Aversion to inequality in Italy and its determinants

The main goal of this paper is to estimate the preferences of the Italian society towards equity in order to verify whether preferences (i) have changed across the years, and (ii) can be related to specific socio-demographic characteristics. Introducing equity concerns in the implementation of economic policies is a fundamental problem faced by both economists and policy makers. This paper uses a social welfare function à la Jorgenson and Slesnick to estimate society’s aversion towards inequality by implementing a voting scheme for compiling individuals’ equity preferences into a social choice by majority rule. The results show that preferences are highly polarized toward a low and a high concern for equity aversion and that this concern is significantly related with several sociodemographic characteristics. Among them, income plays an important role with richer people tending to favor less equity. Results also show that preferences towards equity have changed across the years.     

The Recent Crisis Impact on the Economies of Some Countries of Central and Eastern Europe

Wealth of nations is nowadays something complex depending on democratic processes and debt accumulation. In Europe the EURO introduction provoked even more complexity, as there is no common government to steer the fiscal process, a situation without precedence. New solutions are therefore looked for, based on different schools of thought in order to tackle the problem. The analytical part analyzes the economic behaviour of four recently less studied countries. A comparison between them is based on time series of Real GDP Growth, Consumer Price Inflation, Government Balance.     

POLITICIANS AT WORK: THE PRIVATE RETURNS AND SOCIAL COSTS OF POLITICAL CONNECTIONS

We quantify the private returns and social costs of political connections exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset that combines matched employer–employee data for a representative sample of Italian firms with administrative archives on the universe of individuals appointed in local governments over the period 1985–1997. According to our results, the revenue premium granted by political connections amounts to 5.7% on average, it is obtained through changes in domestic sales but not in exports, and it is not related to improvements in firm productivity. The connection premium is positive for upstream producers for the public administration only, and larger (up to 22%) in areas characterized by high public expenditure and high levels of corruption. These findings suggest that the gains in market power derive from public demand shifts towards politically connected firms. We estimate that such shifts reduce the provision of public goods by approximately 20%.     

Multidimensional item response theory models for dichotomous data in customer satisfaction evaluation

In this paper, multidimensional item response theory models for dichotomous data, developed in the fields of psychometrics and ability assessment, are discussed in connection with the problem of evaluating customer satisfaction. These models allow us to take into account latent constructs at various degrees of complexity and provide interesting new perspectives for services quality assessment. Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques are considered for estimation. An application to a real data set is also presented.     

Interpretation of the coefficient of determination of an ANOVA model as a measure of polarization

In this paper, it is demonstrated that coefficient of determination of an ANOVA linear model provides a measure of polarization. Taking as the starting point the link between polarization and dispersion, we reformulate the measure of polarization of Zhang and Kanbur using the decomposition of the variance instead of the decomposition of the Theil index. We show that the proposed measure is equivalent to the coefficient of determination of an ANOVA linear model that explains, for example, the income of the households as a function of any population characteristic such as education, gender, occupation, etc. This result provides an alternative way to analyse polarization by sub-populations characteristics and at the same time allows us to compare sub-populations via the estimated coefficients of the ANOVA model.     

Egalitarianism and utilitarianism in committees of representatives

We consider a committee of representatives that makes dichotomous choices (acceptance/rejection) by vote. Given the size of each group represented, what is the most adequate voting rule for the committee? We provide answers based on each of the two principles commonly used to make normative assessments in different contexts: egalitarianism and utilitarianism. To that end, we introduce utilities into the model and adopt a normative approach.     

MULTIPLE EQUILIBRIA AND DETERRENCE IN AIRLINE MARKETS

We use a longitudinal dataset from the U.S. airline industry to estimate three different models for entry games with very general forms of heterogeneity between U.S. carriers in airline markets: a simultaneous game with complete information and two sequential games with or without strategic entry deterrence. In a sequential game with entry deterrence, an incumbent decides whether to incur a cost to deter potential entrants. We show that the model with sequential games with strategic deterrence provides the best fit to the data. We conclude that the results reject the hypothesis of a static model and support the hypothesis of the existence of strategic entry deterrence. (JEL L1)     

Educating for Practice in the Chicano Community

This paper conveys one perspective on the development and implementation of a training curriculum designed within a framework of knowledge, values, and skills essential for compatible and complementary social work practice in the Chicano community. It reflects the theoretical foundations upon which the Chicano Training Center is constructing a continuing education program for social service and mental health personnel. Curriculum content areas and emphases, as well as training modalities, are discussed and suggested as possible means for educating practitioners to better understand and serve Mexican Americans. The development of bicultural practice models in service delivery systems is also stressed.     

Measuring residential segregation in multi-ethnic and unequal European cities

Immigration flows and social inequalities reflect increased social and multi-ethnic segregation in contemporary urban Europe. For a better understanding of these processes, the present study investigates the main strengths of the multi-group residential indices, testing sensitivity and reliability under different metropolitan contexts in five European countries. These indices focus on different research dimensions and approach multi-group residential segregation conceptually and mathematically in a different way. A multivariate exploratory data analysis was adopted to classify the observed segregation patterns into a few homogeneous types and to delineate the multivariate relationship between the indices. The results of principal component analysis demonstrate that the indices assessing uniformity and disproportionality of the social groups analysed (H and D) contribute largely to the diversification in today's multi-ethnic communities, clarifying the importance of the dimension of evenness. Our results highlight how segregation is more evident in economically disadvantaged metropolitan regions with high levels of social vulnerability.     

Asymptotic normality of MRPP statistics from invariance principles of u-statistics

Multi-response permutation procedures (MRPP) were recently introduced to test differences between a priori classified groups of objects ( Mielke, Berry Johnson, 1976; Mielke, 1979 ). The null distributions of the MRPP statistics were initially conjectured to be asymptotically normal for some specified conditions within the setting of a sequence of finite populations due to Madow ( 1948 ).

Asymptotic normality of a class of MRPP statistics (under the null hypothesis) is shown in two cases: (i) the setting which considers the populations to be the samples resulting from sequential independent identically distributed (i.i.d.) sampling (sampling from infinite populations) and (ii) the setting of a sequence of increasingly large finite populations (sampling from finite populations). The results are direct applications of the weak convergence of a U-statistic process in the i.i.d. case to a Brownian motion (Bhattacharyya and Sen, 1977) and of the weak convergence of a U-statistic process in the finite populations case to a Brownian bridge (Sen, 1972). The conditions are milder for the i.i.d. case than for the finite populations case. However, neither case provides a restriction of a practical consequence in applications of MRPP. In either case, convergence is shown to depend on the asymptotic ratios of the group sizes to the population size.