Individual Attitudes toward the Impact of Multinational Corporations on Domestic Businesses: How Important are Individual Characteristics and Country-Level Traits?

We study the importance of individual characteristics and national factors influencing individual attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations on local businesses. Our sample includes more than 40 000 respondents in 29 countries from the 2003 National Identity Survey conducted by the International Social Survey Programme. We find that individual demographic factors and socioeconomic status, such as gender, age, income and education, are strong predictors of their attitudes. For example, income and education are positively associated with favourable attitudes towards the impact of multinational corporations (MNCs) on local businesses while age is negatively associated with individual attitudes towards MNCs. In addition, hierarchical ordered logit model results show that approximately 8% of total variations in individual attitudes around our sample mean are not explained by differences in personal traits. Instead, they are due to country-level heterogeneity such as, but not limited to, different degrees of openness or different aggregate income

Testing Monetary Policy Intentions in Open Economies

Temple (2002) argues that the inflation level used in Romer (1993) lacks power in revealing the policy intentions of monetary authorities. Temple also points out that Romer\u27s use of the openness--inflation correlation cannot be explained by time consistency theory. In this article, we demonstrate that more open economies experience less inflation volatility and persistence. We attribute our findings to the hypothesis that monetary authorities in more open economies adopt more aggressive monetary policies. This pattern emerges strongly after 1990. Our results indicate that the near-universal regime shift in 1990 is not just a simple process of increased monetary policy aggressiveness, but an increased response to economic openness

Ranking Economics Journals, Economics Departments, and Economists Using Teaching-Focused Research Productivity

This paper constructs new rankings of economics journals, economics departments, and economists that employ a measure of teaching-focused research productivity, an area of growing importance in recent years. The ranking methodologies presented here use information from articles that were published from 1991 through the early part of 2005 within the Journal of Economic Literature\u27 s economic education classifications (A200-A290). The Journal of Economic Literature tops the list of journals, followed by the Review of Economics and Statistics and the American Economic Review . Among the top institutions are Vanderbilt University, Indiana University, and the University of Wisconsin. Others that rank high here, such as Oberlin College and Denison University, do not often fare as well using methodologies that evaluate more traditional types of economics research. Finally, among the economists we find that John Siegfried, William Becker, and Michael Watts are ranked above other economists

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Political Campaign Advertising Dynamics

We investigate the effectiveness of political campaign advertisements. From findings in communications, political science, and psychology, we know that the relation between voters and campaign strategists is dynamic and evolves until voters\u27 views on a candidate crystallize. After that point, political campaign advertisements are ineffective. To capture this dynamic we develop an adaptive learning model that relates voters\u27 impression formation to expectations about candidate behavior, one form of which (rational expectations), renders political advertising ineffective. We treat rational expectations as a limiting result that supports the concept of crystallization. Our model assumes that voters misspecify their forecasts about a particular candidate\u27s attributes and campaign strategy. Over time voters can reach a rational expectations equilibrium about a candidate\u27s qualities and discount political advertising. We illustrate the learning dynamics using simulations. As one application of this approach we focus on the influence campaign message (strategy) volatility has on crystallization (i.e., reaching the rational expectations equilibrium). Our simulation results show that campaign message volatility has an important effect on crystallization. One implication is that crystallization is a fragile, special case result that can be altered by informational shocks during the campaign

Learning Dynamics In Monetary Policy: The Robustness of an Aggressive Inflation Stabilizing Policy

This paper investigates the effect of an aggressive inflation stabilizing monetary policy on the ability of agents to reach a rational expectations equilibrium for inflation and output. Using an adaptive learning framework we develop a model that combines a real wage contracting rigidity with an interest rate rule. We show that an AR(1) equilibrium requires more aggressive monetary policy to achieve both determinacy and learnability. This model and policy findings contrast with Bullard and Mitra\u27s [Determinacy, learnability and monetary policy inertia (2001); Journal of Monetary Economics 49 (2002) 1105] model (no inflation persistence) and policy findings (less aggressive policy). These results suggest that aggressive policy is robust in different model specifications. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved

Testing Monetary Policy Intentions In Open Economies

Temple (2002) argues that the inflation level used in Romer (1993) lacks power in revealing the policy intentions of monetary authorities. Temple also points out that Romer\u27s use of the openness-inflation correlation cannot be explained by time consistency theory. In this article, we demonstrate that more open economies experience less inflation volatility and persistence. We attribute our findings to the hypothesis that monetary authorities in more open economies adopt more aggressive monetary policies. This pattern emerges strongly after 1990. Our results indicate that the near-universal regime shift in 1990 is not just a simple process of increased monetary policy aggressiveness, but an increased response to economic openness

Las implicaciones empíricas de los modelos teóricos (IEMT). Un marco de referencia para la unificación metodológica

Ofrecemos un marco de referencia para la iniciativa de las implicaciones empíricas de los modelos teóricos (iemt). El objetivo de las iemt es inducir a los especialistas en ciencias políticas y sociales a poner a prueba modelos empíricos directamente vinculados con un modelo formal. Cuando los especialistas fusionan el análisis formal y el empírico, minimizan las prácticas no falsables y sientan las bases de la acumulación en ciencias sociales. Nuestro marco de iemt involucra tres pasos. El primero es para que los investigadores unifiquen los hechos probables y los conceptos estadísticos aplicados. El segundo paso consiste en desarrollar recursos mensurables (análogos) para esos mecanismos y conceptos. Y en el último paso se unifican los análogos. La importancia del marco de referencia de las iemt radica en que promueve que los especialistas utilicen un conjunto de hechos o axiomas plausibles y que luego los modelen de una manera matemática rigurosa, a fin de identificar relaciones causales que expliquen regularidades empíricas