infonet-economy

Estimation of the Pareto tail index from extreme order statistics is an important problem in many settings such as income distributions (for inequality measurement), finance (for the evaluation of the value at risk), and insurance (determination of loss probabilities) among others. The upper tail of the distribution in which the data are sparse is typically fitted with a model such…

In affective psychology, there is a persistent controversy about the number, the nature and the definition of the affect structure dimensions. Responding to the methodological criticisms addressed to the preceding studies, we conciliated the principal theories regarding the affect structure with the same experimental setting. In particular, using the semantic items all around the…

War is a puzzle because, if states were rational, they should agree on their differences in power and reach a solution that avoids the costs of fighting. However, this thesis argues that states are only as rational as the men who lead them, who are well established to suffer from psychological "positive illusions" about their abilities, their control over events, and the…

A comparison of Japan’s and Switzerland’s immigration policies disclaims both globalist and public choice explanations that would predict a similar increase in immigrant numbers and an expansion of immigrant rights in liberal democracies. Although both countries have traditionally espoused a rather exclusionary approach towards immigration, Japan is unique in having hitherto…

Thisarticlefocusesonthepoliticalclaimsmadebyimmigrantsandethnicminori- ties in France and Switzerland. We look at cross-national variations in the overall presence of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the national public space, and the forms and content of their claims. Following a political opportunity approach, we argue that claim-making is affected both by institutional…

Structural equation models have been around for now a long time. They are intensively used to analyze data from di.erent fields such as psychology, social sciences, economics, management, etc. Their estimation can be performed using standard statistical packages such as LISREL. However, these implementations su.er from an important drawback: they are not suited for cases in which the…

In most health survey the state of health of individuals is measured through several different kinds of variables such as qualitative, discrete quantitative or dichotomic ones. From these variables, one aims at building univariate indices of health that summarize the information. To do so, we propose in this paper to use Generalized Linear Latent Variable Models (GLLVM) (see e.g.…

The aim of this paper is (i) to assess the impact of regional agreements on members’ trade in Sub-Saharan Africa (intra-regional trade as well as trade with the rest of the world), controlling for the other traditional determinants and (ii) to compare the respective effect of the preferential trade agreements and the currency unions. Considering the period 1962–96, we first assess…