Volume 20, Issue 4

This study contributes to the literature on long-term effects of relative age (i.e. age differences between classmates in compulsory school) by examining tertiary education outcomes. We investigate whether there is evidence of relative age effects on university students enrolled in the Erasmus exchange program. We use administrative data on all exchange students who visited the Linnaeus University, in Sweden, in the four years since its founding. We find long-term evidence of RAEs—the youngest cohort students participate less often to the Erasmus exchange program than older cohort members.

In a simple model of waste management, we analyse the basic aspects of co-production in local public service delivery. Our results suggest that citizen involvement may lead to an expansion of the production possibility frontier, if waste sorting is made sufficiently convenient, relative to work, through an appropriate tax policy. However, by diverting time away from work, this policy may trigger a tax base erosion phenomenon. We find that the incentive power of the tax should be high (low) when local preferences for the service are very high (low) relative to local incomes. In the intermediate situation, two cases arise. First, when preferences are (not very) low relative to incomes, taxation should pursue resource collection purposes and be deprived of its incentive effects. Second, when preferences are middle-to-high relative to incomes, the trade-off between incentive provision and tax base erosion causes the optimal tax rate to first increase, then decrease.

This paper evaluates how a light-touch parenting program for parents of children below school entry age affects maternal family well-being. We analyze data from a randomized controlled trial focusing on non-disadvantaged parents. Overall, results show no short-term effects but a relatively large positive effect of the intervention on maternal family well-being in the medium term. With a 20- to 30-percent standard deviation, the effects appearing three years after treatment are relatively large. Mechanisms such as improvements in child behavior are further explored.

This paper studies the impact of marital status on job finding in China using the correspondence methodology. Fictitious CVs are sent to job advertisements through an online job board website, focusing on financial and accounting jobs, and the callback rate is measured. We vary the gender and marital status on otherwise identical CVs. The previous literature suggests that being married has a negative impact on the labor market outcomes of females, but a positive impact for males. In contrast, for the Chinese labor market, we do not find a significant effect of marital status on job finding for either gender.

A vertically integrated provider (VIP) initially has a duty to deal with a rival at unregulated upstream and downstream prices in a Bertrand-Nash framework. The duty to deal is subsequently terminated which enables the VIP to acquire the rival and serve as a two-product, downstream monopolist. We find that the refusal to deal is efficiency-enhancing, given that prices decrease while profits increase ex post .

This note emphasizes some flaws of the Panzar–Rosse H statistic to address market power. First, I show that it is more related to the pass-through rate than to a market power measure, which implies reconsidering its interpretation and use. Second, I show that the inclusion of other strategic variables rather than prices or quantities may lead to contradictory predictions about market power. Therefore, competition authorities should refrain from using the H statistic to rule out significant market power because it is not a well-behaved measure of the degree of competition.