Search results for "Stochastic Dominance"

Rising Educational Attainment and Opportunity Equalization: Evidence from France

2020

Educational policies are widely recognized as the means par excellence to equalize opportunities among children with different social and family backgrounds and to promote intergenerational mobility. In this chapter, we focus on the French case and we apply the opportunity equalization criterion proposed by Andreoli, Havnes, and Lefranc (2019) for evaluating the effect of rising compulsory schooling requirements in secondary education. Our results show that such education expansion has a limited redistributive effect on students’ earnings distribution. Nonetheless, we provide evidence of opportunity equalization among groups of students defined by family background circumstances.

Measuring the presence of organized crime across Italian provinces: a sensitivity analysis

2020

AbstractThe existing literature identifies different indicators to construct organized crime indices and places equal importance to different concepts of organized crime. This paper examines the sensitivity of organized crime across Italian provinces when different set of indicators and weights are used to combine crime indicators. Our findings suggest that there is a remarkable variation in the distribution of organized crime across Italian provinces based on the choice of indicators and the importance given to different crime indicators. It is also found that the relationship of organized crime with socioeconomic and political factors varies depending on the normative choices made in the …

Does Firm Size Affect Self-selection and Learning-by-Exporting?

2010

The trade literature has long discussed the existence of some benefits attributed to exporting, among others, the improvement of firm productivity. This paper examines whether firm size plays a role in this supposedly favourable relationship between exporting and total factor productivity (TFP). To examine this, we investigate, separately for large and small firms, whether firms starting to export perform better ex ante (self-selection) than non-exporting firms and, conditional on this fact, if they are also more productive ex post (learning-by-exporting). With this purpose, we use both stochastic dominance and matching techniques. The dataset is a representative sample of Spanish manufactu…

Testing selective influence directly using trackball movement tasks

2019

Abstract Systems factorial technology (SFT; Townsend & Nozawa, 1995) is regarded as a useful tool to diagnose if features (or dimensions) of the investigated stimulus are processed in a parallel or serial fashion. In order to use SFT, one has to assume the speed to process each feature is influenced by that feature only, termed as selective influence (Sternberg, 1969). This assumption is usually untestable as the processing time for a stimulus feature is not observable. Stochastic dominance is traditionally used as an indirect evidence for selective influence (e.g., Townsend & Fific, 2004). However, one should keep in mind that selective influence may be violated even when stochastic domina…

Measuring wage discrimination according to an expected utility approach

2012

Following on from the seminal works by Blinder (1973) and Oaxaca (1973), many methods have been proposed to measure wage discrimination against women. Some of these methods focus on the entire distribution of the discrimination experienced by each woman, underlining a common aspect of poverty and discrimination analysis: the latter two are both based on an idea of deprivation which originates from a poverty line (in the case of poverty) and from the expected wage in the absence of discrimination (in the case of wage discrimination) (Jenkins, 1994; Del Río et al., 2011). These approaches hinge on conditional-to-individual-characteristics expected wages, lacking in any focus regarding the ent…

The Export-Productivity Link in Brazilian Manufacturing Firms

2015

This paper explores the link between exports and total factor productivity in Brazilian manufacturing firms over the period 2000–08. The Brazilian experience is instructive, as it is a case of an economy that expanded aggregate exports significantly, but with stagnant aggregate growth in total factor productivity. The paper first estimates firm-level total factor productivity under alternative assumptions (exogenous and endogenous law of motion for productivity) following a GMM procedure. In turn, the analysis uses stochastic dominance techniques to assess whether the ex ante most productive firms are those that start exporting (self-selection hypothesis). Finally, the paper tests whether e…

Rent Seeking in Public Procurement

2005

Skills, Job Mobility and Productive Efficiency

2017

Making use of a survey that directly assesses the participants’ cognitive skills, I study the relation between skills and job mobility in a large international comparison of 32 countries. Motivated by the canonical on-the-job search model, I measure job mobility by the ratio of the job-finding rate on the job to the transition rate into unemployment. A higher ratio of these rates induces, ceteris paribus, first-order stochastic dominance in the distribution of workers over jobs, indicating a more efficient allocation of resources across firms. On average across the 32 countries, a one-standard-deviation increase in numeracy skills is estimated to double the ratio of the job-finding rate on …

Multinationals, R&D and productivity: Evidence for UK Manufacturing firms

2010

In this study, we analyze multinationality (domestic-based firms versus multinationals) and foreignness (foreign versus domestic firms) effects in the returns of R&D to productivity. We follow a two-step strategy. In the first step, we consistently estimate firm's productivity by GMM and numerically compute the sample distribution of the R&D returns. In the second step, we use stochastic dominance techniques to make inferences on the multinationality and foreignness effects. Results for a panel of UK manufacturing firms suggest that multinationality and foreignness effects operate in an opposite way: whilst the multinationality effect enhances R&D returns, the foreignness diminishes them. C…

L’économie de la santé : inégalités, prévention et offre de soins

2010

À partir d’une sélection des communications présentées lors des 31e Journées des économistes de la santé français à Rennes en décembre 2009, ce numéro spécial, coordonné par le Collège des Économistes de la Santé, présente des travaux originaux en économie de la santé. Comme à l’accoutumée, la revue Économie Publique - Public économies propose trois rubriques (« Panorama », « Dossier » et « Recherches »). Alain Trannoy (Ehess, Greqam-Idep) offre au lecteur tout d’abord un véritable « panorama...