In: Empirical economics, 2012, vol. 42, no. 2, p. 471-486
Because of bacterial resistance, current antibiotic consumption is reinforced by past use, and future utility is lower. The purpose of this article is to provide evidence on habit and addictive behavior toward antibiotics by exploring variations in the average consumption of antibiotics across 20 Italian regions. Using a balanced panel data set (2000–2009), we estimate myopic and rational...
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In: Proceedings of the 15th European Conference of Developmental Psychology, 2012, p. 301-306
The present investigation has examined 3 to 6 year old children’s “why” questions and their communicative functions in family conversations. Children’s why questions included in thirty videorecordings of dinnertime interactions, held by Italian and Swiss families, were analyzed. In this investigation, the presence of two fundamental functions of children’s why questions,...
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Thèse de doctorat : Università della Svizzera italiana, 2009.
This work investigates how argumentation, namely the communicative exchange aimed at founding ones position in a reasonable fashion, is an essential condition for the fulfilment of the pragmatic goals of mediation, conceived of as a conflict resolution practice. In mediation, the parties are competent and responsible for the decision on the conflict, while the mediator helps them assume an...
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In: Journal of econometrics, 2012, vol. 167, no. 1, p. 197-210
We characterize the robustness of subsampling procedures by deriving a formula for the breakdown point of subsampling quantiles. This breakdown point can be very low for moderate subsampling block sizes, which implies the fragility of subsampling procedures, even when they are applied to robust statistics. This instability arises also for data driven block size selection procedures minimizing ...
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In: Journal of transport economics and policy, 2012, vol. 46, no. 1, p. 51-66
Efficiency measurement in public transport requires an adequate account of unobserved network characteristics that are typically modelled as factors separable from the production process. This paper proposes a panel data model that allows for non-separable firm-specific heterogeneity in an input distance function. The proposed model is applied to a sample of German and Swiss urban transit...
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In: The journal of finance, 2006, vol. 61, no. 2, p. 921-956
The paper argues that the market significantly overvalues firms with severely underfunded pension plans. These companies earn lower stock returns than firms with healthier pension plans for at least 5 years after the first emergence of the underfunding. The low returns are not explained by risk, price momentum, earnings momentum, or accruals. Further, the evidence suggests that investors do...
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In: Journal of empirical finance, 2009, vol. 16, no. 4, p. 537-556
We amend the conditional CAPM to allow for unobservable long-run changes in risk factor loadings. In this environment, investors rationally “learn” the long-run level of factor loadings from the observation of realized returns. As a consequence of this assumption, we model conditional betas using the Kalman filter. Because of its focus on low-frequency variation in betas, our approach...
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In: Journal of financial economics, 2009, vol. 92, no. 3, p. 491-518
Mandatory contributions to defined benefit pension plans provide a unique identification strategy to estimate the market's assessment of the value of internal resources controlling for investment opportunities. The price decrease following a pension-induced drop in cash is magnified for firms that appear a priori more financially constrained, suggesting a negative effect of financing...
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This paper suggests that the global current account and global capital and financial account discrepancies are the twin result of a common cause. This cause can be identified in the payment of net interests on debt. Re-interpreting the World Bank’s definition of capital flight, we will show that both discrepancies can be consistently accounted for by Schmitt’s analysis of the double charge...
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The aim of this paper is not to provide an exhaustive survey of neoclassical, new classical and new business cycle economics. We will instead present a critical evaluation of the major theoretical features shared by these three analytical frameworks, with the explicit purpose of clearing the way for a new macroeconomic approach to macroeconomics. Conceived as the first chapter of a...
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