The Decent Work Questionnaire: Development and validation in two samples of knowledge workers

This research develops a Decent Work Questionnaire (DWQ) to measure workers’ perceptions of decent work. Current measurements of decent work are almost completely lacking at the individual worker level of analysis, and this study contributes to filling the gap. The authors designed their DWQ based on the substantive elements used by the ILO in its Decent Work Agenda, with the final 31‐item version of the DWQ yielding seven factors related to decent work. Showing good reliability coefficient values and good convergent and discriminant validity, this DWQ could open up new avenues for empirical studies on the concept of decent work.     

Assessing Health Endowment,Access and Choice Determinants: Impact on Retired Europeans’ (In)activity and Quality of Life

A future for the E.U., dominated by an ever-increasing population of retired citizens represents a major challenge to social and health policy in European countries. Under Rowe and Kahn’s (Gerontol 37(4):433–440, 1997) perspective on positive aging, this paper is interested in exploring the role of health on citizens’ active participation after retirement and social engagement to life and quality of life. This paper also aims at finding whether Sen’s (Public health, ethics, and equity. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004) capability approach or cumulative disadvantage or advantage theory relative to the access to health also verifies in a context of multi-national developed economies. The first part of this study is therefore concerned with generating a health indicator that enables this, whilst controlling for individual heterogeneity in self-rated health responses from 10,859 retired individuals from the SHARE survey. Socioeconomic determinants of health are found not to be critical in determining health in such a developed context whilst cumulative advantage is found relevant for the positive aging of Europeans. Evidence is found that active engagement in activities and quality of life are most certainly a prerogative for the more educated and the healthier retirees, hinting a strategy for European policymakers: cumulative advantage, leveraged by education and health policy, might just be the long-term strategy for contouring an aging and unproductive European population, transforming what could be a ‘burden’ into an asset.     

Stationary persistent time series misspecified as nonstationary arima

Long-memory processes, such as Autoregressive Fractionally Integrated Moving-Average processes—ARFIMA—are likely to lead the observer to make serious misspecification errors. Nonstationary ARFIMA processes can easily be misspecified as ARIMA models, thus confusing a fractional degree of integration with an integer one. Stationary persistent ARFIMA processes can be misspecified as nonstationary ARIMA models, thus leading to a serious increase of out-of-sample forecast errors. In this paper, we discuss three prototypical misspecification cases and derive the corresponding increase in mean square forecasting error for different lead times.     

Poetry in motion: protest songwriting as strategic resource (Portugal,circa 1974)

In this article, we use protest songs written in Portugal in the periods surrounding the Carnations Revolution to suggest that artists have the capacity to use their artistic discourses as strategic resources, attempting to shape socio‐political reality. We identify three periods in the Portuguese revolution wherein this instrumental use of art becomes patent. We further suggest that organisational managers should take into account the subjective artistic reality, especially in periods when it can affect the organisational context.     

ACADEMIC TENURE, POSTTENURE EFFORT, AND CONTRACTUAL DAMAGES

In this article we explore the incentive properties of academic tenure relative to alternatives that might be substitutes for tenure, in particular contractual damages. We emphasize the role of tenure in providing an incentive for incumbent faculty to reveal the characteristics of recruits and to maintain their own performance posttenure. Our results suggest that tenure is just one of many mechanisms potentially able to achieve honest revelation. (JEL I2 , K0 , L2 )     

Modeling stock markets’ volatility using GARCH models with Normal,Student’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">t</Emphasis> and stable Paretian distributions

As GARCH models and stable Paretian distributions have been revisited in the recent past with the papers of Hansen and Lunde (J Appl Econom 20: 873–889, 2005) and Bidarkota and McCulloch (Quant Finance 4: 256–265, 2004), respectively, in this paper we discuss alternative conditional distributional models for the daily returns of the US, German and Portuguese main stock market indexes, considering ARMA-GARCH models driven by Normal, Student’s t and stable Paretian distributed innovations. We find that a GARCH model with stable Paretian innovations fits returns clearly better than the more popular Normal distribution and slightly better than the Student’s t distribution. However, the Student’s t outperforms the Normal and stable Paretian distributions when the out-of-sample density forecasts are considered.     

The 2007 Subprime Market Crisis Through the Lens of European Central Bank Auctions for Short‐Term Funds

We study European banks' demand for short‐term funds (liquidity) during the summer 2007 subprime market crisis. We use bidding data from the European Central Bank's auctions for one‐week loans, their main channel of monetary policy implementation. Our analysis provides a high‐frequency, disaggregated perspective on the 2007 crisis, which was previously studied through comparisons of collateralized and uncollateralized interbank money market rates which do not capture the heterogeneous impact of the crisis on individual banks. Through a model of bidding, we show that banks' bids reflect their cost of obtaining short‐term funds elsewhere (e.g., in the interbank market) as well as a strategic response to other bidders. The strategic response is empirically important: while a naïve interpretation of the raw bidding data may suggest that virtually all banks suffered an increase in the cost of short‐term funding, we find that, for about one third of the banks, the change in bidding behavior was simply a strategic response. We also find considerable heterogeneity in the short‐term funding costs among banks: for over one third of the bidders, funding costs increased by more than 20 basis points, and funding costs vary widely with respect to the country‐of‐origin. The funding costs we estimate using bidding data are also predictive of market‐ and accounting‐based measures of bank performance, reinforcing the usefulness of “revealed preference” information contained in bids.     

Comparison of Times Series with Unequal Length in the Frequency Domain

In statistical data analysis it is often important to compare, classify, and cluster different time series. For these purposes various methods have been proposed in the literature, but they usually assume time series with the same sample size. In this article, we propose a spectral domain method for handling time series of unequal length. The method make the spectral estimates comparable by producing statistics at the same frequency. The procedure is compared with other methods proposed in the literature by a Monte Carlo simulation study. As an illustrative example, the proposed spectral method is applied to cluster industrial production series of some developed countries.     

Optimal Deterrence with Legal Defense Expenditure

Legal defense expenditure by honest and dishonest accused can increase or reduce the amount of crime, and deterrence can decrease when punishment is increased. Unregulated expenditure of innocent and guilty defendants is inefficient whether or not there is a direct social harm from type I and II errors. The circumstances in which the optimal fine bankrupts convicted dishonest or honest defendants, regulation to limit defense expenditure and a tax-financed public defender system are also investigated.