Welfare, labor supply and heterogeneous preferences: evidence for Europe and the US

Following the report of the Stiglitz Commission, measuring and comparing well-being across countries has gained renewed interest. Yet, analyses that go beyond income and incorporate non-market dimensions of welfare most often rely on the assumption of identical preferences to avoid the difficulties related to interpersonal comparisons. In this paper, we suggest an international comparison based on individual welfare rankings that fully retain preference heterogeneity. Focusing on the consumption-leisure trade-off, we estimate discrete choice labor supply models using harmonized microdata for 11 European countries and the US. We retrieve preference heterogeneity within and across countries and analyze several welfare criteria which take into account that differences in income are partly due to differences in tastes. The resulting welfare rankings clearly depend on the normative treatment of preference heterogeneity with alternative metrics. We show that these differences can indeed be explained by estimated preference heterogeneity across countries—rather than demographic composition.     

The Effectiveness of Immigration Policies

This article elaborates a conceptual framework for assessing the character and effectiveness of immigration policies. It argues that, to a considerable extent, the public and academic controversy concerning this issue is spurious because of fuzzy definitions of policy effectiveness, stemming from confusion between (1) policy discourses, (2) policies on paper, (3) policy implementation, and (4) policy impacts. The article distinguishes three policy gaps: the discrepancy between public discourses and policies on paper (discursive gap); the disparity between policies on paper and implemented policies (implementation gap); and the extent to which implemented policies affect migration (efficacy gap). Although implemented policies seem to be the correct yardstick to assess policy effectiveness, in practice the (generally more pronounced) discourses are often used as a benchmark. This can lead to an overestimation of policy failure. Existing empirical studies suggest that policies significantly affect the targeted migration flows, but they crucially fail to assess the relative importance of policies in comparison to other migration determinants, including non‐migration policies, as well as the hypothetical occurrence of unintended categorical, spatial, inter‐temporal, and reverse flow “substitution” effects. Evidence on such effects is still scarce, showing the need for more empirically informed insights about the short‐ and long‐term effects of migration policies.     

Ein Optimierungsansatz für ein fortlaufendes Datenqualitätsmanagement und seine praktische Anwendung bei Kundenkampagnen

Zusammenfassung  Die Verbesserung der Datenqualit?t (DQ) wird in Wissenschaft und Praxis intensiv diskutiert. Ob die ergriffenen DQ-Ma?nahmen jedoch ?konomisch überhaupt gerechtfertigt sind und wann und in welchem optimalen Umfang investiert werden soll, wird oftmals nicht analysiert. Zur Untersuchung dieser Fragestellungen entwickeln die Autoren ein Optimierungsmodell, mit dem die Umf?nge und Zeitpunkte für Investitionen in ein fortlaufendes DQ-Management ermittelt werden k?nnen. Hierdurch lassen sich vier Investitionsszenarien mit allgemeinen Handlungsempfehlungen identifizieren. So ist bspw. bei ehemalig intensiven Kundenbeziehungen, die sich inzwischen verschlechtert haben (nur wenige Gesch?ftstransaktionen), zwar über mehrere Perioden zu investieren, jedoch bei einem sich nicht ver?ndernden, geringen Transaktionsanteil, in abnehmender H?he. Daneben l?sst sich u. a. zeigen, dass der Umfang der existierenden Kundendatenmenge und nicht, wie oftmals angeführt, ein schlechtes existierendes DQ-Niveau ma?geblich für die Entscheidung ist, ob überhaupt in DQ investiert werden soll. Anhand einer Fallstudie wird abschlie?end nicht nur die praktische Anwendbarkeit des Optimierungsmodells verdeutlicht, sondern es soll zudem aufgezeigt werden, wie sich für einen konkreten Sachverhalt detaillierte Empfehlungen hinsichtlich des DQM-Einsatzes ermitteln lassen.

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A model based approach for continuous data quality management and its implementation to improve customer campaigns

Summary  The improvement of data quality (DQ) currently finds a great deal of attention in science as well as in practice. Nevertheless there are two fundamental questions that are often ignored in the analysis: i) Are the DQ measures already implemented economically reasonable? ii) When and to what extent is investing into the improvement of DQ justifiable? For an in-depth understanding considering the design of DQ management the authors develop an optimization model which determines the optimal amount and point of time for consecutive DQ investments. Hence they distinguish between four scenarios and propose corresponding action recommendations. For example, a customer relationship with declining intensity up to the present (i. e. diminishing volume of business transactions) requires DQ investments over several future business periods- and at a decreasing investment rate in cases where the transaction volume continues to go down. Additionally it can be shown that in general the amount of available client data is a crucial factor for the decision whether it is reasonable to invest into DQ at all as opposed to a low quality level — which is often claimed. A concluding case study determines the practical applicability of the proposed optimization model.

     

Private Health Insurance in Chile: Basic or Complementary Insurance for Outpatient Services?

A private health insurance system has existed in Chile since 1981 and has covered over a quarter of the population of that country since 1995. This article examines that system in economic terms. The analysis focuses on the incentive effects of state regulations governing the formulation of private health insurance policies and the relationship with the state health service. The imbalance in policy termination rights and the unrestricted possibility to return to the state system emerge as central functional elements. The article postulates that the private system represents, for many, not a full coverage scheme but an additional policy for outpatient benefits, regardless of its officially stated aims.     

Unemployment and Business Cycles

We develop and estimate a general equilibrium search and matching model that accounts for key business cycle properties of macroeconomic aggregates, including labor market variables. In sharp contrast to leading New Keynesian models, we do not impose wage inertia. Instead we derive wage inertia from our specification of how firms and workers negotiate wages. Our model outperforms a variant of the standard New Keynesian Calvo sticky wage model. According to our estimated model, there is a critical interaction between the degree of price stickiness, monetary policy, and the duration of an increase in unemployment benefits.     

Extreme value index estimator using maximum likelihood and moment estimation

ABSTRACT

When a distribution function is in the max domain of attraction of an extreme value distribution, its tail can be well approximated by a generalized Pareto distribution. Based on this fact we use a moment estimation idea to propose an adapted maximum likelihood estimator for the extreme value index, which can be understood as a combination of the maximum likelihood estimation and moment estimation. Under certain regularity conditions, we derive the asymptotic normality of the new estimator and investigate its finite sample behavior by comparing with several classical or competitive estimators. A simulation study shows that the new estimator is competitive with other estimators in view of average bias, average MSE, and coefficient of variance of the new device for the optimal selection of the threshold.     

International Migration and City Growth in the Global South: An Analysis of IPUMS Data for Seven Countries, 1992–2013

Evidence on the demographic components of city growth in the global South is scarce, and the role played by international migration is neglected. We analyze the importance of recent international migration in cities, compare it with that of internal movements, and evaluate the growth contribution across national contexts and the urban hierarchy. Combining individual-level census data and geographic master files of metropolitan areas with indirect demographic estimation techniques, we cover 377 cities in seven countries. It is found that, in almost one third of cities, population change and replacement has been mainly determined by migration. The international component was larger than the internal one in more than half of cities. Whereas internal migration tends to decrease with rising city size, international movements tend to increase. Positive net international migration substitutes for the net losses from domestic movements in large cities, but complements the gains in intermediate-sized cities.     

All risk-taking is not the same: examining the competing effects of firm risk-taking with meta-analysis

Although researchers have vigorously studied organizational risk-taking for over 35 years, relatively little emphasis has been placed on theoretically differentiating the unique relationships between the many risk-taking choices organizations make and firm risk or firm performance. In this research, we propose a new framework that builds from March’s exploration–exploitation model to argue that different risk-taking choices can have substantially different influences on firm outcomes. We use meta-analysis to examine the unique and at times competing effects of four of the most commonly studied risk-taking choices on firm risk and firm performance. Results from a meta-analysis of 257 unique studies (N = 499,808) demonstrate support for our proposed framework and cast significant doubt on the idea that commonly studied firm risk-taking choices theoretically aggregate into one overarching risk-taking construct.     

The Globalization of Migration: Has the World Become More Migratory?

Although it is commonly believed that the volume, diversity, geographical scope, and overall complexity of international migration have increased as part of globalization processes, this idea has remained largely untested. This article analyzes shifts in global migration patterns between 1960 and 2000 using indices that simultaneously capture changes in the spread, distance, and intensity of migration. While the results challenge the idea that there has been a global increase in volume, diversity, and geographical scope of migration, main migratory shifts have been directional. Migration has globalized from a destination country perspective but hardly from an origin country perspective, with migrants from an increasingly diverse array of non‐European‐origin countries concentrating in a shrinking pool of prime destination countries. The global migration map has thus become more skewed. Rather than refuting the globalization of migration hypothesis, this seems to reflect the asymmetric nature of globalization processes in general.