The Power of the Last Word in Legislative Policy Making

We examine legislative policy making in institutions with two empirically relevant features: agenda setting occurs in real time and the default policy evolves. We demonstrate that these institutions select Condorcet winners when they exist, provided a sufficient number of individuals have opportunities to make proposals. In policy spaces with either pork barrel or pure redistributional politics (where a Condorcet winner does not exist), the last proposer is effectively a dictator or near‐dictator under relatively weak conditions.     

ENDOGENOUS LOBBYING

In this article, we present a citizen‐candidate model of representative democracy with endogenous lobbying. We find that lobbying induces policy compromise and always affects equilibrium policy outcomes. In particular, even though the policy preferences of lobbies are relatively extreme, lobbying biases the outcome of the political process toward the center of the policy space, and extreme policies cannot emerge in equilibrium. Moreover, in equilibrium, not all lobbies participate in the policy‐making process. (JEL: D72, D74, D78)     

Female Asylum-Seekers in the Netherlands: An Empirical Study

This article presents the findings from a study into the chances for refugee status, or a temporary residence permit, for three cohorts of male and female asylum-seekers to the Netherlands. The study investigated whether men and women with similar backgrounds in terms of country of origin, social and demographic characteristics have a similar likelihood of obtaining permission to stay in the Netherlands.
The quantitative findings are corroborated with an in-depth qualitative study of refugees' files from the Immigration and Naturalization Service (IND), as well as with an experiment in which decision-making personnel were asked to judge hypothetical case studies of refugees in which gender as well as other gender-specific properties were systematically varied.
We recommend that further in-depth studies be conducted to capture elements in the decision-making process that could not be investigated in our kind of large-scale study.     

Efficiency and Equilibrium with Dynamic Increasing Aggregate Returns due to Demand Complementarities

When do dynamic nonconvexities at the disaggregate level translate into dynamic nonconvexities at the aggregate level? We address this question in a framework where the production of differentiated intermediate inputs is subject to dynamic nonconvexities, and we show that the answer depends on the degree of Hicks-Allen complementarity (substitutability) between differentiated inputs. In our simplest model, a generalization of Judd (1985) and Grossman and Helpman (1991) among many others, there are dynamic nonconvexities at the aggregate level if and only if differentiated inputs are Hicks-Allen complements. We also compare dynamic equilibrium and optimal allocations in the presence of aggregate dynamic nonconvexities due to Hicks-Allen complementarities between differentiated inputs.     

Servitization strategy as a roadmap for the accounting machine

Journal of Management and Governance - In the last decades contributions on servitization strategy have investigated the role of accounting in supporting it, highlighting the helpfulness of...     

Electroencephalographic Evidence of Abnormal Anticipatory Uncertainty Processing in Gambling Disorder Patients

Putting money at stake produces anticipatory uncertainty, a process that has been linked to key features of gambling. Here we examined how learning and individual differences modulate the stimulus preceding negativity (SPN, an electroencephalographic signature of perceived uncertainty of valued outcomes) in gambling disorder patients (GDPs) and healthy controls (HCs), during a non-gambling contingency learning task. Twenty-four GDPs and 26 HCs performed a causal learning task under conditions of high and medium uncertainty (HU, MU; null and positive cue-outcome contingency, respectively). Participants were asked to predict the outcome trial-by-trial, and to regularly judge the strength of the cue-outcome contingency. A pre-outcome SPN was extracted from simultaneous electroencephalographic recordings for each participant, uncertainty level, and task block. The two groups similarly learnt to predict the occurrence of the outcome in the presence/absence of the cue. In HCs, SPN amplitude decreased as the outcome became predictable in the MU condition, a decrement that was absent in the HU condition, where the outcome remained unpredictable during the task. Most importantly, GDPs’ SPN remained high and insensitive to task type and block. In GDPs, the SPN amplitude was linked to gambling preferences. When both groups were considered together, SPN amplitude was also related to impulsivity. GDPs thus showed an abnormal electrophysiological response to outcome uncertainty, not attributable to faulty contingency learning. Differences with controls were larger in frequent players of passive games, and smaller in players of more active games. Potential psychological mechanisms underlying this set of effects are discussed.     

Dependent Lindeberg central limit theorem for the fidis of empirical processes of cluster functionals

Drees H. and Rootzén H. [Limit theorems for empirical processes of cluster functionals (EPCF). Ann Stat. 2010;38(4):2145–2186] have proven central limit theorems (CLTs) for EPCF built from β-mixing processes. However, this family of β-mixing processes is quite restrictive. We expand some of those results, for the finite-dimensional marginal distributions (fidis), to a more general dependent processes family, known as weakly dependent processes in the sense of Doukhan P. and Louhichi S. [A new weak dependence condition and applications to moment inequalities. Stoch. Proc. Appl. 1999;84:313–342]. In this context, the CLT for the fidis of EPCF is sufficient in some applications. For instance, we prove the convergence without mixing conditions of the extremogram estimator, including a small example with simulation of the extremogram of a weakly dependent random process but nonmixing, in order to confirm the efficacy of our result.     

An Empirical Approach to the Poverty Indicators Based on Revealed Parameters: The Case of Spain

This article investigates the issue of measuring the proportion of the population affected by the phenomenon of poverty in Spain on the basis of the relationship between the severe material deprivation rate and the at-risk-of-poverty rate by regions. The current definitions of equivalence units and equivalent income were analysed and an innovation to allow the introduction of a parametric model, based on the revealed annual consumption of the main different type of households and on the regional purchase power parities, was subsequently proposed. In the case of Spain it was discovered empirically that the equivalence units are not constant, as maintained until now, but that they vary over time. An improvement between the relations of the two rates was obtained by means of the application of these revealed scales. The regional composition was also improved. The results could serve as a base for future studies to provide more detailed information about the breakdown of the relative poverty within each country and, thereby, to meet the relevant information requests, at national and international level, to support the implementation of public policies in this area.