THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DEBT LEVEL AND FISCAL SUSTAINABILITY IN ORGANIZATION FOR ECONOMIC COOPERATION AND DEVELOPMENT COUNTRIES

In this article we unify the traditional approaches to testing for fiscal sustainability considering the stock‐flow system that fiscal variables configure. Our approach encompasses previous ways of testing for sustainability. The results obtained for a group of 17 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries point to weak fiscal sustainability, as well as to the existence of cointegration between deficit and debt, confirming the relevance of the stock‐flow approach. Allowing for structural breaks and multicointegration turns out to be of critical importance to assess whether the fiscal authorities apply their policies looking for sustainability and whether, simultaneously, they try to stabilize real debt target levels. (JEL H62, E62, C22)     

Changement technologique et emploi au Brésil,en Colombie et au Mexique: quels sont les travailleurs les plus affectés?

L'analyse, axée sur les tâches, de la structure de l'emploi urbain du Brésil, de la Colombie et du Mexique montre que celui-ci a nettement diminué entre 2002 et 2015 dans des professions semi-qualifiées et augmenté dans les professions faiblement et fortement qualifiées. La décomposition des résultats suggère que le déclin de l'emploi des secrétaires et des sténographes s'explique entièrement par les changements intrabranche (hypothèse de «routinisation»), tandis que dans la conduite des machines et l'artisanat l'explication tient aux changements interbranches. Sous l'angle sociodémographique, le changement technologique affecte négativement les femmes, mais il profite aux travailleurs plus jeunes et plus instruits.     

Technological change and employment in Brazil,Colombia and Mexico: Which workers are most affected?

This article adopts a task-based approach to analyse employment patterns in terms of skill distribution and occupations in the urban labour markets of Brazil, Colombia and Mexico during 2002–15. The results suggest that employment fell strongly for some medium-skilled occupations, and increased slightly for both low-skilled and high-skilled occupations. Decomposition results suggest that the decreasing share of employment of secretaries and stenographers is fully explained by changes within industries (routinization hypothesis), whereas the decrease in machinery operation and handicraft jobs is mainly explained by changes between industries. By socio-demographic group, technological changes negatively affected women but benefited younger workers and those with higher educational attainment.     

Quasi-likelihood ratio tests for cointegration,cobreaking, and cotrending

We consider a set of variables with two types of nonstationary features, stochastic trends and broken linear trends. We develop tests that can determine whether there is a linear combination of these variables under which the nonstationary features can be canceled out. The first test can determine whether stochastic trends can be eliminated and thus whether cointegration holds, regardless of whether structural breaks in linear trends are eliminated. The second test can determine whether both stochastic trends and breaks in linear trends are simultaneously removed and thus whether cointegration and cobreaking simultaneously hold. The third test can determine whether not only breaks in linear trends but also linear trends themselves are eliminated along with stochastic trends and thus whether both cointegration and cotrending hold.     

Supranationalism Decision Making for Spanish Citizens and its Relation to Personal Variables

A crucial issue in the European Union (EU) is which policies should be regulated by EU and which ones by national governments. Given this situation it is interesting to study the citizens’ preference for the level of political decision making. The interest of the paper is mainly empirical, which consists in the creation of a measure for supranationalism decision making from different measured policies and to study how personal variables affect the level of political decision. A combination of Item response theory (IRT) and structural equation modeling (SEM) will be used. IRT is useful to discover whether a cumulative scale for different policies exists, and SEM will be used as validity of the supranationalism scale. Multiple group Confirmatory Factor analysis taking into account invariance tests will be used to compare the differences within gender, age, education and political trust with supranationalism scale. A whole model combining all these predictors and the supranationalism scale can be done using multiple input multiple cause-MIMIC models. The application is based on Spanish data from the European Social Survey. Differences in education and age on the level of political decision making are found. The combination of IRT and SEM methods it of great interest in the case is the researcher wants to fulfill both goals, creating the construct for supranationalism and validation of the model.     

Reliable error estimation for Sobol’ indices

In the field of sensitivity analysis, Sobol’ indices are sensitivity measures widely used to assess the importance of inputs of a model to its output. The estimation of these indices is often performed through Monte Carlo or quasi-Monte Carlo methods. A notable method is the replication procedure that estimates first-order indices at a reduced cost in terms of number of model evaluations. An inherent practical problem of this estimation is how to quantify the number of model evaluations needed to ensure that estimates satisfy a desired error tolerance. This article addresses this challenge by proposing a reliable error bound for first-order and total effect Sobol’ indices. Starting from the integral formula of the indices, the error bound is defined in terms of the discrete Walsh coefficients of the different integrands. We propose a sequential estimation procedure of Sobol’ indices using the error bound as a stopping criterion. The sequential procedure combines Sobol’ sequences with either Saltelli’s strategy to estimate both first-order and total effect indices, or the replication procedure to estimate only first-order indices.     

A New Proposal to Gauge Intergenerational Mobility: Educational Mobility in Europe as a Case Study

This paper is aimed at presenting a new intergenerational mobility index that (a) combines the intergenerational elasticity and the R-squared of the intergenerational regression and (b) enables the expression of the total degree of mobility as the weighted sum of mobility with respect to both parents. As a case study, we apply our proposal to investigate the intergenerational mobility of education in several European countries and its changes across birth cohorts. The results derived from the proposed index indicate that Nordic countries display higher levels of educational mobility than Southern countries, whereas continental countries are in an intermediate position. Moreover, it appears that the degree of mobility increases over time only in those countries with low initial levels and remains stable for the most mobile countries. Finally, for most of the countries the proposed methodology can prove that the degree of educational mobility with respect to each parent tends to converge to the same level over the course of time.     

Graphical comparison of normality tests for unimodal distribution data

A methodology is proposed to compare the power of normality tests with a wide variety of alternative unimodal distributions. It is based on the representation of a distribution mosaic in which kurtosis varies vertically and skewness horizontally. The mosaic includes distributions such as exponential, Laplace or uniform, with normal occupying the centre. Simulation is used to determine the probability of a sample from each distribution in the mosaic being accepted as normal. We demonstrate our proposal by applying it to the analysis and comparison of some of the most well-known tests.