The Impact of Public Services Expenditure on the Spanish Income Distribution

This paper performs an assessment and imputation of the benefits produced to the individuals and households well-being by the public services provision. This analysis is very relevant in the current framework of economic crisis of the European economies. Although most of the papers in the literature compare countries, decentralization processes are included in this paper by accounting the effect of public expenditure on regional health care and education upon the levels of inequality and rates of poverty in each Spanish region. This case is relevant because of the high decentralization degree of the Spanish political structure and the persistent regional disparities. The results show a clear downward tendency in both phenomena following imputation, although education shows a greater impact. Furthermore, a decomposition, used in this context for the first time, of the effects shows the very relevant redistributive effect of this public expenditure.     

The generalized two-sided power distribution

The generalized standard two-sided power (GTSP) distribution was mentioned only in passing by Kotz and van Dorp Beyond Beta, Other Continuous Families of Distributions with Bounded Support and Applications, World Scientific Press, Singapore, 2004. In this paper, we shall further investigate this three-parameter distribution by presenting some novel properties and use its more general form to contrast the chronology of developments of various authors on the two-parameter TSP distribution since its initial introduction. GTSP distributions allow for J-shaped forms of its pdf, whereas TSP distributions are limited to U-shaped and unimodal forms. Hence, GTSP distributions possess the same three distributional shapes as the classical beta distributions. A novel method and algorithm for the indirect elicitation of the two-power parameters of the GTSP distribution is developed. We present a Project Evaluation Review Technique example that utilizes this algorithm and demonstrates the benefit of separate powers for the two branches of activity GTSP distributions for project completion time uncertainty estimation.     

A study of Bayesian local robustness with applications in actuarial statistics

Local or infinitesimal Bayesian robustness is a powerful tool to study the sensitivity of posterior magnitudes, which cannot be expressed in a simple manner. For these expressions, the global Bayesian robustness methodology does not seem adequate since the practitioner cannot avoid using inappropriate classes of prior distributions in order to make the model mathematically tractable. This situation occurs, for example, when we compute some types of premiums in actuarial statistics in order to fix the premium to be charged to an insurance policy. In this paper, analytical and simple expressions that allow us to study the sensitivity of premiums, which are usually used in automobile insurance are provided by using the local Bayesian robustness methodology. Some examples are examined by using real automobile claim insurance data.     

Más allá de la sociología. Sobre catástrofes,expertos y comunidades

We could state that a catastrophic discourse is one that refers to a catastrophe which is avoided by the same discourse. This kind of discourse stimulates cautious behaviours. It is necessary that the actors do not know that the catastrophe exists and that they are avoiding it so that this situation can work. Nevertheless, the analyst knows everything. The catastrophic discourse takes part in a stable situation in which the analyst's knowledge is directly proportional to the actor alienation. The economist knows that unstable situations like panic produce an opposite phenomenon: the analyst does not know very well what is going on but the actor knows how to manage. If the market, as well as stable operation, permits instability, the prevention of catastrophes could admit an unstable one, similar to panic and together with the catastrophic solution. This paper suggests some concepts to think about this unstable and anticatastrophic situation. They are notions which give prominence to ‘emergentism’, autopoiesis and uncertainty. The reinterpretation of the Hobbesian natural state developed by Foucault, the analysis of the mobilization power of fear by Bataille and the unpolitical reflections of the community which have been proposed by Esposito, Nancy and Agamben will be reinterpreted in order to achieve this goal.     

Working mothers’ decisions on childcare: the case of Spain

This paper aims to analyze household decisions regarding the childcare of young children. We present two specifications. The first one assumes a sequential decision process. Firstly, parents choose between paid or unpaid care and, secondly, those who opt for paid childcare must decide whether to take their children to a nursery or pre-school or employ somebody to care for them. The second specification is a multinomial Logit in which it is assumed that parents choose from three alternatives: unpaid care, paid care by a nanny, and center-based care. We apply our models to a sample of working mothers with children under three. The database used is the 2008–2010 Spanish Survey of Quality of Working Life (Encuesta de Calidad de Vida en el Trabajo). The results are in line with previous work: Parental education, family composition, income and the characteristics of the mother’s job are important factors in determining the type of childcare chosen for under-three-year-olds.     

The complementarity of internal integration and product modularity: An empirical study of their interaction effect on competitive capabilities

Modular product design and internal integration are commonly adopted by manufacturers to improve operational performance. A number of studies argue that the adoption of product modularity significantly alters organization design, which affects the impact of internal integration on competitive capabilities. This paper thus aims to empirically explore the individual effects as well as interaction effects of product modularity and internal integration on competitive capabilities. The competitive capabilities studied in this paper include product innovativeness, low price, product quality, delivery, flexibility and customer services. After analysing the data from 251 Hong Kong manufacturers through moderated multiple regression analysis, the study found that better internal integration can significantly improve product innovativeness, product quality, delivery, flexibility and customer services, while a high level of product modularity enhances product innovativeness, flexibility and customer services. More importantly, the study shows that internal integration and product modularity can interact to improve product innovativeness and product quality. These results enhance our understanding of the interaction of product design and organizational coordination.     

Estimating utility functions using generalized maximum entropy

This paper estimates von Neumann and Morgenstern utility functions using the generalized maximum entropy (GME), applied to data obtained by utility elicitation methods. Given the statistical advantages of this approach, we provide a comparison of the performance of the GME estimator with ordinary least square (OLS) in a real data small sample setup. The results confirm the ones obtained for small samples through Monte Carlo simulations. The difference between the two estimators is small and it decreases as the width of the parameter support vector increases. Moreover, the GME estimator is more precise than the OLS one. Overall, the results suggest that GME is an interesting alternative to OLS in the estimation of utility functions when data are generated by utility elicitation methods.     

The Impact of Remittances on Nutritional Status of Children in Ecuador1

This work analyzes the impact of remittances on nutritional status of children aged <5 years old in Ecuador in 2006. Using a set of anthropometric indicators constructed according to the new World Health Organization standards, the last household survey available for this country, and an instrumental variables strategy controlling for endogeneity of remittances, this study finds a positive and significant effect of remittance income on short-term and middle-term child nutritional status; nevertheless, no significant impact on long-run anthropometric indicators.     

Bayesian multivariate GARCH models with dynamic correlations and asymmetric error distributions

The main goal in this paper is to develop and apply stochastic simulation techniques for GARCH models with multivariate skewed distributions using the Bayesian approach. Both parameter estimation and model comparison are not trivial tasks and several approximate and computationally intensive methods (Markov chain Monte Carlo) will be used to this end. We consider a flexible class of multivariate distributions which can model both skewness and heavy tails. Also, we do not fix tail behaviour when dealing with fat tail distributions but leave it subject to inference.