Search results for " Econometric"
showing 10 items of 3136 documents
Another "French paradox": explaining why interest rates to microenterprises dit not increase with the change in French usury legislation
2015
Conventional wisdom indicates that the growth of credit may not materialize if credit rates remain capped by usury laws, as had long been the case in France. France therefore abolished usury ceilings on loans to microenterprise in an effort to increase financing for microentrepreneurs. This should have led to an increase in interest rates and increase in microcredit. However, we do not find any increase in interest rates and this is therefore a paradox. The paper provides a brief literature review and the salient features of the legislative changes in France. It follows this up with a presentation of interest rate movements. The discussion of possible explanations of the paradox includes cl…
Environmental problems and Geographic education. A case study: Learning about the climate and landscape in Ontinyent (Spain)
2021
AbstractCultural perceptions of the environment bring us back to elements and factors guided by “natural” cause-effect principles. It seems that academic education has had little effect on the manner and results of learning about changes in the local landscape, especially as regards rational explanations. There is considerable difficulty relating academic concepts about the climate to transformations in the environmental landscape. Teaching tasks are mediatized due to the use of rigorous and precise concepts which facilitate functional and satisfactory learning. This is the objective of the research this article aims to undertake, for which we have chosen the case of Ontinyent (Spain). This…
Anti-Semitism and Progressive Era Social Science. The case of John R. Commons
2016
This paper explores Common’s views toward Jews in order to assess whether his published writings contain assertion that today would be stigmatized as anti-Semitic. The evidence we provide shows that Commons’ racial characterization of Jews was framed within a broad and indiscriminate xenophobic framework. With other leading Progressive Era social scientists, in fact, Commons shared the idea that the new immigration from Eastern and southern Europe would increase competition in the labor market, drive down wages, and lead Anglo-Saxon men and women to have fewer children, since they would not want them to compete with those who survive on less. Within this general xenophobic context, Commons …
Éducation primaire et croissance économique en Afrique subsaharienne : les conditions d'une relation efficace
1995
This article is looking at the causes of the low effectiveness of educational investment in Subsaharan Africa, both at the micro level (effect on labour productivity), and at the macro level (effect on the rate of economic growth). Several recent empirical studies have shown that education impact is systematically weaker in this region than in the rest of the world, and even sometimes negative, as in the case of agricultural productivity. Two series of causes may explain this lack of impact : first, inappropriate economic policies at the macro level which hamper the role of education, either through negative incentives structures, or because of the absence of provision of associated factors…
The significance of climate variability on early modern European grain prices
2021
AbstractGrain was the most important food source in early modern Europe (c. 1500–1800), and its price influenced the entire economy. The extent to which climate variability determined grain price variations remains contested, and claims of solar cycle influences on prices are disputed. We thoroughly reassess these questions, within a framework of comprehensive statistical analysis, by employing an unprecedentedly large grain price data set together with state-of-the-art palaeoclimate reconstructions and long meteorological series. A highly significant negative grain price–temperature relationship (i.e. colder = high prices and vice versa) is found across Europe. This association increases a…
Information nutritionnelle, choix et caractéristiques des consommateurs
2012
Consumers’ food decisions are based on the information they receive and on their own individual characteristics. This paper is based on an experiment using experimental economics and sensory evaluation to measure individual characteristics of participants and to analyze the impact of nutritional information relative to orange juice. The aim is to explore the potential link between specific characteristics (risk aversion, time preference) and the reactions of consumers to nutritional information. The results show that participants react significantly to this information supplied, positively for the pure orange juice and a negatively for orange nectars. In addition, “risk averse” individuals …
Gender gap in Swiss vocational education and training teachers’ economics content knowledge and the role of teaching experience
2019
In the commercial sector, which is of crucial importance to the Swiss economy among other countries, a large number of apprentices are trained on a vocational education and training programme every year. Besides other subjects, the subject Economics and Society forms an integral part of the vocational education and training curriculum and serves to prepare apprentices for professional, economic and civic participation. Although content knowledge is widely considered necessary to both teaching quality and student achievement, little is known about the subject-specific content knowledge of Swiss Economics and Society teachers. As previous research has shown a gender gap in the content knowled…
The many faces of human sociality: uncovering the distribution and stability of social preferences
2018
There is vast heterogeneity in the human willingness to weigh others' interests in decision making. This heterogeneity concerns the motivational intricacies as well as the strength of other-regarding behaviors, and raises the question how one can parsimoniously model and characterize heterogeneity across several dimensions of social preferences while still being able to predict behavior over time and across situations. We tackle this task with an experiment and a structural model of preferences that allows us to simultaneously estimate outcome-based and reciprocity-based social preferences. We find that non-selfish preferences are the rule rather than the exception. Neither at the level of …
The European Regional Convergence Process, 1980-1995: Do Spatial Regimes and Spatial Dependence Matter?
2002
International audience; The authors show that spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity matter in the estimation of the ß-convergence process among 138 European regions over the 1980 to 1995 period. Using spatial econometrics tools, the authors detect both spatial dependence and spatial heterogeneity in the form of structural instability across spatial convergence clubs. The estimation of the appropriate spatial regimes spatial error model shows that the convergence process is different across regimes. The authors also estimate a strongly significant spatial spillover effect: the average growth rate of per capita GDP of a given region is positively affected by the average growth rate of …
Predictive distributions that mimic frequencies over a restricted subdomain
2020
A predictive distribution over a sequence of $$N+1$$ events is said to be “frequency mimicking” whenever the probability for the final event conditioned on the outcome of the first N events equals the relative frequency of successes among them. Exchangeable distributions that exhibit this feature universally are known to have several annoying concomitant properties. We motivate frequency mimicking assertions over a limited subdomain in practical problems of finite inference, and we identify their computable coherent implications. We provide some examples using reference distributions, and we introduce computational software to generate any complete specification desired. Theorems on reducti…