We shed light on assessing product quality in blind tastings and their potential (gender) biases. We study how phonetic traits of grape varieties suggest product attributes in the context of professional reviews. This study aims to close this research gap and analyze how product variety and phonetic name traits affect expert ratings. We obtained data on 18,609 wines and their ratings from Wine Enthusiast Magazine between 1997 and 2016, yielding a sample of 31,058 observations. We suppose that the gender of the taster needs to be considered to understand what affects tastings and ratings, as women and men might be attracted differently to masculine or feminine names. This study shows that masculine names receive higher evaluations than feminine ones. This phonetic gender gap is driven by lower ratings for white wines by female reviewers and lower ratings for red wines by male reviewers. In addition, white wines are rated lower overall by both men and women.

This paper explores the relationship between globalisation and mental health by using the global dataset of high-, middle-, and low-income countries for the period 1970–2020. Although the consequences of globalisation on general health have been extensively studied, limited attention has been paid to investigating the implications on mental health. To show robustness, globalisation has been divided into three main dimensions such as economic globalisation, political globalisation, and social globalisation while, mental health has been classified through various indicators, i.e., mental disorder, anxiety disorder, and depressive disorder. The study used panel fixed effect techniques to demonstrate the quadratic effects of globalisation on mental health. A U-shaped curve relationship between globalisation (including economic, political, and political globalisation) and mental disorders, anxiety disorders, and depressive disorders was identified. However, findings also indicate an inverted U-shaped curve relationship between globalisation and mental health for high-income countries and a U-shaped curve relationship for middle- and low-income countries. Prioritizing mental health is crucial for overall well-being and productivity. Furthermore, a comprehensive policy implementation is strongly recommended to protect societies from mental distress when a country plans to expand globalisation worldwide.

The COVID-19 pandemic itself constitutes an environment for people to experience the potential loss of control and freedom due to social distancing measures and other government orders. Variety-seeking has been treated as a mechanism to regain a sense of self-control. Using Machine Learning model and household-level data with a focus on the wine market in the United States, this study showcases the changing variety-seeking behavior over the pandemic year of 2020, in which people’s perception of the status of restriction measures influences the degree of their use of variety-seeking behavior as a coping strategy. It is the shopping pattern and store environments that drive the behavioral responses in wine purchases to freedom-limited circumstances. Coupon use is associated with a lower variety-seeking tendency at the beginning of the stay-at-home order, but the variety level resumes when more time has passed in the restriction periods. Variety-seeking tendency increases with shopping frequency at the beginning of the social distancing measure but decreases to a level lower than all the non-restriction periods.

The canonical income process, including autoregressive, transitory, and fixed effect components, is routinely used in macro and labor economics. We provide a guide for its estimation using quasidifferences, cataloging biases in the estimated parameters for various $N$, $T$, initial conditions, and weighting schemes. Using Danish administrative data on male earnings, estimation in quasidifferences yields divergent estimates of the autoregressive parameter for different weighting schemes, which conforms to our simulation results when the variance of transitory shocks is higher than that of persistent shocks, true persistence is high, and the persistent component’s variance in the first sample year is nonzero. We further apply quasidifferences to the data from a calibrated lifecycle model and find significant biases in the persistence of shocks and their insurance. Estimation of the income process using quasidifferences is reliable only when the variance of persistent shocks is higher than that of transitory shocks and the moments are equally weighted.

The impact of product ratings is significant in the experience goods market, whose intangible products are difficult to evaluate before consumption. Product ratings can reduce information asymmetries because they represent a credible signal of quality and thus positively affect product sales. In this study, we shed light on how professional critics behave by focusing on the influence of product characteristics and former reviews on rating behavior and market prices as additional quality signals in wine markets. Using 13,911 observations from professional wine tastings, we analyze 8,444 worldwide-produced wines and their ratings over 20 years. We find clear evidence to suggest that prices and product ratings are significantly related. Finally, the results suggest that review consistency evolves and determines current ratings.

The purpose of this article is to assess the relationship between trade liberalisation in Tunisia and the employment intensity of sectoral output growth, in order to examine the claim that free trade creates jobs by stimulating growth. Using panel data for 15 Tunisian sectors over the period 1983–2010, we compare estimated sectoral output–employment elasticities prior to and following the Free Trade Agreement process with the European Union. The results provide evidence that trade liberalisation in Tunisia has led to an increase in the intensity of employment in exporting manufacturing sectors like textiles, clothing and leather industries, and mechanical and electrical industries. However, their ability to generate jobs in response to value-added growth remains weak. Conversely, since the Free Trade Agreement process, the most labour-intensive service sectors, notably tourism and miscellaneous services, have shown a significant decrease in the employment intensity of their output growth. Our findings suggest that the Free Trade Agreement with the European Union has not really fostered the shift of the Tunisian Economy towards a more inclusive model and support the argument for a reorientation of investment policy in favour of sectors generating more job opportunities.

This paper uses a difference-in-differences approach to analyze the treatment effect of a hail weather shock in a specific Swiss wine-growing region. We exploit a natural experiment from Switzerland's Three Lakes wine region in 2013 and examine its impact on the country's retail market. We find statistically significant (1%-level) effects of –22.8% and +2.8% for the volume and price of wine consumed, respectively. These effects can be interpreted as average treatment effects, which is the difference in outcomes between treatment and control groups using a pre-post shock study methodology. Several robustness checks confirm the statistical significance of the estimated effects and the initial assumptions.

This study scrutinizes spatial econometric models and specifications of crop yield response functions to provide a robust evaluation of empirical alternatives available to researchers. We specify 14 competing panel regression models of crop yield response to weather and site characteristics. Using county corn yields in the US, this study implements in-sample, out-of-sample, and bootstrapped out-of-sample prediction performance comparisons. Descriptive propositions and empirical results demonstrate the importance of spatial correlation and empirically support the fixed effects model with spatially dependent error structures. This study also emphasizes the importance of extensive model specification testing and evaluation of selection criteria for prediction.

Innon-life insurance, the payment history can be predictive of the timing of a settlement for individual claims. Ignoring the association between the payment process and the settlement process could bias the prediction of outstanding payments. To address this issue, we introduce into the literature of micro-level loss reserving a joint modeling framework that incorporates longitudinal payments of a claim into the intensity process of claim settlement. We discuss statistical inference and focus on the prediction aspects of the model. We demonstrate applications of the proposed model in the reserving practice with a detailed empirical analysis using data from a property insurance provider. The prediction results from an out-of-sample validation show that the joint model framework outperforms existing reserving models that ignore the payment–settlement association.

Telematicsdevices installed in insured vehicles provide actuaries with new risk factors, such as the time of the day, average speeds, and other driving habits. This paper extends the multivariate mixed model describing the joint dynamics of telematics data and claim frequencies proposed by Denuit et al. (2019a) by allowing for signals with various formats, not necessarily integer-valued, and by replacing the estimation procedure with the Expected Conditional Maximization algorithm. A numerical study performed on a database related to Pay-How-You-Drive, or PHYD motor insurance illustrates the relevance of the proposed approach for practice.

Using detailed spending and time use data from the Netherlands, this paper analyzes the causal effect of retirement on spending and time use decisions. Both total consumption and disaggregated consumption categories are considered. We do not find empirical evidence for drops in households' total non-durable spending at retirement. Our estimates suggest increases in spending at retirement on goods that are complementary to leisure, but no decreases in spending on goods that are replaceable by home production. The quantitative implication of our empirical results for the Life-Cycle Model is an intertemporal elasticity of substitution for leisure below unity.

In 2020–2021, the world has been gripped by a pandemic that no living person has ever known. The coronavirus pandemic is undoubtedly the greatest challenge the world has faced in over a generation. The imperative of statistical modelling is not only to manage the short-run crisis for the health services, but also to explain the pandemic’s course and establish the effectiveness of different policies, both non-pharmaceutical and with vaccines. This difficult task has been undertaken by the epidemiologists and others in the face of measurement data problems, behavioural complications and endogeneity issues. This paper proposes a simple taxonomy of the alternative different models and suggests how they may be used together to overcome limitations. This perspective may have important implications for how policy-makers cope with future waves or strains in the current pandemic, or future pandemics.

This paper empirically investigates the effect of transnational migrants on gender equality in the country of origin measured by the share of women enrolled in the lower chamber of National Parliaments. We test for a “migration-induced transfer of norm” using panel data from 1970 to 2010 in 10-year intervals. Total international migration has a positive and significant effect on female political empowerment in countries of origin conditional on the initial female parliamentary participation in both origin and destination countries. Endogeneity issues are taken into account and results are tested under specific geo-political subsamples.

This paper explores the driving forces behind household waste generation in the Portuguese municipalities. The focus of the analysis is to empirically test the validity of the waste Kuznets curve (wKc) hypothesis, which postulates an inverted U-shaped relationship between waste generation and economic activity. Panel data is collected for 307 municipalities over the 2009–2018 period. Estimating the fixed-effects model and its dynamic versions of the waste generation equation, the decoupling hypothesis is confirmed, although it is only observed in the richest region of Lisbon and three other municipalities. Results suggest that the productive structure of the local economies is important for explaining waste generation behavior. Population ageing contributes negatively to waste generation, while population density and the development dichotomy are not important drivers in this process. Finally, tourism inflows have a positive effect on municipal waste generation, although the size of the impact is minimal.

This paper reports on the availability of regional capital stock data,1 in the form of new/updated regional (NUTS2 level) capital stock estimates,2 building on an approach (Perpetual Inventory Method) which had been previously developed for the European Commission. The particular focus here is on the UK and how these data are used to shed light on regional labour productivity disparities. Using a NUTS2 level dataset constructed for the period 2000–16, we use a dynamic spatial panel approach from Baltagi et al. (2019) to estimate a model relating productivity to output (growth or levels) and augmented by explicit incorporation of capital stock plus various other covariates such as human capital. We find that regional variations in capital stocks per worker make a significant contribution to regional variations in labour productivity, but the geography of human capital is also highly relevant. Moreover, we give evidence to show that as human capital rises, notably as we move from the regions to London, the impact of capital stock per worker is less. The effect of capital stock depends on the level of human capital.

In the face of strong policy interest in the possible regulation–jobs linkage and weak analytical evidence to support a generalizable conclusion, what should a regulatory agency like the Environmental Protection Agency do in a regulatory impact analysis (RIA)? Initially, an RIA should start with a clear concept of what the regulatory agency is trying to estimate. Much of the popular debate is looking for a total job effect. Yet one thing we do know is that, in aggregate, there will not be a net job change unless the economy deviates from its normal rate of full employment. The gist of our literature review suggests that looking to historic data for stable statistical relationships between regulatory spending and job changes, even in a single industry, is tenuous at best. However, the intuition is relatively easy to trace out with certain assumptions: (1) added costs imply added activity that entails added jobs; (2) higher product prices or other regulatory limits imply less production that entails fewer jobs. Taking an average employment rate per dollar of relevant economic activity, coupled with an assumed demand elasticity, these effects can be multiplied out into job changes, although such simple calculations must be tested by validating key assumptions or exploring the estimates sensitivity to alternatives. New estimates by Belova, Gray, Linn and Morgenstern [(2013a). Environmental Regulation And Industry Employment: A Reassessment. Center for Economic Studies, U.S. Census Bureau Discussion Paper, CES 1336, July.] indicate that extending and expanding the widely cited approach by Morgenstern, Pizer and Shih [(2002). Jobs Versus the Environment: An Industry-Level Perspective. Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, 43, 412–436] is unlikely to be successful. Finally, more effort is needed to inform the public about the potential job impacts of new regulations, especially the distinction of these impacts from long-term technological and economic trends.

This paper examines the effect of the U.S.-Mexico trade agreement under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The results suggest that U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico have been responsive to tariff rate reductions applied to Mexican products. A one percentage point decrease in tariff rates is associated with an increase in U.S. agricultural imports from Mexico by 5.31% in the first 6 years of NAFTA and by 2.62% in the last 6 years of NAFTA. U.S. imports from Mexico have also been attributable to the pre-NAFTA tariff rates. Overall, the results indicate that the U.S-Mexico trade agreement under NAFTA has been trade creating rather than trade diverting.

This article examines the effects of the application of panel data estimation methods on a system of equations with unbalanced panel data. We apply pooled, random-effects, and fixed-effects estimation in three data sets: small, medium, and large farms to examine the relationship between farm size and the elasticity of cotton supply with respect to cotton price. Our results indicate that the adoption of various estimation methods entails different estimated parameters both in terms of their absolute value and in terms of their statistical significance. Additionally, the elasticity of cotton supply with respect to price varies according to farm size.

As farm income from tobacco production has declined in recent years, there has been increasing interest in identifying alternative sources of income for tobacco farmers in the southern United States The recent termination of the tobacco quota program has accelerated the exit of tobacco farmers and has heightened concern regarding the availability of substitutes for tobacco production. In this study, we examine factors influencing tobacco farmers' attempts to identify profitable alternatives to tobacco, their off-farm employment behavior, and changes in acres of tobacco cultivated using survey data collected from a panel of North Carolina tobacco farmers combined with market data.

These articles provide a discussion of studies presented in a session on spatial econometrics, focusing on the ability of spatial regression models to quantify the magnitude of spatial spillover impacts. Both articles presented argue that a proper modeling of spatial spillovers is required to truly understand the phenomena under study, in one case the impact of climate change on land values (or crop yields) and in the second the role of regional industry composition on regional business establishment growth.