The use of detailed statistical data in customs reforms: The case of Madagascar

To carry out their various missions—collecting revenue, facilitating trade and ensuring security— many customs administrations have established a risk management unit. In developing countries, however, because of the lack of dedicated human and material resources, intelligence and risk analysis remain insufficiently developed. In view of the lack of resources, this article proposes a simple methodology aiming at detecting risky import operations. The mirror analysis first helps to identify and target products or sectors with the greatest risk. Based on the examination of customs declarations patterns (data mining), it is then possible to identify and target higher risk economic operators (importers and customs brokers). When implemented in Madagascar, this method has helped to reveal probable fraud cases in the context of current customs reforms.     

Revenue diversification among non-profits

Although the non-profit literature has grown substantially, the issue of how revenue diversification affects non-profits has not been fully explored. This paper presents several disciplinary perspectives regarding the financing of non-profits, what determines their ability to diversify, and the consequent effects on their behaviour. It first develops an index for measuring revenue diversification and applies it to a national sample of charitable non-profits. The results indicate that, while the perception that most non-profits rely on a single revenue source is exaggerated, the institutions in our sample have somewhat concentrated revenue. Our findings also suggest that the activity of a non-profit and the proportion of its expenditures that it devotes to fund-raising affect its ability to diversify its revenues concentration. While a number of anomalies exist, the weight of our evidence suggests that diversified revenue sources are more likely to be associated with a strong financial position than are concentrated revenue sources. Researchers interested in studying the life-cycle of non-profits, the factors that give rise to stability and growth, and the constraints on non-profit behaviour would do well to consider the diversification index presented in this paper.     

Robust Inference in Two‐phase Sampling Designs with Application to Unit Nonresponse

Influential units occur frequently in surveys, especially in business surveys that collect economic variables whose distributions are highly skewed. A unit is said to be influential when its inclusion or exclusion from the sample has an important impact on the sampling error of estimates. We extend the concept of conditional bias attached to a unit and propose a robust version of the double expansion estimator, which depends on a tuning constant. We determine the tuning constant that minimizes the maximum estimated conditional bias. Our results can be naturally extended to the case of unit nonresponse, the set of respondents often being viewed as a second‐phase sample. A robust version of calibration estimators, based on auxiliary information available at both phases, is also constructed.     

Beyond support in two-stage variable selection

Numerous variable selection methods rely on a two-stage procedure, where a sparsity-inducing penalty is used in the first stage to predict the support, which is then conveyed to the second stage for estimation or inference purposes. In this framework, the first stage screens variables to find a set of possibly relevant variables and the second stage operates on this set of candidate variables, to improve estimation accuracy or to assess the uncertainty associated to the selection of variables. We advocate that more information can be conveyed from the first stage to the second one: we use the magnitude of the coefficients estimated in the first stage to define an adaptive penalty that is applied at the second stage. We give the example of an inference procedure that highly benefits from the proposed transfer of information. The procedure is precisely analyzed in a simple setting, and our large-scale experiments empirically demonstrate that actual benefits can be expected in much more general situations, with sensitivity gains ranging from 50 to 100 % compared to state-of-the-art.     

Bequests and family traditions: the case of nineteenth century France

Like father, like son: is the bequest behavior of children “inherited” from that of their parents? Most economic models (altruistic, paternalistic or exchange models) postulate that bequest behavior does not depend per se on parents’ behavior. Yet because of data limitations, few empirical studies have analyzed the link between bequests left and inheritances received. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of inheritance relative to lifetime income on the amount that individuals bequeath, in the case of France. This study uses original historical data including wealth genealogies covering the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries for the Loire Inférieure département. Empirical evidence suggests that the propensity to bequeath is much greater for inheritance than for human resources: a deceased having inherited twice the average wealth leaves 35–60 % more to his own heirs that the average for his generation. In nineteenth century France, bequests are explained more by inheritance received than by personal savings per se.     

Transmission and inequality of wealth: An empirical study of wealth mobility from 1800 to 1938 in France

This paper endeavors to measure the intergenerational transmission of wealth inequalities over the 1800–1938 period. For this purpose, we have consulted historical data composed of wealth genealogies covering the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. The database was created from families included in the “3,000 families” survey of those individuals residing in the Loire-Inférieure département. The empirical study reveals a relatively large degree of intergenerational immobility: those whose father had twice the average level of wealth themselves upon death leave behind 1.45 times the average wealth of their generation.     

Why do nonprofit managers accumulate surpluses,and how much do they accumulate?

Most theories of nonprofit behavior assume that nonprofit managers run surpluses only temporarily and that managers choose a budget level equal to expected revenues. In reality, equity accumulations have intrinsic value to nonprofit managers, and equity balances of nonprofits do grow over time. The authors discuss the tax treatment of nonprofits under U.S. tax laws, present existing theories of nonprofit behavior, and consider the reasons a prudent nonprofit manager might wish to earn and retain surplus funds. Data from a 1983 national sample of nonprofits are used to show that a large majority of nonprofits earned surpluses in 1983, that surprisingly few nonprofits had surpluses close to the zero level, and that the size of a nonprofit's surplus was related to its equity and asset holdings.