We argue that identification and proper specification of ownership links among firms is an important factor and is affecting firm performance on different dimensions. We focus on the corporate wage policy, where we show that firms with same stockholders have similar average labour costs after controlling for standard factors of the wage equation. Moreover, we propose new measures of stockholders’ ability to influence firms’ decision, signal and its strength. The signal measures stockholder’s preferences over a given corporate policy, while the strength function describes stockholder’s ability to influence a firms’ corporate policy.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1772942
In this paper, we show that successful policy aimed at enhancing economic growth in the long run must be based on policies which improve human capital and technological progress. This is applied to Slovenia, a small open economy in the European Union and the Euro Area. In particular, we investigate how fiscal policies should be designed to support economic growth without violating the European Union Stability and Growth Pact. Using the SLOPOL10 model, an econometric model of the Slovenian economy, we analyse the effects of different fiscal policies in Slovenia over the next few years by means of simulations. The fiscal policy multipliers of the Slovenian economy are small and short-lived, which renders demand-side expansionary fiscal policies inappropriate as a means of achieving higher growth. However, if an increase in government expenditures directly related to technological progress is implemented (such as better funding for tertiary education or subsidies for firms’ investments in research and development), this can trigger a path of output which is permanently higher than that of the baseline simulation. Reducing income taxes and social security contributions has strong positive effects on employment. This result shows that the key to prosperity and sustained growth is investment in human capital and technology, also for a small open economy like Slovenia.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1885838
In this article, we study the causal effects of two economic standing measures on the subjective well-being of the elderly, as well as the moderating effects of distinct welfare regimes on these relationships. For our analysis, we classify countries into the following welfare regimes: Conservative, Social-democratic, Mediterranean, and Post-socialist. We address the income endogeneity issue by utilizing the panel structure of our data and instrumenting for income. Our findings show that the significance and strength of the effects of both economic standing measures on life satisfaction are moderated by the institutional context or welfare regime type, which we support by providing several robustness checks. Finally, we make a deeper inquiry into the heterogeneity of the countries classified. After controlling for endogeneity, our results indicate that the relationship between economic standing and life satisfaction is mostly driven by individual countries, which suggests caution when studying the effect of economic standing on subjective well-being.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1898126
Regression for compositional data has so far been largely considered only from a parametric point of view. Recently, some work adapted non-parametric regression to nonEuclidean manifolds. For example, Di Marzio et al. (2013) pursue the circular case, and Di Marzio et al. (2014) the spherical one. In a recent article, Di Marzio, Panzera and Venieri (2015) extended this to nonparametric situations, introducing local constant and local linear smoothing for regression with compositional data. In our analysis, we extend the work of Di Marzio, Panzera and Venieri to locally adaptive estimators, in particular discrete and continuous wavelets. We rely on the work of Dey and Wang (2004), modeling the priors on triangles by use of wavelets constructed speci?cally for triangles. We transfer their methodology of deriving father and motherwavelets using a sequential approach to orthogonalization to derive the motherwavelets. Our new estimator is derived for three cases: simplicial-real; simplicial-simplicial; and real-simplicial regression and is based on Bayesian approach using wavelet type priors. We present a detailed statistical elaboration and analysis, simulation results to compare the performance with some existing parametric estimators for compositional data regression, and an application to the results to two case studies from economics– inference for inequality indices and international trade.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1933454