The transition from compulsory schooling to upper-secondary education is a crucial and frequently difficult step in the educational career of young people. In this study, we analyze the impact of one non-cognitive skill, locus of control, on the intention and the decision to delay the transition into post-compulsory education in Switzerland. We find that locus of control, measured at ages 13–14, has a significant impact on the intention to delay the transition into upper-secondary education. Furthermore, we find that the intention to delay the transition is strongly correlated with the actual delay, measured one and a half years after the intention. Finally, students with the initial intention to delay but successfully continuing into upper-secondary education show a stronger internal locus of control than comparable students who do delay their transition.
This special sssue contains five papers from the 7th European Sport Economics Association (ESEA) Conference on Sports Economics. This conference was hosted by the Center for Research in Sports Administration (CRSA; http://www.crsa.uzh.ch (link is external)) August 27–28, 2015, at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. On the day prior to the conference, the CRSA organized a PhD course in sport economics. Paul Madden (University of Manchester) held an introductory lecture on theoretical sport economics before Brad Humphreys (West Virginia University) explained various methods for dealing with zeros in empirical data. The former and the current editors of this journal, Rob Simmons (Lancaster University) and Arne Feddersen (University of Southern Denmark), led a roundtable discussion on effective publishing strategies in sport economics. The PhD course was very successful with more than 25 graduate students participating.
This essay traces the lines of development of cost accounting to the present state. Based on the historical evidence we carve out the topics and approaches that determine the current state and the expected developments in the next years and decades.
We study the effects of a Danish wage subsidy program for highly educated workers on the performance of the persons and firms participating in the program. Using data on the population of program participants, both workers and firms, we find that the program had positive effects on employment and annual earnings during program participation while there are no positive effects for the years after program expiration. At the employer-level, we find statistically significant effects on the number of highly educated employees for both the period of program participation and the subsequent time period. For the total number of employees we only find positive effects during program participation while there are no statistically significant effects for value added, net income, return on assets, wages per employee and labor productivity.
This paper investigates the process of knowledge exchange in inter-firm Research and Development (R&D) alliances by means of an agent-based model. Extant research has pointed out that firms select alliance partners considering both network-related and network-unrelated features (e.g., social capital versus complementary knowledge stocks). In our agent-based model, firms are located in a metric knowledge space. The interaction rules incorporate an exploration phase and a knowledge transfer phase, during which firms search for a new partner and then evaluate whether they can establish an alliance to exchange their knowledge stocks. The model parameters determining the overall system properties are the rate at which alliances form and dissolve and the agents' interaction radius. Next, we define a novel indicator of performance, based on the distance traveled by the firms in the knowledge space. Remarkably, we find that - depending on the alliance formation rate and the interaction radius - firms tend to cluster around one or more attractors in the knowledge space, whose position is an emergent property of the system. And, more importantly, we find that there exists an inverted U-shaped dependence of the network performance on both model parameters.
This paper explores the expressive ability of the external habit mechanism. I show that whenever the stochastic discount factor (SDF) is a function of aggregate consumption, there exists a representative agent external habit model that replicates that SDF. I also show that within this framework the other utility function parameters become indeterminate, in that a different choice of power utility can lead to the exact same SDF. The indeterminacy arises from an ambiguity in the SDF between the externality and individual consumption.
