The impact of the term spread in US monetary policy from 1870 to 2013

In this paper, we apply a novel econometric approach joint with an exhaustive revision of the main events in the history of US monetary policy in order to check the effectiveness of monetary policy focused on interest rates. Unlike the traditional cointegration approach, this new methodology allows us to break with the rigidity of traditional approaches in favour of letting the series be cointegrated, and the spread is able to follow a long-memory process; i.e., it does not necessarily need to be I(0) and also rejects the assumption that interest rates could follow the dichotomy I(0)/I(1). To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first applications of the Fractionally Cointegrated Vector Autoregressive (FCVAR) model (Johansen and Nielsen (2012) and Nielsen and Popiel (2016)). Aiming to achieve this goal, we use two databases, i.e., the Jordà-Schularick-Taylor Macrohistory Database and Shiller’s database. Our results cannot reject the Expectations Hypothesis of Term Structure in this time period, and more importantly, we also find that the long-term rate drives the long-run relationship, contributing to the total proportion to the common trend; the persistence of the spread shows us effective control power over interest rates by the Fed.     

Efficacy of a brief intervention on attitudes to reduce school violence: A randomized clinical trial

There is growing interest in the phenomenon of school violence, which has been associated in diverse works with youth's attitudes towards violence, and it has been the focus of many intervention programs. However, the high human and economic cost entailed can impede its administration in some school centers. Therefore, the goal of the present study is to assess the efficacy of a brief intervention aimed at modifying attitudes towards violence to reduce the phenomenon of school bullying. The sample was obtained from a Secondary Education Institute during the 2010–2011 school term, and was made up of 252 students aged between 12 and 15 years. A controlled and randomized design was used in order to assess the effects of the program “Count on Me.” Ten classrooms were randomly assigned either to the intervention or to a waiting-list. Results show a significant reduction of playground violence perceived by the students, especially among the girls. Implications for the development of future brief programs for the prevention of school violence are discussed.     

Games with capacity manipulation: incentives and Nash equilibria

Studying the interactions between preference and capacity manipulation in matching markets, we prove that acyclicity is a necessary and sufficient condition that guarantees the stability of a Nash equilibrium and the strategy-proofness of truthful capacity revelation under the hospital-optimal and intern-optimal stable rules. We then introduce generalized games of manipulation in which hospitals move first and state their capacities, and interns are subsequently assigned to hospitals using a sequential mechanism. In this setting, we first consider stable revelation mechanisms and introduce conditions guaranteeing the stability of the outcome. Next, we prove that every stable non-revelation mechanism leads to unstable allocations, unless restrictions on the preferences of the agents are introduced.     

Materialist Scholarship and The People of Puerto Rico

The People of Puerto Rico occupies an ambivalent place in both the genealogy of anthropological theory and the understanding of Puerto Rican society. Its co-authors collectively developed a uniform and complex conceptual scheme which expressed both convergence and divergence among them. The book furthered Marxist approaches in U.S. anthropology and was the first serious scholarly materialist analysis of Puerto Rico. While privileging the lives of common people, it fell short of representing important strains of Puerto Rican diversity and socio-historical dynamics. The Puerto Rico Social Anthropology Project used four different models to explain the genesis of cultural forms and the interrelations among aspects of society/culture, in a given, homogeneous, “subculture” or “socio-cultural segment” of a complex society. The Project's members stressed a linear-utilitarian analysis of these subcultures, but where they could not account for observed cultural forms with such an approach, they appealed to the culture-psychology relation. This article considers the four interlinked paradigms, the associated analysis of socio-cultural trends, the resulting problematic theoretical consequences, and the flawed Marxism of the work.     

Breakthroughs in the Management Accounting Science: Imaging a Balanced Scorecard Thought by Lean Philosophy Rationales

This paper aims at providing a proposal for a new way of conducting the balanced scorecard (BSC), assuming a model that fulfils the leading features of lean philosophy and designing a research strategy that could explain how to act for arguing a “Lean–Balanced Scorecard”. Management solutions inclined towards lean thinking try to solve contemporary worldwide market challenges by focusing on a virtuous corporate functioning, thanks to a shared philosophy that relies entirely on the minimization of any kind of waste: their main target is to achieve business goals in a way that is absolutely flexible and can be shared at any strategy level within the firm. In the transition towards new management accounting paradigms, might the use of the BSC enhance information processing, useful for spreading lean thinking all over the firm, and for testing its effects? Moreover, thanks to lean thinking, might we suppose improvements related to the BSC functioning, by streamlining that information processing? According to the literature, little is known about how to answer these questions. By answering them, however, we may find innovative solutions towards a better measuring process of firm success—especially from the perspectives of integrated management reporting activities in turbulent times.     

Variables related to psychiatric sick leave taken by Spanish secondary school teachers

Abstract

This study analyses the relationships of certain sociodemographic, organizational, and personality variables with psychiatric sick leave taken by Spanish secondary school teachers. The sample comprised 200 teachers (84 men and 116 women) divided into two groups. The first group was composed of 100 teachers who had suffered from psychiatric disorders requiring sick leave. The second was a matched control group composed of 100 teachers with no history of psychiatric disorders. Both groups shared the same organizational variables (same centre, town, number of students, etc). Logistic regression analysis was conducted to determine any relationships and the risk and protection factors for psychiatric sick leave. It is concluded that the most significant variables related to psychiatric sick leave included competitiveness and hostility, as defined by Type A Behaviour Pattern, emotional exhaustion as a factor of burnout, and job dissatisfaction.     

Rain and the Democratic Window of Opportunity

We show that democratic change may be triggered by transitory economic shocks. Our approach uses within‐country variation in rainfall as a source of transitory shocks to sub‐Saharan African economies. We find that negative rainfall shocks are followed by significant improvement in democratic institutions. This result is consistent with the economic approach to political transitions, where transitory negative shocks can open a window of opportunity for democratic improvement. Instrumental variables estimates indicate that following a transitory negative income shock of 1 percent, democracy scores improve by 0.9 percentage points and the probability of a democratic transition increases by 1.3 percentage points.     

About the “economic” origin of altruism

The principal aim of this paper is to present an evolutionary model based on a simple inequality system which shows how altruism can increase exchanges of goods and services, in order to study the conditions which can permit the emergence and prevalence of altruistic behaviors. We will show that given certain conditions, and even without considering group selection, kin selection or reciprocal altruism, altruists may have a greater probability of survival than egoists.     

Illegal immigration booms and welfare in the host country

We assess the effects of an important influx of illegal immigration on production and welfare, applied to the Spanish economy during the nineties, through a calibrated general equilibrium model. Immigrants are perfect substitutes of unskilled native workers, according to their productivity, but they are unevenly rewarded. In a first simulation we analyse the effects of an exogenous increase of illegal workers equal to the estimates for the period. In another simulation an equivalent expansion in unskilled legal immigrants is then considered. Finally, a comparison of both simulations provides the scenario of illegal immigrants being legalised. The outcome suggests that the amount of remittances and the role of labour market mechanisms (e.g. trade unions) play an important role in overall results.     

Measures of freedom

According to the capability approach and more orthodox theories of individual well-being, freedom is an important ingredient of individual welfare. In operationalising these theories, therefore, it is crucial to have a practical measure of freedom. This paper analyses the measures of freedom proposed by Pattanaik and Xu, Steiner and Carter, Kramer, and Rosenbaum. We provide two interpretations of the first three measures. It is shown that one of these interpretations can be useful in empirical applications, while the other, together with additional arguments, considerably weakens Kramer's measure of freedom. Finally, it is shown that Rosenbaum's measure is not satisfactory as well because it yields counterintuitive results.