Disentangling the Housing Satisfaction Puzzle: Does Homeownership Really Matter?

There is a general consensus that homeownership has beneficial effects for both individuals and society in many outcomes. However, research regarding the effect of homeownership on individuals' subjective well-being remains inconclusive. In this paper, for the first time, we provide empirical evidence for the link between homeownership and housing satisfaction using panel data. We use the eight waves of the European Community Household Panel (ECHP) covering the period 1994-2001. We observe that renters who become homeowners not only experience a significant increase in housing satisfaction, but also after changing their tenure status, they obtain a different utility from the same housing context. This evidence might provide support to the hypothesis that a share of the differences in the perceived utility derived from housing can be attributed to (un)fulfilled expectations or aspirations regarding homeownership. Keywords: Housing satisfaction, subjective well-being, homeownership, fixed-effects, housing aspirations JEL classification: D1, R2.

Narrating urban entrepreneurship: a matter of imagineering?

The battle between cities with regard to their creative possibilities has evolved into a process of multiplying ever-new images and variegated stories of urban attractiveness and success. Engineering “cool” images and “hot” stories about one’s city is now a central endeavor in the narratives of urban policy-making that center more and more on the idea of the entrepreneurial city. The making of an entrepreneurial image is enacted through various narrative genres that lie somewhere between place making and place marketing, between branding and boosting, between restoration and revanchism, between iconic architecture and mega-spectacle. This “imagineering” is not only part of the way cities try to (re)present themselves as entrepreneurial to various audiences through a real “image inflation” (Zukin, 2008, p. xii) but is 1 Forthcoming in: B. Lange,.A. Kalandides, B. Stoeber, I. Wellmann (Hrsg.) (2009): Governance der Kreativwirtschaft. Diagnosen und Handlungsoptionen. Transcript-Verlag, Bielefeld. 2 also inscribed in the various ways urban creativity and entrepreneurship can be studied, researched and imagined. In this chapter we aim to differentiate the political narratives of the entrepreneurial city as we emphasize the need to understand the politics of narration and make a plea for critical reflexivity in our forms of researching and theorizing. We will thus try to investigate how the politics of narration is intertwined with the narration of political concepts and will argue that the narrating of urban entrepreneurship can raise very different images and discourses of city life beyond those that are currently engineered. We will distinguish between a grand narrative, a counter-narrative, and an assemblage of more ambivalent little narratives, which we call prosaic narration. While the distinction between these three types might be seen as a bit too simple and “straight”, we believe that by juxtaposing these different forms of narration and alternating between them, we can help problematize the engineering of the city as entrepreneurial and imagine alternative views both of city life and of what is understood as its creativity.

Why do educated mothers matter? A model of parental help

The paper investigates the role of mothers in affecting childrens' performance at school. It develops a theoretical model in which household is treated as an individual, whose utility depends on the performance at school of the student and on consumption. The model focuses on the possibilities through which mother’s help may affect pupil's performance in terms of time devoted to supervision and spillover effects. Empirical evidence, using Italian PISA 2006, shows that highly educated mothers have a positive impact on students' score only when they are highly qualified in the job market.

Monetary policy rules and financial stress: does financial instability matter for monetary

We examine whether and how main central banks responded to episodes of financial stress over the last three decades. We employ a new methodology for monetary policy rules estimation, which allows for time-varying response coefficients as well as corrects for endogeneity. This flexible framework applied to the U.S., U.K., Australia, Canada and Sweden together with a new financial stress dataset developed by the International Monetary Fund allows not only testing whether the central banks responded to financial stress but also detects the periods and type of stress that were the most worrying for monetary authorities and to quantify the intensity of policy response. Our findings suggest that central banks often change policy

Location Determinants of New Firms: Does Skill Level of Human Capital Really Matter?

This paper is about the role played by stock of human capital on location decisions of new manufacturing plants. We analyse the effect of several skill levels (from basic school to PhD) on decisions about the location of plants in various industries and, therefore, of different technological levels. We also test whether spatial aggregation level biases the results and determine the most appropriate areas to be considered in analyses of these phenomena. Our main statistical source is the Register of Manufacturing Establishments of Catalonia (REIC), which has plant-level microdata on the locations of new manufacturing plants. Keywords: agglomeration economies, industrial location, human capital, count-data models, spatial econometrics.

The Innovation and Imitation Dichotomy in Spanish firms: do absorptive capacity and the technological frontier matter?

This paper analyses whether a firm’s absorptive capacity and its distance from the technological frontier affect the choice between innovation and imitation in innovative Spanish firms. From an extensive survey of 5,575 firms during the 2004-2009 period, we found two significant results. With regard to the role of absorptive capacity, the empirical evidence shows that when innovative firms have difficulties in accessing external information and hire skilled workers, their innovative capacity is reduced. Meanwhile, with regard to distance from the technological frontier, the firms that reduce this gap manage to increase their innovative capacity at the expense of imitation. To summarise, when we studied firms’ absorptive capacity and their relative position to the technological frontier in tandem, we found that the two factors directly affected firms' ability to innovate or imitate.

The Innovation and Imitation Dichotomy in Spanish firms: do absorptive capacity and the technological frontier matter?

This paper analyses whether a firm’s absorptive capacity and its distance from the technological frontier affect the choice between innovation and imitation in innovative Spanish firms. From an extensive survey of 5,575 firms during the 2004-2009 period, we found two significant results. With regard to the role of absorptive capacity, the empirical evidence shows that when innovative firms have difficulties in accessing external information and hire skilled workers, their innovative capacity is reduced. Meanwhile, with regard to distance from the technological frontier, the firms that reduce this gap manage to increase their innovative capacity at the expense of imitation. To summarise, when we studied firms’ absorptive capacity and their relative position to the technological frontier in tandem, we found that the two factors directly affected firms' ability to innovate or imitate. Key words: R&D sources, innovation and imitation strategies, absorptive capacity, technological frontier, ordered probit.

Search for dark matter using VHE gamma-ray telescopes

One of the unresolved questions of modern physics is the nature of Dark Matter. Strong experimental evidences suggest that the presence of this elusive component in the energy budget of the Universe is quite significant, without, however, being able to provide conclusive information about its nature. The most plausible scenario is that of weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), that includes a large class of non-baryonic Dark Matter candidates with a mass typically between few tens of GeV and few TeVs, and a cross section of the order of weak interactions. Search for Dark Matter particles using very high energy gamma-ray Cherenkov telescopes is based on the model that WIMPs can self-annihilate, leading to production of detectable species, like photons. These photons are very energetic, and since unreflected by the Universe's magnetic fields, they can be traced straight to the source of their creation. The downside of the approach is a great amount of background radiation, coming from the conventional astrophysical objects, that usually hides clear signals of the Dark Matter particle interactions. That is why good choice of the observational candidates is the crucial factor in search for Dark Matter. With MAGIC (Major Atmospheric Gamma-ray Imaging Cherenkov Telescopes), a two-telescope ground-based system located in La Palma, Canary Islands, we choose objects like dwarf spheroidal satellite galaxies of the Milky Way and galaxy clusters for our search. Our idea is to increase chances for WIMPs detection by pointing to objects that are relatively close, with great amount of Dark Matter and with as-little-as-possible pollution from the stars. At the moment, several observation projects are ongoing and analyses are being performed.

Does Warfare Matter? Severity, Duration, and Outcomes of Civil Wars

Importa si una guerra civil es combat com un conflicte irregular, convencional o simètric no convencional? En altres paraules, tenen les “tecnologies de la rebel·lió” un impacte sobre la gravetat d’una guerra, la seva durada o el seu resultat? Aquest treball mostra que els conflictes irregulars duren més que els altres tipus de conflicte, mentre els convencionals tendeixen a ser més greus en termes de letalitat al camp de batalla. D’altra banda, els conflictes irregulars tendeixen a ser guanyats pels governs, mentre els altres són més propensos a acabar en empat. Substancialment, aquests resultats ens ajuden a donar sentit a l’evolució de les guerres civils, les quals tendeixen a ser més curtes, més intenses i més difícils per als governs. Teòricament, aquests resultats donen suport a la importància de la tecnologia de rebel·lió a l’estudiar la gravetat, la durada i els resultats de les guerres civils; a més, contribueixen a una millor comprensió de la contribució històrica de la guerra irregular a la construcció de l’Estat i al canvi social.

Market rewards to patterns on increasing earnings: do cash flow patterns, accruals manipulation and real activities manipulation matter?

This study explores whether firms have differential price-earnings multiples associated with their means of achieving a sequential pattern of increasing positive earnings. Our main findings show that market participants assign higher price-earnings multiples to firms when their pattern of increasing earnings is supported by the same pattern of increasing cash flows. Market participants assign lower price-earnings multiples to firms suspect of having engaged in accrual-based earnings management, sales manipulation, and overproduction to achieve the earnings pattern. We find, however, that market participants do not penalize firms suspect of having achieved the earnings pattern through the opportunistic reduction of discretionary expenses.

First impressions matter: Signalling as a source of policy dynamics

We first establish that policymakers on the Bank of England's Monetary PolicyCommittee choose lower interest rates with experience. We then reject increasingconfidence in private information or learning about the structure of the macroeconomy as explanations for this shift. Instead, a model in which voters signal theirhawkishness to observers better fits the data. The motivation for signalling is consistent with wanting to control inflation expectations, but not career concerns orpleasing colleagues. There is also no evidence of capture by industry. The papersuggests that policy-motivated reputation building may be important for explainingdynamics in experts' policy choices.

Do institutions and culture matter for business cycles?

We examine the relationship between institutions, culture and cyclical fluctuations for a sampleof 45 European, Middle Eastern and North African countries. Better governance is associated withshorter and less severe contractions and milder expansions. Certain cultural traits, such as lack ofacceptance of power distance and individualism, are also linked business cycle features. Businesscycle synchronization is tightly related to similarities in the institutional environment. Mediterraneancountries conform to these general tendencies.