Sequential legislative lobbying

In this paper, we analyze the equilibrium of a sequential game-theoretical model of lobbying, due to Groseclose and Snyder (Am Polit Sci Rev 90:303–315, 1996), describing a legislature that vote over two alternatives, where two opposing lobbies compete by bidding for legislators’ votes. In this model, the lobbyist moving first suffers from a second mover advantage and will make an offer to a panel of legislators only if it deters any credible counter-reaction from his opponent, i.e., if he anticipates to win the battle. This paper departs from the existing literature in assuming that legislators care about the consequence of their votes rather than their votes per se. Our main focus is on the calculation of the smallest budget that the lobby moving first needs to win the game and on the distribution of this budget across the legislators. We study the impact of the key parameters of the game on these two variables and show the connection of this problem with the combinatorics of sets and notions from cooperative game theory.     

Longitudinal Links Between Gambling Participation and Academic Performance in Youth: A Test of Four Models

Gambling participation and low academic performance are related during adolescence, but the causal mechanisms underlying this link are unclear. It is possible that gambling participation impairs academic performance. Alternatively, the link between gambling participation and low academic performance could be explained by common underlying risk factors such as impulsivity and socio-family adversity. It could also be explained by other current correlated problem behaviors such as substance use. The goal of the present study was to examine whether concurrent and longitudinal links between gambling participation and low academic performance exist from age 14 to age 17 years, net of common antecedent factors and current substance use. A convenience sample of 766 adolescents (50.6% males) from a longitudinal twin sample participated in the study. Analyses revealed significant, albeit modest, concurrent links at both ages between gambling participation and academic performance. There was also a longitudinal link between gambling participation at age 14 and academic performance at age 17, which persisted after controlling for age 12 impulsivity and socio-family adversity as well as current substance use. Gambling participation predicts a decrease in academic performance during adolescence, net of concurrent and antecedent personal and familial risk factors.     

Does a firm’s exposure to ethical failures matter to financial markets? A governance perspective

This paper investigates if a firm’s ethical reputation, in conjunction with its governance, affects its standing within financial markets. A firm`s ethical reputation, as measured by ethical failures, arises from its involvement in ethical violations and incidents while a comprehensive index proxies for governance. We assess a firm’s standing within financial markets through two complementary perspectives, i.e., the level of information asymmetry between managers and investors, as inferred from analyst forecast dispersion and analyst forecast error, and the relation between a firm’s earnings and its stock market valuation or return (value relevance). Our results suggest that a firm`s ethical reputation affects financial analysts’ forecasts as well as the stock market value assigned to its reported earnings. Moreover, it appears that corporate governance moderates such relations, with strong (weak) governance compensating for a weak (strong) ethical reputation. Overall, our evidence shows that ethical failures do not seem to pay.     

Social choice,optimal inference and figure skating

We approach the social choice problem as one of optimal statistical inference. If individual voters or judges observe the true order on a set of alternatives with error, then it is possible to use the set of individual rankings to make probability statements about the correct social order. Given the posterior distribution for orders and a suitably chosen loss function, an optimal order is one that minimises expected posterior loss. The paper develops a statistical model describing the behaviour of judges, and discusses Markov chain Monte Carlo estimation. We also discuss criteria for choosing the appropriate loss functions. We apply our methods to a well-known problem: determining the correct ranking for figure skaters competing at the Olympic Games.     

Learning from experience or learning from others?: Inferring informal training from a human capital earnings function with matched employer–employee data

A model of informal training which combines learning from own experience and learning from others is proposed in this paper. It yields a closed-form solution that revises Mincer–Jovanovic's [Mincer, J., Jovanovic, B., 1981. Labor mobility and wages. In: Rosen, S. (Ed.), Studies in Labor Markets. Chicago University Press, Chicago, pp. 21–64] treatment of tenure in the human capital earnings function. We estimate the structural parameters of this non-linear model on a large French cross-section with matched employer–employee data. We find that workers on average can learn from others 10% of their own human capital on entering one plant, and catch half of their learning from others’ potential in just 2 years. The private marginal returns to education are declining with education as more educated workers have less to learn from others and share the social returns of their own education with their less qualified co-workers. The potential for learning from others on the job varies across jobs and establishments, and this provides a new distinction between imitation jobs and experience jobs. Workers in imitation jobs, who learn most from others, tend to have considerably longer tenure than workers in experience jobs. Although workers in experience jobs can learn little from others, we find that they learn a lot by themselves. We document several analogies between the imitation jobs/experience jobs “dualism” and the primary/secondary jobs and firms’ dualism implied by the dual labor market theory. However, our binary classification of jobs depicts the data more closely than the dual theory categorization into primary-type and secondary-type establishments. Competition prevails between jobs and firms but jobs differ by their learning technology.     

Management science in the United States and Europe: A decade of change in the literature

This paper focuses upon the investigation of change in the management science literature from 1965 to 1974. Both subject areas and reported areas of implementation are investigated. The study classifies the content of each article published during the past decade in the following set of European and American journals: United States—Management Science; British—Operational Research Quarterly; and German—Zeitscrift für Operations Research. A comparison of the results along both inter and intra country dimensions is presented.     

Mixed refinements of Shapley's saddles and weak tournaments

We investigate refinements of two solutions, the saddle and the weak saddle, defined by Shapley (1964) for two-player zero-sum games. Applied to weak tournaments, the first refinement, the mixed saddle, is unique and gives us a new solution, generally lying between the GETCHA and GOTCHA sets of Schwartz (1972, 1986). In the absence of ties, all three solutions reduce to the usual top cycle set. The second refinement, the weak mixed saddle, is not generally unique, but, in the absence of ties, it is unique and coincides with the minimal covering set. Received: 14 August 1998/Accepted: 12 November 1999     

Cardiac conditions

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death in the US. The growth of the older population in coming decades will inevitably increase the incidence of age-related cardiac disease. Increasing evidence has shown the prevalence of co-morbid mental health conditions in CVD patients. Specifically, depression and anxiety have been linked with CVD mortality. Due to the risk of psychosocial conditions with cardiac patients, mental health practitioners in health and gerontology need to be well-informed about CVD-related mental health comorbidity and current research developments. Accordingly, this article provides a systematic review of the clinical evidence about the efficacy, cost-effectiveness, and any potential risk of psychosocial intervention with cardiac patients.     

Distribution of the random future life expectancies in log-bilinear mortality projection models

Projected life tables are obtained from forecasting methods and account for future improvements in longevity. Since the future path of mortality is unknown, working with projected life tables makes the survival probabilities stochastic. The resulting demographic indicators in turn become random variables. This paper aims to study the distribution of period and cohort life expectancies derived from projected life tables. To fix the ideas, we adopt here the standard Lee–Carter framework, where the future forces of mortality are decomposed in a log-bilinear way. Exact formulas are derived for period life expectancies, and approximations are proposed for cohort life expectancies. In the latter case, numerical illustrations based on Belgian population data show that the relative accuracy is remarkable.