Do Reservation Wages Really Decline? Some International Evidence on the Determinants of Reservation Wages

Using cross-country data, we investigate the determinants of reservation wages and their course over the jobless spell. Higher unemployment benefits lead to higher reservation wages. Further, again consistent with the basic search model, repeated observations on the same individual provide scant evidence of declining reservation wages.

Support Vector Clustering for Customer Segmentation on Mobile TV Service

This article presents a proposal for customer segmentation through Support Vector Clustering, a technique that has been gaining attention in the academic literature due to the good results usually obtained. An application of this method to a sample from consumers in Brazil about mobile TV service is performed; we compare this approach with the classical hierarchical methods of cluster analysis. It is concluded that this methodology is effective in reducing the heterogeneity often present in customers’ data, improving the cluster segmentation analysis for managers.     

Sample Partitioning Estimation for Ergodic Diffusions

In this article, we present a new technique to obtain estimators for parameters of ergodic processes. When a diffusion is ergodic its transition density converges to the invariant density Durett (1996 Durett, R. (1996). Stochastic Calculus. A Practical Introduction. New York: CRC Press. [Google Scholar]). This convergence enabled us to introduce a sample partitioning technique that gives, in each subsample, observations that can be treated as independent and identically distributed. Within this framework, is possible the construction of estimators like maximum likelihood estimators or others.     

Estimating Parliamentary composition through electoral polls

Summary.  All electoral systems have an electoral formula that converts proportions of votes into Parliamentary seats. Pre-electoral polls usually focus on estimating proportions of votes and then apply the electoral formula to give a forecast of Parliamentary composition. We describe the problems that arise from this approach: there will typically be a bias in the forecast. We study the origin of the bias and some methods for evaluating and reducing it. We propose a bootstrap algorithm for computing confidence intervals for the allocation of seats. We show, by Monte Carlo simulation, the performance of the proposed methods using data from Spanish elections in previous years. We also propose graphical methods for visualizing how electoral formulae and Parliamentary forecasts work (or fail).     

Nuisance parameter free properties of correlation integral based statistics

This paper presents conditions under which statistics based on the correlation integral are invariant to the use of estimated residuals from dynamic models. The methods are applied to the so-called BDS test for nonlinearity, under a variety of data-generating processes.     

Portuguese Migrants in the German Labor Market: Selection and Performance1

The labor market performance of Portuguese workers in Germany is analyzed in this article. While previous work has compared wages and characteristics of migrants to natives only, this study also matches the data set with an equivalent survey from the sending country. The findings show that Portuguese migrants as a whole are negatively selected, with the exception of blue‐collar workers, the largest group among the movers. The finding that Portuguese migrants earn more than comparable Germans indicates that they have higher unobservable skills.     

A note on the information content of a consistent pairwise comparison judgment matrix of an AHP decision maker

A decision maker using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) could be consistent, and still provide no information in the resulting vector of priorities. An extreme example would be a pairwise comparison judgment matrix filled with 1s which is totally consistent under the various definitions of consistency, but has provided no information about the prioritization of alternatives resulting from the decision maker's judgments. In this paper, the quality of a consistent decision maker's judgments using the Analytic Hierarchy Process is placed in the context of the entropy of the resulting vector of priorities. Indeed, it is the purpose of this paper to provide a formal definition of this notion ofentropy of a priority vector, and to provide a framework for a quantitative measurement of the information content of consistent pairwise comparison judgment matrices of a decision maker who is using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. We will prove that the entropy of the vector of priorities for consistent matrices follows a normal distribution and discuss some general considerations of this result.     

The endogeneity of union status and the application of the hausman test

Union endogeneity in relative wage equations has been long recognized. Recently, a new specification test, parsimonious in its computational requirements, has been advocated. This paper investigates the suitability of the test in a switching regression framework and critiques its most widely cited application.     

The Influence of Service Orientation on B2B e‐Service Capabilities: An Empirical Investigation

E‐Services, or the company's portfolio of service offerings available to its customers through the Internet, are an emerging area of interest to operations management. Yet little is known about the operations and capabilities needed for provision of business‐to‐business (B2B) e‐services. This paper aims to make a contribution toward closing this gap. First, we develop a new construct of B2B e‐service capability, a term that captures a generic set of five interrelated and complementary dimensions: (1) e‐service recovery, (2) e‐customization, (3) ease of navigation, (4) service portfolio comprehensiveness, and (5) information richness. These combined operational abilities are associated with B2B service delivery, including its portal design, technology architecture, and mix of product and service offerings. They are posited to be necessary for delivering effective B2B e‐services. We also argue that, both service orientation (SO) and customer receptivity to technology, influence B2B e‐service capability. We empirically test a path model using structural equation modeling on a sample of 181 businesses that have deployed B2B e‐services. We find that the influence of SO on performance is not direct but rather mediated by the e‐service capability, a finding that holds for both goods producers and service providers. We suggest that a firm's SO may mitigate industrial customers' resistance toward conducting business online.