Displaying from 61 to 70 of 90 available piece of news category "Article"
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Price versus quantity measures to deal with pollution and congestion in urban areas: A political economy approach
Pollution and congestion in urban areas are serious externalities that can be mitigated through the adoption of either price- or quantity-based mechanisms. While price restrictions are occasionally applied, quantity constraints based on car vintage are becoming increasingly popular. Our model provides a comprehensive analysis that explains this prevalence of quantity over price schemes. We also elucidate some other stylized facts observed in urban areas applying traffic restrictions, such as the implementation of hybrid price-and-quantity systems, the use of trial periods and commitments to invest in public transit to enhance the acceptability of urban tolls, and the concentration of quantity restrictions in high-income cities.
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Presence of tourists and perceived safety from COVID-19 among local bus users
Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, public transport has been signalled as a potential contagion hot-spot, leading to a generalised decrease in its use. In this study, we explore how the presence of tourists influences the configuration of the perceived safety related to the transmission of COVID-19 on public transport daily users. Our results show how the presence of tourists in buses influences negatively the perception of safety of local users. However, this influence is highly related with their prior perception of their risk to contagion.
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How has COVID-19 affected the performance of green investment funds?
This paper adopts quantile regressions to scrutinize the dynamics of green investment funds in relation to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. We use data on three of the largest green investment funds (BNP PARIBAS Funds Climate Impact, Nordea Global Climate & Environment, and AMUNDI Funds Global Ecology ESG), whose proceeds finance environmental-focused projects.
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Long-memory and volatility spillovers across petroleum futures
We analyze volatility connectedness across petroleum markets, making two significant contributions to the literature. First, we relax the questionable assumptions on the persistence of volatilities in previous studies by accounting for the long-memory possibility, which is more in accordance with the empirical evidence. To do so, we rely on the connectedness framework of Diebold and Yilmaz (2012;2014), but, unlike previous literature, we employ a fractionally integrated VAR.
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What hampers or increases the R&D intensity of firms?
Many studies have analysed the determinants of firms' internal R&D expenditure-see, for example, (Montresor and Vezzani, 2015) or (Coad, 2019). Such studies typically find the heterogeneity of firm level R&D investment (Coad et al., 2020), the incidence of non-observable characteristics on the R&D effort (Cohen and Klepper, 1992), and the non-homogenous nature of R&D activity (Czarnitzki and Hottenrott 2011a; Barge-Gil and López 2014). The topic is important since R&D investment expands a country's technological frontier. Thus, we need to understand how the distribution of R&D investments is influenced by different firms' characteristics and by the economic cycle.
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Impact of COVID-19 on vacation recreational walking: Evidence from an urban coastal destination
The study examines the impact of COVID-19 on recreational walking, a relevant activity for tourists. Observing the responses of a group of tourists on the Costa Daurada during August 2020, only 5% of the participants reported having walked less compared to normal circumstances; 20% reported having walked more. This is associated with the quality of urban facilities and the perceived safety of avoiding contagion compared to other spaces. It is shown that the pandemic has altered entertainment patterns, leading to an increase in outdoor activities.
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Job-to-job transitions and the job satisfaction puzzle
This paper studies the impact of different types of job-to-job transitions (from salaried employment to self-employment, from self-employment to salaried employment, and within salaried employment) on job satisfaction. Considering the three types of job transition, allows us to separate the pure mobility effect from the type of employment effect. We design an identification strategy based on the diff-in-diff approach. This is possible because our panel data allow us to compare the same individuals before and after job-to-job transitions occur.
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Investment expectations by vulnerable European firms in times of COVID”
The effect of the COVID shock on European economies has been severe and also unequal, with some firms being affected much more strongly than others. To improve the effectiveness of policy interventions, policymakers need to understand which types of vulnerable firms have been suddenly pushed into dire circumstances.
We fill this important gap by providing evidence from the European Investment Bank Investment Survey 2016-2020 on how the COVID shock has affected the investment activity and investment-related framework conditions of vulnerable firms. While data on actual investment activity post-COVID is not yet available to us, we focus on investment expectations. We exploit the fact that the same questions relating to investment expectations have been asked in several previous survey waves, which enables a difference-in-differences approach to investigate how investment expectations might have suddenly changed, for vulnerable groups of firms, immediately after the onset of the COVID crisis.
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New empirical insights on conflicting claims problems
A conflicting claims problem is a distribution problem in which the available amount to be shared, the endowment, is insufficient to cover the agents' acquired rights, their claims. Ilustrative situations are water distribution during periods of drought and resource allocation procedures in the public healthcare sector (see, for instance, Hougaard et al. 2012; Moreno-Ternero and Roemer 2012). The design of efficient radio resource management policies to provide the best quality service while guaranteeing user fairness and environmental safety has also been modelled as a problem with conflicting claims (see Lucas-Estañ et al. 2012; Giménez-Gómez et al. 2016, respectively).
The empirical análisis of these problems are base don two different approaches to studying the acceptance of the main rules proposed in the theoretical literature can be found: (i) questionnaires, and (ii) laboratory experiments. Gaertner and Schokkaert (2012) is a survey about empirical social choice.
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On the heterogeneity of the long-term leverage-growth relationship: A cross-country analysis of manufacturing firms
Despite a great deal of studies, the relationship between firm leverage and its impact on growth remains still unclear. We offer an analytical framework, which based on a comprehensive literature review and of related empirical reasoning, helps explaining the long-term leverage and firm growth nexus. Both the theoretical views and empirical evidence are mixed, and the lack of consensus may be the result of inconsistent estimation techniques and of the dual interpretation that firm leverage has.
Analysing debt from credit institutions to firms in France, Italy, and Spain, and observed from 2010 to 2016, we bring a selection framework to trial. The comparative perspective seeks the establishment of regularities, while the use of a dynamic quantile panel estimator unravels its heterogeneity.
Strong non-linearities are detected, but the selection framework finds no support. Indeed, only firms in the lowest-growing deciles of the growth distributions benefit consistently from leverage. On the contrary, the impact on the right part of the growth distribution is either non-significant or negative
