Measuring Agglomeration Forces in a Financial Center

Basing on Scitovsky's (1954) definition of external economies and applying the method of Caballero and Lyons (1990) to macro data of Luxembourg services industry, we find significant agglomeration forces between financial intermediaries (downstream industry) on the one hand and business services and computer industry (upstream industries) on the other.

The shortage of medical workers in sub-Saharan Africa and substitution policy

Substitution policies are strategies sometimes chosen in Sub-Saharan Africa for curtailing the shortage of health professionals especially caused by the outflow of medical personnel. The aim of our contribution is to propose a way to assess the merits and drawbacks of substitution policies by developing a simple growth model of healthcare productivity with medical brain drain. Within this framework, we use a medical care production function of the CES type which aggregates low and high specialized health workers. We then run simulations which compare scenarios with and without substitution strategies by using data from the Ghana’s medical sector.medical shortage, healthcare policy, substitution policy

MESURE DES EXTERNALITÉS TECHNOLOGIQUES ET PÉCUNIAIRES DANS UN CLUSTER FINANCIER

Cet article se propose d’estimer les économies d’agglomération des activités de services supérieurs au sein du cluster financier luxembourgeois. Le modèle empirique utilisé, inspiré de celui de Midelfart-Knarvik et Steen (1999), fait notamment apparaître l’existence de différents effets externes pécuniaires et technologiques entre le secteur financier et les branches de services aux entreprises et informatiques. Abstract: In this paper, we estimate agglomeration effects which arise in the Luxembourg banking and services industries. The empirical model we use is inspired from Midelfart-Knarvik and Steen (1999). Empirical evidence of technological and pecuniary externalities is found between the financial industry and the computer and business services.CLUSTER FINANCIER, LUXEMBOURG, EXTERNALITÉS TECHNOLOGIQUES, EXTERNALITÉS PÉCUNIAIRES

Financial openness, disclosure and bank risk-taking in MENA countries

In this paper, we analyze the risk-taking behavior of banks in emerging economies in a context of international capital mobility. Our paper highlights a new channel through which depositors can exercise pressure to control risk-taking. Depositors can reallocate their savings away from their home country to the more protective system of a developed economy. We recover a classical result according to which increased competition resulting from more international financial openness induces banks to take excessive risks. We find however that sufficiently high financial openness is necessary for a positive link between financial transparency and safe risk management. Finally, we test the relationship between disclosure, financial openness and bank risk-taking for a panel of 258 banks from the MENA region and Turkey

ALUMNA DE LA ESCUELA TALLER [Material gráfico]

Copia digital. Madrid : Ministerio de Educación, Cultura y Deporte. Subdirección General de Coordinación Bibliotecaria, 201

Corruption and tax compliance: Evidence from small retailers in Bamako, Mali

We investigate the impact of corruption on tax compliance using a sample of 700 small business in Bamako, Mali. Our results show that paying bribes reduced tax compliance by almost ten percentage points

Formation des salaires en Belgique : interactions sectorielles et performances macroéconomiques

L’article examine le rôle des interactions salariales entre secteur privé et secteur public. Les résultats empiriques sur la période 1995-2015 suggèrent clairement qu’il n’y a pas, dans la formation des salaires belges, un secteur «leader» qui imposerait systématiquement ses hausses de salaire à l’autre secteur. Les interactions salariales sectorielles privé-public sont très fortes, mais au final chaque secteur conserve une large autonomie. Les salaires du secteur privé sont en particulier nettement plus sensibles aux modifications de l’environnement macro-économique (productivité, inflation, chômage), et caractérisés par une tendance négative qu’on peut attribuer à une plus forte modération salariale

Genome-Wide Association Studies in an Isolated Founder Population from the Pacific Island of Kosrae

It has been argued that the limited genetic diversity and reduced allelic heterogeneity observed in isolated founder populations facilitates discovery of loci contributing to both Mendelian and complex disease. A strong founder effect, severe isolation, and substantial inbreeding have dramatically reduced genetic diversity in natives from the island of Kosrae, Federated States of Micronesia, who exhibit a high prevalence of obesity and other metabolic disorders. We hypothesized that genetic drift and possibly natural selection on Kosrae might have increased the frequency of previously rare genetic variants with relatively large effects, making these alleles readily detectable in genome-wide association analysis. However, mapping in large, inbred cohorts introduces analytic challenges, as extensive relatedness between subjects violates the assumptions of independence upon which traditional association test statistics are based. We performed genome-wide association analysis for 15 quantitative traits in 2,906 members of the Kosrae population, using novel approaches to manage the extreme relatedness in the sample. As positive controls, we observe association to known loci for plasma cholesterol, triglycerides, and C-reactive protein and to a compelling candidate loci for thyroid stimulating hormone and fasting plasma glucose. We show that our study is well powered to detect common alleles explaining ≥5% phenotypic variance. However, no such large effects were observed with genome-wide significance, arguing that even in such a severely inbred population, common alleles typically have modest effects. Finally, we show that a majority of common variants discovered in Caucasians have indistinguishable effect sizes on Kosrae, despite the major differences in population genetics and environment