The Chaetognaths of the water of the Peru region

ENGLISH: A study has been made of the distributions of the 28 species of Chaetognatha in the waters off Peru and southern Ecuador, based primarily on data from oceanographic surveys carried out between 1958 and 1961 by the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and the Institute of Marine Resources Research and Consejo de Investigaciones Hidrobiologicas of Peru. Data from expeditions previous to 1958 also were used to aid in the interpretation of these materials. SPANISH: Se ha realizado un estudio de la distribución de las 28 especies de quetognatos en las aguas frente al Perú y al Ecuador meridional, basado principalmente sobre datos de los reconocimientos oceanográficos efectuados entre 1958 y 1961 por la Comisión Interamericana del Atún Tropical, la Institución Scripps de Oceanografía, y por el Instituto de Investigación de los Recursos Marinos y el Consejo de Investigaciones Hidrobiológicas del Perú. También se emplearon datos de las expediciones anteriores a 1958 para ayudar a la interpretación de este material. (PDF contains 102 pages

The value of a statistical life for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest victims

Background: Economic evaluation of policies regarding out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) is important and we estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL) for OHCA victims. Method: Responses to a national Swedish mail survey in 2007, based on the stated-preference technique (contingent valuation) to directly elicit individuals hypothetical willingness to pay for a reduced risk of dying from OHCA. Results: VSL values are found to be higher than for comparable VSL estimates from the transport sector. A lower-bound estimate of VSL for OHCA would be around SEK 20-30 million. Conclusions: The results in this paper indicates that it is not an overestimation to use the „baseline VSL value from the transport sector (SEK 22 million) in cost-benefit analysis of OHCA policy decisions. We do not support a senior death discount for this cause of death.Contingent valuation; Value of a statistical life; Cardiac arrest

Sensitivity to scope in contingent valuation – introducing a flexible community analogy to communicate mortality risk reductions

Validity in contingent valuation (CV) is often tested through the sensitivity of estimated willingness to pay (WTP) to the size or quality of a good or service (‘more is better’ and near proportionality). We investigate the performance of two communication aids (a flexible community analogy and an array of dots) in valuing mortality risk reductions for out-of-hospital cardiac arrest. Our results do not support the prediction of expected utility theory, i.e. that WTP for a mortality risk reduction increases with the amount of risk reduction (weak scope sensitivity), for any of the communication aids. In fact, the array of dots even shows a decreasing WTP when the risk reduction is larger. We find some evidence that level of education influences how communication aids are perceived. Also, a larger municipal population results in lower WTP which may signal problems with strategic bias.Contingent valuation; Willingness to pay; Validity; Sensitivity to scope; Risk communication; Community analogy; Cardiac arrest

Estimating Peer Effects in Swedish High School using School, Teacher, and Student Fixed Effects

In this paper I use a rich dataset in order to observe each student over time in different subjects and courses. Unlike most peer studies, I identify the peers and the teachers that each student has had in every classroom. This enables me to handle the simultaneity and selection problems, which are inherent in estimating peer effects in the educational production function. I use a value-added approach with lagged peer achievement to avoid simultaneity and extensive fixed effects to rule out selection. To be specific, it is within-student across-subject variation with additional controls for time-invariant teacher characteristics that is exploited. Moreover, I identify students that are attending classes in which they have no peers from earlier education which otherwise could bias the result. I find positive peer effects for the average student but also that there is a non-linear dimension. Lower-achieving students benefit more from an increase in both mean peer achievement and the spread in peer achievement within the classroom than their higher-achieving peers.Economics of education; Peer effects

Certainty calibration in contingent valuation - exploring the within-difference between dichotomous choice and open-ended answers as a certainty measure

Hypothetical bias is a serious problem of stated preference techniques. The certainty approach calibrates answers by assessing different weights to remedy respondents’ valuation. However, very little research has been done to find a link between economic theory and empirical treatment of uncertainty through certainty calibration. We use a combination of dichotomous choice (DC) followed by an open-ended (OE) question to examine the relation between the degree of confidence and the distance between the DC bid and the OE answer. The results show that the OE bid difference is significantly correlated to the certainty level in one of our two contingent valuation (CV) surveys, with the probability of stating the highest confidence value increasing between 5-19 percent per SEK 1000 (~$170/€106) that the answer to the OE question and the bid differ. The second CV survey shows a significant relation for the no-responders.Contingent valuation; Hypothetical bias; Calibration; Certainty approach; Value of a statistical life; Traffic safety; Cardiac arrest

Detracking Swedish Secondary Schools - Any Losers, Any Winners?

Whether or not to differentiate - or track - students according to ability has been debated over the years. In Sweden, secondary schools that practiced tracking and schools that did not practice tracking existed simultaneously from 1980 to 1997. This variation in tracking status between schools is used in a differences-in-differences approach. I estimate whether tracking math, or not, in Swedish secondary school had any effect on the probability of having graduated upper-secondary school, but also whether tracking had any consequence for the math grade in upper-secondary school. The results show that when considering the attainment of upper-secondary education and the mean achievement in math, there are no effects of tracking. However, there are effects when estimating the probability of receiving a specific grade, i.e. fail, pass, pass with distinction or pass with special distinction. Tracked students, from families with low-educated parents, are more likely to fail math than similar students in a non-tracked environment.Educational economics; Tracking; Ability grouping

When Leadership Leads to Loathing: The Effect of Culturally (In)Congruent Leadership on Employee Contempt and Voluntary Work Behaviors

This article suggests that contempt ― a proclivity towards loathing others ― as an emotional response, can arise as a consequence of culturally incongruent leadership, i.e. leader behaviors and actions that do not comply with follower-held, culturally derived expectations and values. Outcomes of contempt were also studied by hypothesizing that contempt, when experienced in response to a situation of culturally incongruent leadership, can cause followers to reduce their display of organizational citizenship behaviors (OCB) while engaging in deviant behaviors. The model was tested in a sample of 348 follower-level employees using structural equation modeling. Empirical results largely support theoretical hypotheses. Culturally congruent leadership was negatively related to contempt, while contempt was positively related to deviant behaviors and negatively related to OCB. The results contribute to the understudied field of contempt research, and suggest that leaders faced with cultural diversity may be well advised to adapt their behaviors to the local cultural values to stimulate follower OCB rather than deviance

Is the Gender Gap in School Performance Affected by the Sex of the Teacher?

Girls outperform boys in school. We investigate whether the gender performance gap can be attributed to the fact that the teacher profession is female dominated, that is, is there a causal effect on student outcomes from having a same-sex teacher? Using data on uppersecondary school students and their teachers from the municipality of Stockholm, Sweden, we find that the gender performance differential is larger in subjects where the share of female teachers is higher. We argue, however, that this effect can not be interpreted as causal, mainly due to teacher selection into different subjects and nonrandom student-teacher matching. Exploring the fact that teacher turnover and student mobility give rise to variation in teacher’s gender within student and subject, we estimate the effect on student outcomes of changing to a teacher of the same sex. We find no strong support for our initial hypothesis that a same-sex teacher improves student outcomes.-

The geographical concentration of hotels in Switzerland and the industry life cycle

Empirical studies of numerous products and industries have shown that the evolution of variables such as the market price of a product, output and the number of competitors in an industry are non-monotonic and follow a typical pattern over the life span of that industry. The Swiss hotel industry has been experiencing stagnation, even decline, for a period of over 20 years. This can be measured in terms of arrivals, overnight stays and, perhaps most importantly, the number of firms. Thus the number of hotels in Switzerland has declined by over 10 per cent in the past decade. This decline is forecast by the life-cycle model. These models, however, tell us little about where geographically the decline would take place. The aim of this paper is, first, to verify if the evolution of the Swiss hotel industry fits some of the stylized facts of the industry life cycle. The second aim is to verify if there is evidence of geographical clustering of the hotel industry, and, by extension, of tourism. The third aim is to verify a hypothesis that the decline or final phases of the industry life cycle will lead to greater concentration of an industry; in other words that the decline manifests itself mainly in decentralized locations