• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• IT close
• CA close
• Research Papers in Economics close
• The Business History Review close

We explain the persistence of low performances in African agriculture by analyzing the determinants of farmers' decisions to modernize their farming practices. Owing to sociocultural factors specific to Sub-Saharan Africa, farmers' decisions on farming practices are strategic complements. We demonstrate that the modernization game these farmers play admits two pure-strategy, Pareto-ranked, symmetric Nash-equilibria. The equilibrium where all farmers choose to modernize their farming methods is preferred to the one where all of them choose to stick to a traditional method. We argue that scarcity and economic opportunities put forward by neo-Boserupian theories of induced-innovation as determinants of the onset of agricultural innovations are, in the context of African countries, only necessary, but not sufficient to generate modernization of farming methods. Deliberate action to enhance adoption of agricultural innovations must therefore take the African's sociocultural context into consideration, or risk failure.

The paper looks into convergence of Russian institutions with those of other democratic, free-market-oriented states, and considers definitions of "normalcy" that incorporate the concepts of free market, democracy, and government efficiency. The author provides an estimate of Russia’s institutional convergence to the standards of the G7 and the “Big Five” group of large, middle-income countries that includes Brazil, China, and India. In some areas Russia outperforms "Big Five" countries, in others it trails behind. Finally, public mistrust, corruption, and inefficient governance in Russia are discussed in light of the Putin administration’s current reform policies.

We study the effect of a merger in a dynamic high-technology industry - the videogame market - which is characterized by frequent introduction of new products. To assess the impact of the merger between two large specialist retailers in the UK, we perform a difference-in-differences analysis comparing the price evolution of the merging parties to that of their 7 major competitors on an original sample of 196 videogames belonging to six different consoles. The results of our econometric analyses suggest that there has been a reduction in the general level of prices of both new and pre-owned games after the merger. This decline has been more marked for the merging parties, which suggests that the merger between Game and Gamestation did not lead to a substantial lessening of competition; rather it is consistent with the existence of efficiency gains.

Abstract This paper investigates the use of tick-by-tick data for intraday market risk measurement. We propose a method to compute an Intraday Value at Risk based on irregularly spaced high-frequency data and an intraday Monte Carlo simulation. A log-ACD–ARMA–EGARCH model is used to specify the joint density of the marked point process of durations and high-frequency returns. We apply our methodology to transaction data for three stocks actively traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Compared to traditional techniques applied to intraday data, our methodology has two main advantages. First, our risk measure has a higher informational content as it takes into account all observations. On the total risk measure, our method allows for distinguishing the effect of random trade durations from the effect of random returns, and for analyzing the interaction between these factors. Thus, we find that the information contained in the time between transactions is relevant to risk analysis, which is consistent with predictions from asymmetric-information models in the market microstructure literature. Second, once the model has been estimated, the IVaR can be computed by any trader for any time horizon based on the same information and with no need of sampling the data and estimating the model again when the horizon changes. Backtesting results show that our approach constitutes reliable means of measuring intraday risk for traders who are very active in the market.

How and to what extent have European ideas transformed the political-administrative institutions in the candidate countries in the East? Which conditions work to mitigate and undermine the impact of the European Union (EU) in these contexts? Research on post-communist transformations, by and large, holds EU enlargement as a successful attempt of institutional transfer in the candidate countries. However, while the EU proved to be successful in the first wave of enlargement in the East, we know much less about its effects in ‘borderline’ cases that lack the will and/or the capacity to pursue required reforms, thus posing a real challenge to EU enlargement strategy. The paper aims to trace the effects of enlargement in challenging domestic environments focusing on public administration reform in post-communist Albania. Differently from the classic Europeanization literature, the bottom-up approach used here, seeks to bring to the fore the crucial role of domestic agency to download and sometimes mitigate European transfers in the national arena. Evidence from the case study shows that governing actors have used EU enlargement as a means to further their strategic goals – they have preferred to talk the talk of reform in order to reap the benefits associated with EU integration and broader external assistance, but also resist implementation of new rules that curtail the political control of the state and the ongoing system of spoils built throughout the post-communist transition. The EU’s broad thresholds on administrative reform and the weak association between monitoring of progress and rewards have left ample space for the governing actors to merely pay lip service to the EU prescriptions, while getting full control of a politicized administration.

An important research question examined in the credit risk literature focuses on the proportion of corporate yield spreads attributed to default risk. This topic is reexamined in the light of the different issues associated with the computation of transition and default probabilities obtained from historical default data. We find that the out of sample estimated default risk proportion in corporate yield spreads is highly sensitive to the ex-ante estimated term structure of default probabilities used as inputs. This proportion can become a large fraction of the yield spread when sensitivity analyses are made with respect to the period over which the probabilities are estimated and the recovery rates. The computation of approximate confidence sets evaluates the statistical precision of the estimated proportions which are also shown to be sensitive to the different filtering procedures required to treat the historical default data base.

Prevailing trends in the management of European museums underline the importance of additional museum services in fostering and encouraging the optimization of cultural assets while facilitating the collection of resources necessary for conservation. This paper considers the case of the archaeological site of Paestum (Salerno) and presents an analysis of individual preferences in relation to specific policies of cultural heritage management, each characterized by the supply of different museum services. Since the diversity of these services can prompt different individual preferences, the analysis allows for heterogeneity of parameters among individuals.