Managed honey bee colony losses are of concern in the USA and globally. This survey, which documents the rate of colony loss in the USA during the 2015-2016 season, is the tenth report of winter ...losses, and the fifth of summer and annual losses. Our results summarize the responses of 5725 valid survey respondents, who collectively managed 427,652 colonies on 1 October 2015, an estimated 16.1% of all managed colonies in the USA. Responding beekeepers reported a total annual colony loss of 40.5% 95% CI 39.8-41.1% between 1 April 2015 and 1 April 2016. Total winter colony loss was 26.9% 95% CI 26.4-27.4% while total summer colony loss was 23.6% 95% CI 23.0-24.1%, making this the third consecutive year when summer losses have approximated to winter losses. Across all operation types, 32.3% of responding beekeepers reported no winter losses. Whilst the loss rate in the winter of 2015-2016 was amongst the lowest winter losses recorded over the ten years this survey has been conducted, 59.0% (n = 3378) of responding beekeepers had higher losses than they deemed acceptable.
We study the role of morality in debt repayment, using an experiment with the credit card customers of a large Islamic bank in Indonesia. In our main treatment, clients receive a text message stating ...that “non-repayment of debts by someone who is able to repay is an injustice.” This moral appeal decreases delinquency by 4.4 percentage points from a baseline of 66 percent and reduces default among customers with the highest ex ante credit risk. Additional treatments help benchmark the effects against direct financial incentives and rule out competing explanations, such as reminder effects, priming religion, and provision of new information.
Technology has facilitated new, nontraditional work arrangements, including the ride-sharing company Uber. Uber drivers provide rides anytime they choose. Using data on hourly earnings and driving, ...we document driver utilization of this real-time flexibility. We propose that the value of flexibility can be measured as deriving from time variation in the drivers’ reservation wage. Measuring time variation in drivers’ reservation wages allows us to estimate the surplus and labor supply implications of Uber relative to alternative, less-flexible work arrangements. Despite other drawbacks to the Uber arrangement, we estimate that Uber drivers earn more than twice the surplus they would in less-flexible arrangements.
Solidarity behaviour (SB) among employees is important in building a sense of community in organizations, particularly within a crisis context where adverse working conditions prevail. However, we ...have limited knowledge concerning how SB develops. Using the lens of social exchange theory, this study examines how top‐down communication and employee voice relate to horizontal (employee to emplCoyee) SB. We conducted two comprehensive studies during the Greek economic crisis and found that the relationship between top‐down employee communication and horizontal SB is mediated by employee voice. The paper extends our existing knowledge in the fields of management and human resource management by advancing our understanding of horizontal SB, highlighting the role of top‐down employee communication as an effective human resource practice and delineating the role of employee voice in fostering workplace camaraderie in small and medium‐sized enterprises under crisis.
Combining click data from a Swedish newspaper and administrative data on asylum seekers in Sweden, I examine whether a larger presence of refugees in a municipality induces people to avoid news that ...may encourage welcoming the newcomers. Exploiting the unexpected inflow of refugees to Sweden during 2015 and their exogenous allocation across Swedish municipalities, I find that people living in municipalities where the relative number of refugees is larger read fewer articles about asylum seekers. The decrease in clicks is 36% larger for more empathic articles and is correlated with less engagement in activities aimed at welcoming refugees.
We experimentally varied information mailed to 87,000 households in California’s health insurance marketplace to study the role of frictions in insurance take-up. Reminders about the enrollment ...deadline raised enrollment by 1.3 pp (16 percent) in this typically low take-up population. Heterogeneous effects of personalized subsidy information indicate misperceptions about program benefits. Consistent with an adverse selection model with frictional enrollment costs, the intervention lowered average spending risk by 5.1 percent, implying that marginal respondents were 37 percent less costly than inframarginal consumers. We observe the largest positive selection among low income consumers, who exhibit the largest frictions in enrollment. Finally, we estimate the implied value of the letter intervention to be $25 to $53 per month in subsidy dollars. These results suggest that frictions may partially explain low take-up for marketplace insurance, and that interventions reducing them can improve enrollment and market risk in exchanges.
Abstract
Can political rallies affect the behavior of law enforcement officers toward racial minorities? Using data from 35 million traffic stops, we show that the probability that a stopped driver ...is Black increases by 5.74% after a Trump rally during his 2015–2016 campaign. The effect is immediate, specific to Black drivers, lasts for up to 60 days after the rally, and is not justified by changes in driver behavior. The effects are significantly larger among law enforcement officers whose estimated racial bias is higher at baseline, in areas that score higher on present-day measures of racial resentment, those that experienced more racial violence during the Jim Crow era, and in former slave-holding counties. Mentions of racial issues in Trump speeches, whether explicit or implicit, exacerbate the effect of a Trump rally among officers with higher estimated racial bias.
Evaluating a new survey of German consumers, we test whether individual consumption spending decisions are formed according to a Euler equation model. We find that consumers are more likely to ...increase current spending if they plan to increase spending in the future and if they expect higher inflation. In the subsample of financially literate households, we find an additional negative effect of nominal interest rate expectations. The effects of macroeconomic expectations become stronger if consumers observed news on monetary policy or financial markets. These news effects are particularly pronounced for consumers who save and those with low inflation forecast accuracy.
Analysis of the Warmest Arctic Winter, 2015-2016 Cullather, Richard I.; Lim, Young-Kwon; Boisvert, Linette N. ...
Geophysical research letters,
28 October 2016, Letnik:
43, Številka:
20
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
December through February 2015-2016 defines the warmest winter season over the Arctic in the observational record. Positive 2m temperature anomalies were focused over regions of reduced sea ice cover ...in the Kara and Barents Seas and southwestern Alaska. A third region is found over the ice-covered central Arctic Ocean. The period is marked by a strong synoptic pattern which produced melting temperatures in close proximity to the North Pole in late December and anomalous high pressure near the Taymyr Peninsula. Atmospheric teleconnections from the Atlantic contributed to warming over Eurasian high-latitude land surfaces, and El Niño-related teleconnections explain warming over southwestern Alaska and British Columbia, while warm anomalies over the central Arctic are associated with physical processes including the presence of enhanced atmospheric water vapor and an increased downwelling longwave radiative flux. Preconditioning of sea ice conditions by warm temperatures affected the ensuing spring extent.
PDF
