Search results for "Variable"
showing 10 items of 1674 documents
A European Multi Lake Survey dataset of environmental variables, phytoplankton pigments and cyanotoxins
2018
Under ongoing climate change and increasing anthropogenic activity, which continuously challenge ecosystem resilience, an in-depth understanding of ecological processes is urgently needed. Lakes, as providers of numerous ecosystem services, face multiple stressors that threaten their functioning. Harmful cyanobacterial blooms are a persistent problem resulting from nutrient pollution and climate-change induced stressors, like poor transparency, increased water temperature and enhanced stratification. Consistency in data collection and analysis methods is necessary to achieve fully comparable datasets and for statistical validity, avoiding issues linked to disparate data sources. The Europea…
Climate variability and agricultural production efficiency: evidence from Ethiopian farmers
2020
It is known that climate and weather variability have negative impacts on agricultural production efficiency. The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of climatic variables on farms’ efficiency in Ethiopia making use of nationally representative datasets from Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) 2011/2012. By using the Stochastic Frontier Approach, we estimate simultaneously the farmers’ optimal production function and technical inefficiency equations, taking into account unobserved heterogeneity of farmers. Our main findings show that climate change variables have a positive effect on households’ efficiency but the impact depends on the diff…
Are business cycles asymmetric? Some European evidence
1997
Economic thought has ofien regal'ded business cycles as asymmetric. This papel' examines the existence of asymmetries over the business cycle in three European countries: France, Germany and the United Kingdom. To analyze this issue, industrial production in these countries from 1957 to 1994 is examined, and quarterly contractions and expansions in this variable are compared. The results obtained with both parametric and nonparametric methods allow the existence of asymmetries in these countries to be questioned. El pensamiento económico ha considerado frecuentemente que los ciclos económicos son de naturaleza asimétrica. Este trabajo examina la existencia de asimetrías en los ciclos económ…
How do educational reforms change the share of students in special education? Trends in special education in Finland
2019
Recent European and global trends in education have been to promote inclusive education and expand education, resulting in the increased provision of special education. In promoting inclusive education, recent special education reforms have also aimed to curtail the rise in identification rates for students in special education, for example, by focusing more on early support and discontinuing fiscal incentives to identify students with special educational needs. Using official special education statistics, we studied how Finland’s special education system reforms changed the share of students in special education. In addition, we examined variations in special education provisions among mu…
Does politics matter in the conduct of fiscal policy? Political determinants of the fiscal sustainability: Evidence from seven individual Central and…
2007
This paper aims at assessing the fiscal sustainability and its political determinants in seven Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC), namely Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. First, using the recent sustainability approach of Bohn (1998) based on fiscal reaction function, econometric findings using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) reveal a positive response of the primary surplus to changes in debt in several countries. In other words, fiscal policy is sustainable in Baltic countries, Slovenia and Slovakia, but not in Poland and in the Czech Republic. Second, by introducing political dummy variables, we test the electoral budget cycle and the…
Informal caregiving and work: A high price to pay. The case of Baltic States
2021
Abstract The impact of informal care burden on the labour market outcomes has been the subject of a number of studies. The literature so far has, however, mostly neglected the post-transition countries. The purpose of this study is to provide empirical evidence on various labour market implications of informal care in the three Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In particular, we examine the extensive and intensive margins of work, wage effects, job seeking behaviour and utilization of unemployment benefits. We apply instrumental variable approach to address the observed endogeneity of informal care. The obtained results support the existence of a significant deterrent effect of…
How efficient is maize production among smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe? A comparison of semiparametric and parametric frontier efficiency analyses
2018
The controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme in Zimbabwe that redistributes commercially-owned farmland to smallholder households has caused concerns about the efficiency of agricultural prod...
A Spatiotemporal Solution for the Simultaneous Sale Price and Time-on-the-Market Problem
2015
There exists an important methodological challenge when dealing with sale price and time-on-the-market variables because both variables are simultaneously determined and related to the motivation of the sellers and buyers. Exploiting the fact that transactions occur over space and time, we propose a two-stage approach based on instrumental variables (IV) built from information collected from previous transactions. The unidirectional temporal property and the fact that other transactions are exogenous from the perspective of a single buyer or seller are exploited to evaluate the effect of the sale price on time-on-the-market, and the effect of time-on-the-market on the sale price. Based on 2…
BALANCED VARIABLE ADDITION IN LINEAR MODELS
2018
This paper studies what happens when we move from a short regression to a long regression in a setting where both regressions are subject to misspecification. In this setup, the least-squares estimator in the long regression may have larger inconsistency than the least-squares estimator in the short regression. We provide a simple interpretation for the comparison of the inconsistencies and study under which conditions the additional regressors in the long regression represent a “balanced addition” to the short regression.
Protest beliefs in contingent valuation: Explaining their motivation
2006
Abstract The definition and treatment of protest responses in contingent valuation (CV) can have a significant influence on the estimated values of the good in question if these responses are censored. In order to understand how protest responses are motivated, in a CV about forest biodiversity in Germany we used an item battery to identify respondents' protest beliefs. The items were measured for all respondents, irrespective of their willingness to pay (WTP) in principle. Then, a scale based on these beliefs is taken as a dependent variable of regression analyses. In addition to environmental concern we used norms, the warm glow of giving and dilemma concern as further explanatory variabl…