Relationship between Remittances and Macroeconomic Variables in Times of Political and Social Upheaval: Evidence from Tunisia's Arab Spring

If Tunisia was hailed as a success story with its high rankings on economic, educational, and other indicators compared to other Arab countries, the 2011 popular uprisings demonstrate the need for political reforms but also major economic reforms. The Arab spring highlights the fragility of its main economic pillars including the tourism and the foreign direct investment. In such turbulent times, the paper examines the economic impact of migrant' remittances, expected to have a countercyclical behavior. Our results reveal that prior to the Arab Spring, the impacts of remittances on growth and consumption seem negative and positive respectively, while they varyingly influence local investment. These three relationships held in the short-run. By considering the period surrounding the 2011 uprisings, the investment effect of remittances becomes negative and weak in the short-and medium-run, whereas positive and strong remittances' impacts on growth and consumption are found in the long term.Comment: ERF 23rd Annual Conference , Mar 2017, Amman, Jorda

Foreign capital in a growth model

Within an endogenous growth framework, this paper empirically investigates the impact of financial capital on economic growth for a panel of 60 developing countries, through the channel of domestic capital formation. By estimating the model for different income groups, it is found that while private FDI flows exert beneficial complementarity effects on the domestic capital formation across all income-group countries, the official financial flows contribute to increasing investment in the middle income economies, but not in the low income countries. The latter appears to demonstrate that the aid-growth nexus is supported in the middle income countries, whereas the misallocation of official inflows is more likely to exist in the low income countries, suggesting that aid effectiveness remains conditional on the domestic policy environment

Rapid Economic Growth at the Cost of Environment Degradation? Panel Data Evidience from BRIC Economies

The paper investigates whether the decline in environmental quality in BRIC economies is due to high energy consumption level which is a resultant of rapid economic growth. We answer this using environmental, macroeconomic and financial variables along with Kyoto Protocol indicators based on panel data from 1992 to 2004.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64409/1/wp908.pd

Putting theory oriented evaluation into practice

Evaluations of gaming simulations and business games as teaching devices are typically end-state driven. This emphasis fails to detect how the simulation being evaluated does or does not bring about its desired consequences. This paper advances the use of a logic model approach which possesses a holistic perspective that aims at including all elements associated with the situation created by a game. The use of the logic model approach is illustrated as applied to Simgame, a board game created for secondary school level business education in six European Union countries

Understanding Behavioral Sources of Process Variation Following Enterprise System Deployment

This paper extends the current understanding of the time-sensitivity of intent and usage following large-scale IT implementation. Our study focuses on perceived system misfit with organizational processes in tandem with the availability of system circumvention opportunities. Case study comparisons and controlled experiments are used to support the theoretical unpacking of organizational and technical contingencies and their relationship to shifts in user intentions and variation in work-processing tactics over time. Findings suggest that managers and users may retain strong intentions to circumvent systems in the presence of perceived task-technology misfit. The perceived ease with which this circumvention is attainable factors significantly into the timeframe within which it is attempted, and subsequently impacts the onset of deviation from prescribed practice and anticipated dynamics

Use of nonintrusive sensor-based information and communication technology for real-world evidence for clinical trials in dementia

Cognitive function is an important end point of treatments in dementia clinical trials. Measuring cognitive function by standardized tests, however, is biased toward highly constrained environments (such as hospitals) in selected samples. Patient-powered real-world evidence using information and communication technology devices, including environmental and wearable sensors, may help to overcome these limitations. This position paper describes current and novel information and communication technology devices and algorithms to monitor behavior and function in people with prodromal and manifest stages of dementia continuously, and discusses clinical, technological, ethical, regulatory, and user-centered requirements for collecting real-world evidence in future randomized controlled trials. Challenges of data safety, quality, and privacy and regulatory requirements need to be addressed by future smart sensor technologies. When these requirements are satisfied, these technologies will provide access to truly user relevant outcomes and broader cohorts of participants than currently sampled in clinical trials

The impact of the fathers’ job loss during the 1980s recession on their child’s educational attainment and later labour market outcomes

The research on intergenerational correlations in outcomes is increasingly moving from measurement into assessment of causal transmission mechanisms. This paper analyses the causal impact of fathers’ job loss on their children’s educational attainment and later economic outcomes. To do so, we isolate the effect of job loss associated with major industry contractions, mainly in manufacturing, during the recession of the 1980s by mapping industry-level employment change data from 1980 to 1983 into the British Cohort Study (BCS). Children with fathers who were identified as being displaced did significantly worse in terms of their GCSE attainment than those with non-displaced fathers. A child with a displaced father obtained, on average, 18 grade points lower or half a GCSE at grades A*–C less than their otherwise-identical counterparts, the equivalent of about 2 per cent lower wages as an adult. There is also a small effect of fathers’ displacement on the early labour market attachment of children, but no direct impact on their earnings at age 30/34. This does not mean that the impact of job loss will not affect social mobility. Those with lower income, education and social class were most affected by job losses and there is a direct effect on education and youth unemployment, which we know to be drivers of later earnings. This suggests that the recent recession may have significant long-term consequences for the children of those who have lost their jobs

Investigating the dynamics of, and interactions between, Shanghai office submarkets

The Shanghai office market has developed rapidly over the past two decades. As a consequence of this development, two, apparently distinct, office submarkets, Puxi and Pudong have developed in central Shanghai. This raises the issue as to whether the Shanghai office market can be viewed as a homogeneous entity or whether there is imperfect substitutability across office locations within the city. The latter case raises the possibility of the existence of office submarkets. In this paper, we examine intra-metropolitan rental dynamics in the Puxi and Pudong submarkets, identifying any interrelationships between these markets, and consider whether they form distinct office submarkets. We find no interaction between the two submarkets. Further, we find no evidence of lead-lag relationships between the two submarkets. Finally, when we test for convergence in rental performance between the two submarkets, the tests reveal that we can reject the null of no convergence

Evaluating single-sided natural ventilation models against full-scale idealised measurements: impact of wind direction and turbulence

Commonly single-sided natural ventilation is used in temperate climates to provide comfortable and healthy indoor environments. However, within built-up areas it is difficult to predict natural ventilation rates for buildings as they depend on many flow factors and opening type. Here, existing models are evaluated using the nine-month Refresh Cube Campaign (RCC). Pressure-based ventilation rates were determined for a small opening (1% porosity) in a cubical test building (side=6 m). The building was isolated and then sheltered in a limited staggered building array to simulate turbulent flows in dense urban areas. Internal and external flow, temperature and pressure measurements captured a wide range of scales of variability. Although the Warren and Parkins (1985, WP85) model performed best for 30-minute mean ventilation rates, all four models tested underestimated ventilation rates by a factor of 10. As wind dominated the stack effect, new coefficients were derived for the WP85 wind-driven model as a function of wind angle. Predictions were mostly improved, except for directions with complex flow patterns during the sheltered case. For the first time, the relation between ventilation rate and turbulence intensity (TI) around a full-scale building was tested. Results indicate that the wind-driven model for single-sided ventilation in highly turbulent flows (0.5<TI<4) can be improved by including TI as a multiplicative factor. Although small window openings with highly turbulent flows are common for sheltered buildings in urban areas, future model development should include a variety of configurations to assess the generality of these results