A survey on European integration, offshoring and trade

This note describes Central and Eastern European countries’ (CEECs) involvement in production and trade in Europe. After having liberalised their economies in the 1990s, CEECs have become a part of international production networks in Europe. International production/distribution networks in East Asia have been developing simultaneously. The paper compares production and trade patterns in Europe and East Asia.

No influence of CO2 on stable isotope analyses of soil waters with OA-ICOS

Acknowledgements We are thankful for the support by Audrey Innes with the stable isotope, LOI, and GWC analysis. We thank Jonathan Dick for suggesting that we use sparkling water to generate different CO2 concentrations in the headspace and Claire Tunaley for proof reading. We further highly appreciate the help of David Galloway and Michael Mcgibbon from the School of Biological Sciences, University of Aberdeen, with the CO2 analysis. We are also thankful for the support by Robert Provencal and Doug S. Baer regarding the technical aspects of the isotope analyzer. We would also like to thank the European Research Council (ERC, Project No. GA 335910 VeWa) and the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC, Project No. NE/K000268/1) for funding. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback that helped to improve the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Financial Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe

Central and Eastern European Countries have been severely affected by the 2008 financial crisis. Several ways of contagion of the financial turmoil worked at different strengths in the different coun-tries. Although the disparities of the effects of the financial crisis are rather large, there are a number of common explanatory features. Mechanisms of transmission of the global financial crisis to the CEECs and its effects on these countries are discussed in this paper.

Discounting Financial Literacy: Time Preferences and Participation in Financial Education Programs

Many policy makers and economists argue that financial literacy is key to financial well-being. But why do many individuals remain financially illiterate despite the apparent importance of being financially informed? This paper presents results of a field study linking individual decisions to acquire personal financial information to a critical, and normally unobservable, characteristic: time preferences. We offered a short, free credit counseling and information program to more than 870 individuals. About 55 percent chose to participate. Independently, we elicited time preferences using incentivized choice experiments both for individuals who selected into the program and those who did not. Our results show that the two groups differ sharply in their measured discount factors. Individuals who choose to acquire personal financial information through the credit counseling program discount the future less than individuals who choose not to participate. Our results suggest that individual time preference may explain who will and who will not choose to become financially literate. This has implications for the validity of studies evaluating voluntary financial education programs and policy efforts focused on expanding financial education.financial literacy, time preferences, selection, field experiment

WP 40 - Boxing and dancing: Dutch trade union and works council experiences revisited

h3. English summary This paper contains a quantitative analysis of approaches and results of 67 projects of Dutch company union groups and Works Councils to influence technological and organisational change, in three generations between 1975 and 1996. The effectiveness of problem-solving activities jointly undertaken with management (‘dancing’) in realizing advances in quality of working life proved to be higher than that of own activities solely undertaken by union groups and Works Councils. Yet, such activities were more effective in improving their own position vis-à-vis their constituency and/or vis-à-vis management. The scores on own activities were on average substantially higher than on joint problem-solving: even in these projects, active union groups and Works Councils mostly chose for a strong own profile, related to ‘boxing’ practices. This has notably been the case in manufacturing, in larger organizations and where relatively high union densities prevail. h3. Nederlandse samenvatting Dit paper bevat een kwantitatieve analyse van benaderingen en resultaten van 67 projecten die door Nederlandse vakbondsgroepen en Ondernemingsraden zijn ondernomen om technologische en organisatorische veranderingen te beinvloeden, in drie generaties van 1975 tot 1996. De effectiviteit van activiteiten gericht op het gezamenlijk met management zoeken naar oplossingen (‘dansen’) bleek ten aanzien van het verbeteren van de kwaliteit van de arbeid groter dan die van louter eigen activiteiten van bondsgroepen en OR’en. Daarentegen waren zulke eigen activiteiten effectiever voor het versterken van de eigen positie tegenover de achterban en/of tegenover het management. Gemiddeld kwamen de scores op eigen activiteiten hoger uit dan die op gezamenlijke probleemoplossing: zelfs in deze projecten kozen bondsgroepen en OR’en er meestal voor om zichzelf flink te profileren, een praktijk die verbonden is met ‘boksen’. Dit blijkt vooral het geval te zijn geweest in de industrie, in grotere organisaties en bij een relatief hoge organisatiegraad.

Multidimensional Range Queries on Modern Hardware

Range queries over multidimensional data are an important part of database workloads in many applications. Their execution may be accelerated by using multidimensional index structures (MDIS), such as kd-trees or R-trees. As for most index structures, the usefulness of this approach depends on the selectivity of the queries, and common wisdom told that a simple scan beats MDIS for queries accessing more than 15%-20% of a dataset. However, this wisdom is largely based on evaluations that are almost two decades old, performed on data being held on disks, applying IO-optimized data structures, and using single-core systems. The question is whether this rule of thumb still holds when multidimensional range queries (MDRQ) are performed on modern architectures with large main memories holding all data, multi-core CPUs and data-parallel instruction sets. In this paper, we study the question whether and how much modern hardware influences the performance ratio between index structures and scans for MDRQ. To this end, we conservatively adapted three popular MDIS, namely the R*-tree, the kd-tree, and the VA-file, to exploit features of modern servers and compared their performance to different flavors of parallel scans using multiple (synthetic and real-world) analytical workloads over multiple (synthetic and real-world) datasets of varying size, dimensionality, and skew. We find that all approaches benefit considerably from using main memory and parallelization, yet to varying degrees. Our evaluation indicates that, on current machines, scanning should be favored over parallel versions of classical MDIS even for very selective queries

Soil water stable isotopes reveal evaporation dynamics at the soil–plant–atmosphere interface of the critical zone

Acknowledgements. We are thankful for the support by Audrey Innes during all laboratory work. We further thank Jonathan Dick for running the isotope analysis of precipitation samples and Annette C. Raffan for her support in the soil texture analysis. We would also like to thank the European Research Council (ERC, project GA 335910 VeWa) for fundingPeer reviewedPublisher PD

Stability of Time Preferences

Individuals frequently face intertemporal decisions. For the purposes of economic analysis, the preference parameters assumed to govern these decisions are generally considered to be stable economic primitives. However, evidence on the stability of time preferences is notably lacking. In a large field study conducted over two years with about 1,400 individuals, time preferences are elicited using incentivized choice experiments. The aggregate distributions of discount factors and the proportion of present-biased individuals are found to be unchanged over the two years. At the individual level, the one year correlations in measured time preference parameters are found to be high by existing standards, though some individuals change their intertemporal choices potentially indicating unstable preferences. By linking time preference measures to tax return data, we show that identified instability is uncorrelated with socio-demographics and changes to income, future liquidity, employment and family composition.experimental economics, time preferences, preference stability