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Financial inclusion is measured by the number of people who use the formal financial system and banks in particular. Limited access to formal banking services and the existence of unbanked households is a main policy concern. The authors evaluate how the use of prepaid (reloadable) debit cards by unbanked households affects financial inclusion and specifically the potential for these households to participate in the formal financial system and open a bank account.

The authors apply matching models to analyze survey data from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation National Survey of the Unbanked and Underbanked Households from 2009 to 2019 and evaluate how prepaid cards use affects plans to open a bank account.

Unbanked households who use prepaid cards are 5% less likely to open a bank account compared to the matched nonusers of prepaid cards. In addition, prepaid card users are 12% more likely to use nonbanks to transfer money/transact online and 18% more likely to have obtained loans from alternative financial services providers compared to the matched unbanked nonusers of prepaid debit cards.

No previous work has estimated the causal impact of use of prepaid cards on financial inclusion.

Disruptions at ports may destroy the planned ship schedules profoundly, which is an imperative operation problem that shipping companies need to overcome. This paper attempts to help shipping companies cope with port disruptions through recovery scheduling.

This paper studies the ship coping strategies for the port disruptions caused by severe weather. A novel mixed-integer nonlinear programming model is proposed to solve the ship schedule recovery problem (SSRP). A distributionally robust mean conditional value-at-risk (CVaR) optimization model was constructed to handle the SSRP with port disruption uncertainties, for which we derive tractable counterparts under the polyhedral ambiguity sets.

The results show that the size of ambiguity set, confidence level and risk-aversion parameter can significantly affect the optimal values, decision-makers should choose a reasonable parameter combination. Besides, sailing speed adjustment and handling rate adjustment are effective strategies in SSRP but may not be sufficient to recover the schedule; therefore, port skipping and swapping are necessary when multiple or longer disruptions occur at ports.

Since the port disruption is difficult to forecast, we attempt to take the uncertainties into account to achieve more meaningful results. To the best of our knowledge, there is barely a research study focusing on the uncertain port disruptions in the SSRP. Moreover, this is the first paper that applies distributionally robust optimization (DRO) to deal with uncertain port disruptions through the equivalent counterpart of DRO with polyhedral ambiguity set, in which a robust mean-CVaR optimization formulation is adopted as the objective function for a trade-off between the expected total costs and the risk.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the evolution of the rules of origin (RoO) of Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP).

This analysis is done by comparing them with those of existing FTAs/EPAs of ASEAN with other RCEP member countries, and also examining the impact of recent mega-FTAs/EPAs, such as TPP11 and Japan-EU EPA, in which some of the member countries participated.

RCEP holds great significance in that it connects Japan and China and Japan and South Korea, which previously have not had any EPAs/FTAs, transforms this massive economic sphere from one with minutely divided and differing RoO under ASEAN plus FTAs to one that is seamlessly connected with those of having evolved into the unified RoO under RCEP, and realizes ideal production networks in Asia.

This paper makes it clear that RCEP, while based on ASEAN plus FTAs, reflects progressive provisions of recent mega-FTAs/EPAs, and adopts simpler and more systematic rules. These provisions limit the distortive effect on trade, realize ideal production networks in Asia, and are appropriate as uniform RoO connecting networks across this massive economic sphere. It also points out that there are provisions that have not been introduced and those that are considered to have been incomplete as a result of negotiations, and the possibility of evolving into more ideal RoO by utilizing the system for revisions established under the agreement.

This study aims to estimate the quality-adjusted changes in residential mobile consumer prices by controlling for the changes in the relevant service characteristics and quality, in a case study on Hungary between 2015 and 2021; compare the results with changes measured by the traditionally calculated official telecommunications price index of the Statistical Office; and discuss separating the hedonic price changes from the effect of a specific government intervention that occurred in Hungary, namely, the significant reduction in the value added tax rate (VAT) levied on internet services.

Since the price of commercial mobile offers does not directly reflect the continuous improvements in service characteristics and functionalities over time, the price changes need to be adjusted for changes in quality. The authors use hedonic regression analysis to address this issue.

The results show significant hedonic price changes over the observed seven-year period of over 30%, which turns out to be primarily driven by the significant developments in the comprising service characteristics and not the VAT policy change.

This paper contributes to the literature on hedonic price analyses on complex telecommunications service plans and enhances this methodology by using weights and analysing the content-related features of the mobile packages.

The global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007–2008 had far-reaching consequences for the global economy, triggering widespread economic turmoil. We use the event-study method to investigate whether investors priced the effect of significant events before the Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy in European and Asia-Pacific banks. Abnormal returns on the event days range from −4.32% to 5.03% in Europe and −5.13% to 6.57% in Asia-Pacific countries. When Lehman Brothers went bankrupt on September 15, 2008, abnormal returns averaged the lowest at −4.32% in Europe and −5.13% in Asia-Pacific countries. The significant abnormal returns show that Lehman Brothers' collapse was a turning point, and investors paid attention to the precrisis events as warning signs of the oncoming crisis.

In a recent quasi-experimental study, the effects of a large German public startup support measure entitled “EXIST – Business Startup Grant” (EGS) on a variety of outcomes were determined, but without examining which factors are responsible for these program effects. The present study investigates the contribution of several factors to the success of the program in promoting product development and business planning.

By means of a two-wave panel design and fixed-effects panel regressions, evidence is generated that provides unique insights into the effect mechanisms of a publicly funded startup grant. The data for the study come from the program monitoring of the startup support measure.

Several factors were identified that significantly drive the effects of the program on the product development and business planning stages, namely the program-induced improvement of the skills of the startup team, intensification of cooperation with pilot customers/users, increase in the degree of networking and advice/support from third parties and the effort put into business plan preparation.

Startup support programs are a crucial aspect of technology and innovation policies, which are often evaluated in order to find out whether they generate effects. Assessing whether a program is effective or not, however, does not usually allow specific recommendations on how to improve the measure to be developed. Further information on the mechanisms of intervention is needed for this purpose. The present study takes up on this idea and provides this information for a specific type of public startup support measure.

In this chapter, we consider the possibility that a firm may use costly resources to improve its technical efficiency. Results from static analyses imply that technical efficiency is determined by the configuration of factor prices. A dynamic model of the firm is developed under the assumption that managerial skill contributes to technical efficiency. Dynamic analysis shows that the firm can never be technically efficient if it maximizes profits, the steady state is always inefficient, and it is locally stable. In terms of empirical analysis, we show how likelihood-based methods can be used to uncover, in a semi-non-parametric manner, important features of the inefficiency-management relationship using a flexible functional form accounting for the endogeneity of inputs in a production function. Managerial compensation can also be identified and estimated using the new techniques. The new empirical methodology is applied in a data set previously analyzed by Bloom and van Reenen (2007) on managerial practices of manufacturing firms in the UK, US, France and Germany.