Emotion recognition and emergent leadership: Unraveling mediating mechanisms and boundary conditions

This study examines the complex connection between individuals' emotion recognition capability and their emergence as leaders. It is hypothesized that emotion recognition and extraversion interactively relate with an individual's task coordination behavior which, in turn, influences the likelihood of emerging as a leader. In other words, we cast task coordination as a mediating mechanism in the joint relationship between emotion recognition and extraversion, on the one hand, and leader emergence, on the other. Study hypotheses were tested using multisource data from two diverse, independent samples. Study 1 supports the hypothesized relationships in a sample of student project teams in the Netherlands, and Study 2 constructively replicates the proposed model using student participants in an assessment center in the United States. These findings were obtained using a performance-based test of emotion recognition and controlling for a battery of known covariates.     

The black earnings gap: discrimination or culture

This paper explores the earnings gap between West Indians and African Americans that cannot be explained by observable characteristics and is often interpreted as a measure of discrimination or unobservable cultural endowments. The earnings gap advantage has lead to many perceptions and some unsubstantiated implications as to the reasons why West Indians perform better than African Americans in the labor market. This is an attempt to sort out the implications and to put the West Indian/African American earnings difference in prospective.     

A Sensitivity Analysis of the Social Vulnerability Index

The Social Vulnerability Index (SoVI), created by Cutter et al. (2003) , examined the spatial patterns of social vulnerability to natural hazards at the county level in the United States in order to describe and understand the social burdens of risk. The purpose of this article is to examine the sensitivity of quantitative features underlying the SoVI approach to changes in its construction, the scale at which it is applied, the set of variables used, and to various geographic contexts. First, the SoVI was calculated for multiple aggregation levels in the State of South Carolina and with a subset of the original variables to determine the impact of scalar and variable changes on index construction. Second, to test the sensitivity of the algorithm to changes in construction, and to determine if that sensitivity was constant in various geographic contexts, census data were collected at a submetropolitan level for three study sites: Charleston, SC; Los Angeles, CA; and New Orleans, LA. Fifty-four unique variations of the SoVI were calculated for each study area and evaluated using factorial analysis. These results were then compared across study areas to evaluate the impact of changing geographic context. While decreases in the scale of aggregation were found to result in decreases in the variance explained by principal components analysis (PCA), and in increases in the variance of the resulting index values, the subjective interpretations yielded from the SoVI remained fairly stable. The algorithm's sensitivity to certain changes in index construction differed somewhat among the study areas. Understanding the impacts of changes in index construction and scale are crucial in increasing user confidence in metrics designed to represent the extremely complex phenomenon of social vulnerability.     

Nearest neighbor hazard estimation with left-truncated duration data

Duration data often suffer from both left-truncation and right-censoring. We show how both deficiencies can be overcome at the same time when estimating the hazard rate nonparametrically by kernel smoothing with the nearest-neighbor bandwidth. Smoothing Turnbull’s estimator of the cumulative hazard rate, we derive strong uniform consistency of the estimate from Hoeffding’s inequality, applied to a generalized empirical distribution function. We also apply our estimator to rating transitions of corporate loans in Germany.     

Testing for Persistence in the Error Component Model: A One-Sided Approach

This article proposes new simple testing procedures for the joint null hypothesis of absence of persistent effects, in the form of random effects and first-order serial correlation in the error component model. The fact that the presence of random effects is clearly of a one-sided nature, together with the fact that in many empirical applications researchers worry about positive serial correlation leaves room for a power gain that arises from restricting the parameter space under the alternative hypothesis, compared to existing procedures that allow for two-sided alternatives. A Monte Carlo experiment shows that the proposed statistics have good size and power performance in very small samples like those typically used in applied work in panel data. An empirical example illustrates the usefulness of the proposed statistics.     

The role of social transfers in mitigating families with children from the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic

In this study, we investigated the household income of families with children. Our specific interest was the earned income losses during the COVID-19 pandemic, and how social transfers have mitigated those losses. We assessed the monthly income levels by comparing the information on the year prior to pandemic to income levels during COVID-19 pandemic. We found that the pandemic affected all studied subgroups of families with children, with the most negative economic influence in May 2020. In addition, our results indicate that in Finland the social transfers protected fairly well against the negative economic impacts of the pandemic among families with children, especially among vulnerable families (those with lowest income level prior COVID-19, with low parental education, single-parent families and families with non-Finnish-born parents). The information gained from this analysis can be useful in economic recovery during and after COVID-19 pandemic, and when preparing for future challenges.     

INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY PROTECTION AND THE INDUSTRIAL COMPOSITION OF MULTINATIONAL ACTIVITY

In a North‐South model with endogenous foreign direct investment (FDI), we examine the impact of Southern intellectual property rights (IPR) protection on the mode and industrial composition of international technology transfer. A novel feature of the model is that, due to technological reasons, industries differ with respect to their susceptibility to imitation. In equilibrium, licensing occurs in industries where the risk of imitation is low and FDI where it is of intermediate magnitude. Stronger IPRs in the South (1) alter the industrial composition of multinational activity toward licensing at the expense of FDI; (2) reduce local imitation; and (3) increase licensing and, to a lesser extent, FDI. (JEL F10, O34)     

An Analysis of Stability Sets in pure Coordination Games

We calculate the Lebesgue–measures of the stability sets of Nash-equilibria in pure coordination games. The results allow us to observe that the ordering induced by the Lebesgue–measure of stability sets upon strict Nash-equilibria does not necessarily agree with the ordering induced by risk–dominance. Accordingly, an equilibrium selection theory based on the Lebesgue–measure of stability sets would be necessarily different from one which uses the Nash-property as a point of orientation.