in the national level of unemployment decrease average well-being levels in all but the youngest cohort. Controlling for lagged effects, subjective well-being has substantial effects on the odds of being married and unemployed, smaller effects on income and age specific effects on being in a de facto relationship.
Over half of money fund managers voluntarily waive fees they have a contractual right to claim. Moreover, as a consequence of fee waivers, funds on average collect one half of reported expense ...ratios. Variation in fee waivers is significant and relates to differences in relative performance. Both low-performing retail and institutional funds waive fees to improve their net performance. More interestingly, high-performing retail, but not institutional, funds use fee waivers to strategically adjust net performance to increase expected fund flows. Despite fund flow incentives, high-performing institutional funds do not waive more because they cannot significantly improve their relative performance.
Little evidence exists on the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) on local communities in the United States, despite evidence that U.S. communities actively bid against each other for FDI. We ...use detailed county-level panel data from South Carolina across 5-year intervals from 1980 through 1995 to investigate the effect of foreign manufacturing plants on local labor markets and on the level and distribution of local government budgets. We find that foreign investment raises local real wages much more than does domestic investment, but lowers per capita county-government expenditures and redistributes monies away from public school expenditures.
The transport sector significantly contributes to energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions, accounting for about one-third of the total carbon dioxide emissions in OECD countries. In this ...paper the issues of energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions in the transport sector in Italy are addressed. A comparative static approach is applied for the years 1980 and 1995. A decomposition scheme is proposed in order to highlight the main factors determining the variation of carbon dioxide emissions over the period. Then, an evaluation of the impact of the transport sector in terms of global warming is attempted, using some monetary estimates. Results indicate that the main driving force of the variation of carbon dioxide emissions in Italy is the growth in GDP. Total global warming damage caused by the transport sector in Italy ranges from 0.02 to 0.1% of GDP.
Numerous studies have pointed to the econometric problems introduced by heterogeneity in cross-sectional data samples used to explore convergence suggested by neo-classical growth models. We ...introduce a local concept of convergence along with a Bayesian locally linear spatial estimation method to address these problems. The method allows global and local beta-convergence to be viewed in a continuous fashion. Inference regarding global convergence can be treated as a mixture distribution arising from local beta-convergence estimates from each region in the sample. Taking this approach eliminates the need to specify sub-samples and regimes as well as parameter variation schemes that have been used to model heterogeneity. We illustrate the method using a sample of 138 European regions.
Political business cycle (PBC) theory and empirics typically assume that elections are competitive. Yet, as empirical work on PBCs turns increasingly to developing countries for evidence, this ...assumption becomes untenable. We propose and test two empirical hypotheses regarding PBCs: first, we should only see cycles when elections involve multiparty competition; secondly, we should see larger cycles in ‘founding’ elections. Using a new indicator of multiparty competition and macroeconomic data from Africa, we find strong support for our first hypothesis and moderate support for the second. These findings have implications for democratic transitions and the compatibility of economic and political reform in nascent democracies.
This paper examines the financial performance of Malaysian initial public offerings (IPOs) during the period 1980–1995. The major focus of the study is on the role of management earnings forecasts ...and underwriters in the valuation of IPOs. The results suggest extremely high and statistically significant initial premiums and positive and statistically significant long-term returns up to 3 years after listing. The findings for long-term returns contradict the consensus of the IPO literature that documents a significant negative long-term performance. Our results indicate a negative association of upward bias in management earnings forecasts with IPOs' performance during the first 12 months after the IPOs.
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