Policies for promoting the in situ conservation of underutilized crop varieties include the provision of economic incentives to farmers for their market commercialization. Nevertheless, market participation could also have the counter-effect of favoring the cultivation of uniform commercial crop varieties and inducing the erosion of crop genetic diversity. The objective of this research was to ...

The enhancement of existing relationships is of pivotal importance to companies, since attracting new customers is known to be more expensive. Therefore, as part of their customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, many researchers have been analyzing “why” customers decide to switch. However, despite its practical relevance, few studies have investigated how companies can react to defecti...

Theory: Contemporary theories of presidential election outcomes, especially the economic voting and spatial issue voting models, are used to examine voter choice in the 1996 presidential election. Hypotheses: First, we look at the e ects of voter perceptions of the national economy on voter support for Clinton. Second we look at the e ects of candidate and voter positions on ideology and on a n...

This paper focuses on the youth’s decisions on household formation and human capital investment in further education or work experience and the factors influencing these choices. While previous studies limited their analyses to decisions concerning the living arrangements and the labour market, the choice set is extended here to take into account other alternatives. The decisions of either rema...

Virtually all U.S. states have now created voluntary cleanup programs (VCPs), offering liability relief and other incentives for responsible parties to remediate contaminated sites. We use a multinomial probit model to analyze participation in Oregon’s two VCPs. In contrast to previous VCP research, we find that these programs attract sites with significant contamination, not just clean ones. F...

Joint Decisions on Household Membership and Human Capital Accumulation of Youths The role of expected earnings and local markets This paper analyses the effects of expected earnings and local markets conditions on the behaviour of young adults with high school diplomas. Decisions to either remain in the parental home or form a new household are modelled jointly with those of either gaining work...

We introduce a new nonparametric regression estimator that uses prior information on regression shape in the form of a parametric model. In eeect, we nonparametrically encompass the parametric model. We obtain estimates of the regression function and its derivatives along with local parameter estimates that can be interpreted from within the parametric model. We establish the uniform consistenc...

We introduce a new nonparametric regression estimator that uses prior information on regression shape in the form of a parametric model. In e!ect, we nonparametrically encompass the parametric model. We obtain estimates of the regression function and its derivatives along with local parameter estimates that can be interpreted from within the parametric model. We establish the uniform consistenc...

BACKGROUND Estimated effects of breast-feeding on childhood health vary between studies, possibly due to confounding by baseline maternal and child characteristics. Possible time-dependent confounding has received little consideration. Our aim was to evaluate the impact of such confounding. METHODS We estimated the relationship between cumulative exclusive breast-feeding up to 6 months and wh...

Binary response regression is a useful technique for analyzing categorical data. Popular binary models use special link functions such as the logit or the probit link. We assume that the inverse link function H is a random member of the class of normal scale mixture cdfs. We propose three di erent models for this random H : (i) H is a nite scale mixture with a Dirichlet distribution prior on th...