Wage Mobility in Europe. A Comparative Analysis Using restricted Multinomial Logit Regression

In this paper, we investigate cross-country differences in wage mobility in Europe using the European Community Household Panel. The paper is particularly focused on examining the impact of economic conditions, welfare state regimes and employment regulation on wage mobility. We apply a log-linear approach that is very much similar to a restricted multinomial logit model and much more flexible than the standard probit approach. It appears that regime, economic conditions and employment regulation explain a substantial part of the cross-country variation. The findings also confirm the existence of an inverse U-shape pattern of wage mobility, showing a great deal of low and high-wage persistence in all countries.wages; wage mobility; wage dynamics; multinomial logit regression; loglinear models; welfare states

Can the information content of share repurchases improve the accuracy of equity premium predictions?

We adjust the dividend–price ratio for share repurchases and investigate whether predictive power can be improved when constructing forecasts of the UK and French equity premia. Regulations in the two largest European stock markets allow us to employ actual repurchase data in our predictive regressions. Hence, we are able to overcome problems associated with markets characterised by less stringent disclosure requirements, where investors might have to rely on proxies for measuring repurchase activity. We find that predictability does not improve either in a statistical or in an economically significant sense once actual share repurchases are considered. Furthermore, we employ a proxy measure of repurchases which can be easily constructed in international markets and demonstrate that its predictive content is not in line with that of the actual repurchase data

Classification of Potential Sheep Heat-Stress Levels According to the Prevailing Meteorological Conditions

Many researchers have found that physiology, welfare, health, and productivity of ruminants are significantly affected when they are exposed to heat-stress conditions. In such cases, heat-stress may also cause a reduction of farmers’ profit in various ways. Heat-stress levels are significantly affected by the prevailing meteorological conditions. This paper aims to study the potential daily peak heat-stress conditions to which sheep are exposed and to classify them according to the prevailing meteorological conditions. For these purposes, temperature, relative humidity, wind speed and incoming solar radiation data were analyzed. The meteorological data were recorded during the summers of the period 2007 – 2012 by an automated meteorological station that operates in a rural area near the east coast of central Greece. Potential sheep’s heat-stress was assessed using the Temperature Humidity Index (THI). The analysis showed that the daily maximum hourly (DMH) THI value exceeded the extreme severe heat-stress threshold (THI ≥ 25.6) in 82% of the days. The average value of the DMH THI values during August was 29.0, being slightly higher than the corresponding value for July (i.e. 28.6) and 2.7 higher than the corresponding value for June. The classification of the DMH THI values according to the prevailing meteorological conditions was achieved by applying cluster analysis (CA). The 4 meteorological parameters mentioned above were used as variables in the CA. CA was performed by using the values of the meteorological parameters recorded when each DMH THI value was observed. CA is considered as an objective technique to group days with similar weather conditions. CA achieved to group extreme hot days (33.8 – 40.8 oC) and days characterized by high (28.5 – 32.3 oC), moderate (26.1 – 28.9 oC), relatively low (24.3 – 26.0 oC) and very low (20.1 – 20.6 oC) summer temperatures. In brackets, the first number corresponds to the average of DMH THI values calculated for the days included in each cluster. The second number corresponds to the average of temperature values recorded when the DMH THI values were observed, for each cluster of days. The impact of wind speed and incoming solar radiation on peak THI levels was also assessed. It was found that when wind speed and solar radiation increased, peak THI and temperature values also increased. The effect of wind speed to the thermal environment could be mainly attributed to mesoscale circulations that develop in the greater area. This paper showed that CA could be regarded as a useful tool to estimate the range of peak summer THI values, and consequently the magnitude of heat-stress, in relation to the prevailing meteorological conditions.        &nbsp

Net Foreign Assets, Productivity and Real Exchange Rates in Constrained Economies

Empirical evidence suggests that real exchange rates (RER) behave differently in developed and developing countries. We develop an exogenous 2-sector growth model in which RER determination depends on the country's capacity to borrow from international capital markets. The country faces a constraint on capital inflows. With high domestic savings, the country converges to the world per capita income and RER only depends on productivity spread between sectors (Balassa-Samuelson effect). If the constraint is too tight and/or domestic savings too low, RER depends on both net foreign assets (transfer effect) and productivity. We then analyze the empirical implications of the model and find that, in accordance with the theory, RER is mainly driven by productivity and net foreign assets in constrained countries and exclusively by productivity in unconstrained countries.Real exchange rate; capital inflows constraint; overlapping generations

Who benefits from a job change: The dwarfs or the giants?

Empirical studies have shown that voluntary job-to-job changes have a positive effect on wage mobility. In this paper, we suggest that the impact of a job change on wage growth depends on the position in the wage distribution. Using panel data from the UK and Germany, we investigate the effect of employer changes and within-firm job changes on year-to-year wage mobility. We show that a change of employer results into a wage increase for the low-paid workers but not for the high-paid workers. Within-firm job changes produce, on average, moderate wage gains for the low-paid workers in the UK, but have no effect in Germany. Results on 3-year wage mobility are shown to be very similar to the results on year-to-year wage growth.low pay ; high pay ; job mobility ; wage mobility

Testing Long-Run Purchasing Power Parity under Exchange Rate Targeting

The present paper exploits the idea that empirical estimates of the long-run PPP relationship may compound two distinct influences coming from the behavior of market participants and policy makers when the latter are targeting the exchange rate. This tends to bias tests of long-run PPP against its acceptance. The validity of the theoretical arguments is assessed by drawing on the experience of two European Union countries, Greece and France for the post-Bretton Woods period. Estimation biases due to the omission of policy effects are found to be significant only in the case of Greece. For France, our test results provide evidence bearing on the effectiveness of the competitive disinflation strategy pursued by the French authorities.Long-run PPP; exchange rate targeting; intervention policy; multivariate cointegration

Review and improvements on OECD better life index

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has developed the Better Life Index (BLI) as part of the OECD Better Life initiative to facilitate the better understanding of what drives well-being of people and guide the policy-making. The BLI is a three-level hierarchical composite indicator which covers several socio-economic aspects. In this paper, we depart from the traditional approaches of building composite indices by introducing a hierarchical evaluation methodology for the assessment of BLI. We establish a common basis for fair and democratic evaluation as the aggregation schemes for both first and second level of BLI are determined jointly by the assessed countries through optimization process. We also incorporate into the assessment the public opinion that is captured from the worldwide responses in the web platform of OECD BLI. In addition, we enrich our methodology by incorporating the data from previous years into the normalization process of the indicators, thus smoothing the deviations of indicators’ values among the years. We apply our approach to the data of 38 countries for the year 2017. The robust results obtained from our approach provide insights about the key role that public opinion plays in the evaluation of BLI.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio