International Business Cycles with Endogenous Incomplete Markets

Backus, Kehoe, and Kydland (1992), Baxter and Crucini (1995), and Stockman and Tesar (1995) find two major discrepancies between standard international business cycle models with complete markets and the data: In the models, cross‐country correlations are much higher for consumption than for output, while in the data the opposite is true; and cross‐country correlations of employment and investment are negative, while in the data they are positive. This paper introduces a friction into a standard model that helps resolve these anomalies. The friction is that international loans are imperfectly enforceable; any country can renege on its debts and suffer the consequences for future borrowing. To solve for equilibrium in this economy with endogenous incomplete markets, the methods of Marcet and Marimon (1999) are extended. Incorporating the friction helps resolve the anomalies more than does exogenously restricting the assets that can be traded.     

A Data-Driven Approach to Construct Survey-Based Indicators by Means of Evolutionary Algorithms

Despite growing understanding of resilience as a process associated with both individual capacities and physical and relational resources located in social ecologies, most instruments designed to measure resilience overemphasize individual characteristics without adequately addressing the contextual resources that support resilience processes. Additionally, most resilience studies have focused on children and youth, without significant attention to social ecological factors that promote post-risk adaptation for adults and how this is measured. Consequently, a key issue in the continued study of adult resilience is measurement instrument development. This article details adaptation of the Child and Youth Resilience Measure for use with an adult population. The article draws on data from a mixed methods study exploring the resilience processes of Irish survivors of clerical institutional abuse. The sample included 105 adult survivors (aged 50–99) who completed the RRC-ARM and the Warwick–Edinburgh Mental Well-being Scale (WEMWBS) during the first phase of the study. Exploratory factor analysis, Cronbach Alpha and MANOVA were conducted on the data. EFA identified five factors; social/community inclusion, family attachment and supports, spirituality, national and cultural identity, and personal competencies. The RRC-ARM shows good internal reliability and convergent validity with the WEMWBS, with significant differences on scale scores for men and women, as well as place of residence. This exploratory adaptation supports the potential of the RRC-ARM as a measure of social ecological resilience resources for adult populations and may have particular applications with vulnerable communities. Further validation is required in other contexts and specifically with larger samples.     

Prediction of Human Development from Environmental Indicators

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) list the objectives and targets that should be addressed to solve the global issues regarding sustainable development. They encompass the social, economic and environmental dimensions and search for solutions that are able not only to monitor but also to control the operational indicators attributed to each objective. It is expected that many of these indicators are associated to each other and the accurate understanding of these correlations allows to build predictive statistical models that can improve the monitoring and controlling of variables. It would increase the rate of success in achieving the SDG. This study tested a linear multivariate model able to predict the human development index based on environmental variables which are related to SDG 3 (health), 4 (education), 8 (sustainable economic growth and decent work) and 15 (protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems). We fitted the models using the Linear Discriminant Analysis and Best Subset Selection applied to a Linear Multivariate Regression. The model predictive ability was assessed by R² and cross-validation (CV). The results showed that exposure to unsafe sanitation, access to drinking water, tree cover loss, unsafe water quality, wastewater treatment level, and household air pollution are excellent predictors of human development index of a population, with R² = 0.94 and 10-fold CV Mean Squared Error equal to 0.0014. This tool can help stakeholders to monitor and control indicators attributed to good health and well-being, quality education, clean water and sanitation, decent work and economic growth, sustainable cities and communities and life on land sustainable development goals.     

Lean and green supply chain management through intermodal transport: insights from the fast moving consumer goods industry

Combining efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability is crucial for companies to succeed in today’s context of fierce competition. This paper investigates how intermodal transport can be adopted for managing supply chains according to a Lean and Green approach. A scenario-based estimation tool was developed to quantify the potential demand for intermodal transport. The tool was applied to the Italian Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) supply chain. Following, a single longitudinal case study on an FMCG company (Procter & Gamble) was carried out to investigate the enabling factors for the adoption of intermodal transport. Our results show that it is possible to shift demand from road to rail: a number of pathways for action were identified that related to planning and management, assets, train services, collaboration, legal issues and incentive schemes. Also, a collaborative business model for making the modal shift possible was presented. This paper is original because it offers an investigation of Lean and Green Supply Chain Management through intermodal transport by adopting a supply chain perspective and providing a bridging link between academic studies and field evidence.     

Money and Credit Redux

We analyze money and credit as competing payment instruments in decentralized exchange. In natural environments, we show the economy does not need both: if credit is easy, money is irrelevant; if credit is tight, money is essential, but credit becomes irrelevant. Changes in credit conditions are neutral because real balances respond endogenously to keep total liquidity constant. This is true for both exogenous and endogenous debt limits and policy limits, secured and unsecured lending, and general pricing mechanisms. While we show how to overturn some of these results, the benchmark model suggests credit might matter less than people think.     

Robust bayesian analysis given a lower bound on the probability of a set

Suppose that just the lower bound of the probability of a measurable subset K in the parameter space Ω is a priori known, when inferences are to be made about measurable subsets A in Ω. Instead of eliciting a unique prior distribution, consider the class Г of all the distributions compatible with such bound. Under mild regularity conditions about the likelihood function, the range of the posterior probability of any A is found, as the prior distribution varies in Г. Such ranges are analysed according to the robust Bayesian viewpoint. Furthermore, some characterising properties of the extended likelihood sets are proved. The prior distributions in Г are then considered as a neighbour class of an elicited prior, comparing likelihood sets and HPD in terms of robustness.     

Conditional ¡-minimax actions under convex losses

The problem of making decisions about an unknown parameter is examined under a convex loss function, when its prior distribution may not be uniquely specified on the basis of the available information. Following the conditional ¡-minimax approach, an action is chosen such that it minimises the maximum posterior expected loss. The characterising properties of such an action, called a conditional ¡-minimax action, are found and illustrated in three examples.     

Acyclically 3-colorable planar graphs

In this paper we study the acyclic 3-colorability of some subclasses of planar graphs. First, we show that there exist infinite classes of cubic planar graphs that are not acyclically 3-colorable. Then, we show that every planar graph has a subdivision with one vertex per edge that is acyclically 3-colorable and provide a linear-time coloring algorithm. Finally, we characterize the series-parallel graphs for which every 3-coloring is acyclic and provide a linear-time recognition algorithm for such graphs.     

The Endogenous Construction of Accounting Discourses in a Trade Union

The exploration of accounting practices reported in this paper illustrates how perceptions of financial problems and notions of economic accountability develop within cultural and institutional environments that substantially differ from those of the business firm. The paper seeks to oppose a notion of economic determinism which, explicitly or implicitly, promotes the ideal identity between market and society. In contrast to such a view, an institutional and organizational embedded understanding of accounting is suggested as a more fruitful way of appreciating the nature and scope of economic discourses as they develop within a nonprofit organization. The analysis focuses on the ways in which economic functioning is interpreted and accountability developed within an organization that rejects stereotyped views of managerialism and conventional notions of economic rationality. The presence of endogenous fabrications of economic accounts is what eventually allows us to problematize the way in which the economic framework is all too easily seen to enter non-business environments as a colonizing force.