Main contribution: Energy poverty is becoming ever more important for academia and policymakers. In the study, we use the innovative method, i.e. »qualitative comparative analysis« (fsQCA), to create profiles of energy-poor households. The results of the analysis show that none of the individual characteristics of energy poverty can explain the phenomenon of energy poverty alone, giving policymakers the necessary leeway to formulate effective policies as part of agendas covering poverty in general, poor health, climate change and domestic energy inefficiency. This study suggests that energy poverty is a structural issue, mainly arising from poor energy-efficient buildings and/or labour market inefficiencies. FsQCA was performed on 150 households. The results show that energy-poor households are characterised by the interdependence and intertwining of socio-demographic (ownership status, education level, labour force status and household size) and housing (type of building, central heating system and solar collectors/heat pump) characteristics. The conditions form eight equifinal configurations related to energy-poor households. The study also highlights that the conditions play different roles in the presence or absence of energy poverty.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1917070
Main contribution: The study examines different ways of presenting information in discrete-choice experiments in order to identify the balance between the bias due to missed variables and the cognitive burden for the respondents. The research is important because it improves the design of environmental evaluation research, which usually includes complex goods that can not be easily described with a limited set of attributes. Our findings therefore encourage and influence the design of the concept with more general attributes of the recreational environment when visitors do not know the place. This paper focuses on the recreational trail preferences of visitors in the Medvednica Nature Park, a protected forest area on the outskirts of the City of Zagreb, the capital of Croatia. A discrete choice experiment (DCE) was conducted to get the insight into relative importance of different resource, social and managerial conditions in the park. Accounting for multiple site conditions requires a relatively large number of choice attributes, which may impose too high cognitive burden on respondents. On the other hand, ignoring relevant attributes may lead to the omitted variable bias. A split sample approach was used to find the balance between the possibility of omitted variable bias and cognitive burden; one version of the questionnaire used DCE with the lower number of attributes, of which some were multidimensional, while the other version used DCE with the greater number of more specific attributes. By using partial profile design in the latter experiment, the number of attributes in the choice task was identical in both experiments. Perceived difficulty of the choice task, self-reported choice certainty and choice consistency were similar across the two experiments. Heterogeneity in preferences and scale was detected in both experiments. Indications of non-compensatory behavior, and greater error variance among less experienced trail users were found in the partial profile experiment with more specific trail attributes, but not in the experiment with multidimensional attributes. Based on the research results, important managerial implications are derived. Non-visual sensory experiences of nature, namely fresh air and soundscape, are generally more important to trail users than visual experiences. Crowding is an important characteristic of trail experience; trail users are willing to tolerate relatively high levels of crowding.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1863054
Main contribution: Student work might increase human capital (through acquisition of new skills, abilities, and knowledge), which may in turn contribute to academic success. At the same time student work might crowd out time for studying and therefore impair academic performance. Due to the large share of students that work during studies in Slovenia, other EU countries and US, student work has become a centre of public discussion and labour market policies. The analysis of its impact on academic success presents an important basis for future policy making, which will either limit or encourage the extent of student work. The existing literature presented mixed results, probably due to the different dependent variables and institutional contexts. Our analysis is thus important not only because it estimates the impact of student work on academic success in Slovenia, but also due to the estimation of effect of student work on 5 different measures of academic performance for the same set of students within one institutional context, which enabled us to present their relative comparison for the first time. In this article we analyze the effects of student work on academic performance for college students. In order to reduce the endogeneity bias due to selection into treatment, we use propensity score matching technique. This approach allows us to estimate the effects of student work separately for different years of study, which is not possible when inside instruments are used to deal with endogeneity of student work. We find predominantly negative effects of student work for all measures of academic performance (GPA, exam attempts, exams passed, and likelihood of passing a year), although many of these are economically and statistically insignificant. We supplement existing studies that do not estimate separate treatment effects for different years of study by showing that work while in college harms study outcomes mostly in the first year of study—by passing smaller number of exams and thereby increasing the likelihood of failing a year. Our results are consistent with evidence on difficulty with adjusting to college studies of first-year students, who face many uncertainties that affect finding the optimal allocation of time between studies, work and leisure.
COBISS.SI-ID: 23997414
Main contribution: The objectives of this study were to review current methodological guidelines for economic evaluations of all types of technologies in the 33 countries with organizations involved in the European Network for Health Technology Assessment (EUnetHTA), and to provide a general framework for economic evaluation at a European level. On the basis of the extracted information, a summary describing the methods used by the EUnetHTA countries was written for each methodological item. General recommendations were formulated for methodological issues where the guidelines of the EUnetHTA partners were in agreement or where the usefulness of economic evaluations may be increased by presenting the results in a specific way. The presented review of methodological guidelines for health economic evaluations and the consequent recommendations will hopefully improve the comparability, transferability and overall usefulness of economic evaluations performed within EUnetHTA. Methodological guidelines for health economic evaluations used by EUnetHTA partners were collected through a survey. Information from each guideline was extracted using a pre-tested extraction template. At least one contact person from all 33 EUnetHTA countries (100 %) responded to the survey. In total, the review included 51 guidelines, representing 25 countries (eight countries had no methodological guideline for health economic evaluations). On the basis of the results of the extracted information from all 51 guidelines, EUnetHTA issued ten main recommendations for health economic evaluations.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1769614
Main contribution: This article proposes a new dynamic decomposition of aggregate productivity. This method builds on widely used static decomposition proposed by Olley in Pakes (1996). The advantage of this method is appropriate allocation of contributions of different groups of firms like surviving, entering and exiting firms. As this is a mathematical decomposition of an aggregate, it is also useful in decomposition of aggregate price level and aggregate markups. We propose an extension of the Olley and Pakes (1996) productivity decomposition that accounts for the contributions of surviving, entering, and exiting firms to aggregate productivity changes. We argue that the other decompositions that break down aggregate productivity changes into similar components introduce some biases in the measurement of the contributions of entry and exit. We apply our proposed decomposition to Slovenian manufacturing data and contrast our results with those of other decompositions. We find that, over a five-year period, the measurement bias associated with entry and exit is substantial, accounting for up to 10 percentage points of aggregate productivity growth.
COBISS.SI-ID: 22559718
Main contribution: Rapidly aging population in high-income countries has exerted additional pressure on the sustainability of public pension expenditure. We present a theoretical model of public pension expenditure under endogenous human capital, where the latter facilitates a substantial decrease in equilibrium fertility rate alongside the improvement in life expectancy. We demonstrate how higher life expectancy and human capital endowment facilitate a rise of net replacement rate. We then provide and examine an empirical model of old-age expenditure in a panel of 33 countries for the period 1998-2008. Our results indicate that increases in effective retirement age and total fertility rate would reduce age-related expenditure substantially. While higher net replacement rate would alleviate the risk of old-age poverty, further increases would add considerable pressure on the fiscal sustainability of public pensions.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1721486
Main contribution: The article analyzes the admission fees that foreign and domestic tourists are willing to pay, respectively, for the National Museum of Iran, and examines the relationship between the tourists’ willingnesstopay and their various socioeconomic, geographical, and psychological characteristics. By applying the contingent valuation method, we established that different segments of visitors differ substantially, both in their characteristics and in their behaviour. The findings, if applied with caution, could provide museum managers with the rationale for adopting segmented pricing and with practical directions for setting such schemes. It was established that the two segments of tourists differ substantially, both in their characteristics and in their behavior. Unlike for domestic tourists, the entrance fees that foreign tourists are willing to pay are substantially higher than the current single entrance fee, while higher entrance fees would not decrease the consumer surplus significantly. Higher willingness-to-pay originates not only from higher income or higher standard of living, but also from their sociological, geographical, and psychological characteristics. By estimating the demand curves, we established that (substantially) higher entrance fees would not decrease the consumer surplus (significantly).
COBISS.SI-ID: 1683854
Main contribution: This paper documents that a large fraction of trade flows at the firm level consists of simultaneous imports and exports in identical products, narrowly defined at the 8digit product classification, which we call passon trade (POT). As the first in the world it reveals an interesting phenomenon that firms simultaneously import and export identical products. This is a completely new discovery, which has not been investigated yet. Something similar was found by Verdoorn in 1960 when he documented that Benelux countries trade between themselves with similar products (intraindustry trade). This was in contrast to the then valid comparative advantage theory. Our paper reveals similar phenomenon at the firm level. This discovery of POT trade is in contrast to the valid theories offoreign trade, which foresee that firms export only the products they are themselves producing – therefore, adequate theoretical explanation will still have to be developed in the future. The authors used data on imports and exports at the firm and product level for Slovenian manufacturing firms in the period 1994–2008, to show that, on average, 70 % of all exporting firms engage in POT. This corresponds to more than 50 % of all exported products. Thus, imported products that are exported again by the same firm is a statistical regularity of trade of Slovenian manufacturing firms. Authors documented that the use of POT is increasing in firm size, product diversification, multinational status as well as firm productivity and profitability. The study also offers and explores empirically a number of explanations for POT. Among possible explanations, they found the evidence on the importance of firms’ multinational networks and demand complementarities between firms’ own and POT products. The latter confirms the theoretical explanations for carryalong trade (CAT) as developed by the recent work of Bernard et al. (2012).
COBISS.SI-ID: 21109990
Main Contribution: We performed economic valuation of an important Slovenian cultural landscape area with internationally recognized qualities.This research represents one of the very few applications of the method to Central and Eastern European countries. The article represents the economic valuation of the Landscape Development and Protection Area of Volčji Potok. For this purpose we combined classical contingent valuation with a closed version of discrete choice method, where the protest responses have been removed. By using econometric analysis we obtained the value of willingness-to-pay and established its determinants. We also made an attempt to control for different biases that arise in such analyses. The present analysis represents one of the very few applications of the method to Central and Eastern European countries.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1489550
Main contribution: The research fills in the gap in quantitative evidence in the field of absorptive capacity and provides important new scientific insights into this phenomenon. By providing knowledge about how to increase the companies’ capacities to assimilate accessible information from all available external resources and use them for innovation, the results are quite valuable for companies as well. Furthermore, the results have significant potential to impact innovation policies, since they raise the question of the appropriateness of innovation policies which put emphasis only on the knowledge creation (R&D). The importance and the impact of the research is represented also by the award of the Faculty of Economics as well as by presented data on citations. In 2009, the paper was amongst the top 5 most cited papers in the acknowledged scientific journal Technovation. The main purpose of this study is to provide stronger quantitative evidence in the field of organizational absorptive capacity research by using a more direct measure of absorptive capacity and a wide range of variables in a crossnationally tested structural model. The results show that there exist two kinds of absorptive capacity: demandpull and sciencepush. Their most important determinants proved to be internal R&D, training of personnel, innovation cooperation and attitude toward change. Both kinds of absorptive capacity are positively related To product and process innovation output.
COBISS.SI-ID: 1546638