Digital Commons Network^™

Markets, Competition And Efficiency, Shyam Sunder

Shyam Sunder

No abstract provided.

Quarterly Gdp Estimates For Selected South Asian Economies, Safdar Khan

Safdar Khan

No abstract provided.

The Power Of A Promise: Education And Economic Renewal In Kalamazoo, Michelle Miller-Adams

Michelle Miller-Adams

In the first comprehensive account of the Kalamazoo Promise, Michelle Miller-Adams addresses both the potential and challenges inherent in place-based universal scholarship programs and explains why this unprecedented experiment in education-based economic renewal is being emulated by scores of cities and towns around the nation.

A Tiny Heart Beating: Student-Edited Legal Periodicals In Good Ol' Europe, Luigi Russi, Federico Longobardi

Luigi Russi

This paper has a twofold aim: to analyze the possible opportunities disclosed by the observed growth of student- dited law reviews in Europe and to propose an innovative model of student participation to legal publication.

The first part explores the phenomenon of student-edited law reviews in the U.S., focusing on its recognized educational benefits. Among others, it is observed that participation in student-edited law reviews might promote greater scholarly maturity among J.D. students, who might in turn be better equipped for a career in the academia after finishing law school, in comparison to their same-age European peers. Hence, there follows …

Do School Lunches Contribute To Childhood Obesity?, Diane Schanzenbach

Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach

This paper assesses whether school lunches contribute to childhood obesity. I employ two methods to isolate the causal impact of school lunches on obesity. First, using panel data, I find that children who consume school lunches are more likely to be obese than those who brown bag their lunches even though they enter kindergarten with the same obesity rates. Second, I leverage the sharp discontinuity in eligibility for reduced-price lunch to compare children just above and just below the eligibility cutoff. Students are more likely to be obese, and weigh more if they are income-eligible for reduced price school lunches.

Ecosystems As Natural Assets, Edward Barbier

Edward B Barbier

No abstract provided.

The Graphic Novel As A Choice Of Weapons, Tammy Horn

Tammy Horn

In the late 1930s, the photographer Gordon Parks arrived in Washington, DC, to work with Roy Stryker, director of the Farm Security Administration. Parks' first assignment was to tour the nation's capital, a city still governed by Jim Crow laws. Stryker locked Parks' camera in a closed and then bade the young black man adieu, with the expectation Parks would not return for a week.

Valuing Environmental Quality: A Space-Based Strategy (Forthcoming), David Clark, John Carruthers

David E. Clark

This paper develops and applies a space-based strategy for overcoming the general problem of getting at the demand for non-market goods. It focuses specifically on evaluating one form of environmental quality, distance from EPA designated environmental hazards, via the single-family housing market in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. A spatial two stage hedonic price analysis is used to: (1) estimate the marginal implicit price of distance from air release sites, hazardous waste generators, hazardous waste handlers, superfund sites, and toxic release sites; and (2) estimate a series of demand functions describing the relationship between the price of distance …

Central Bank Reaction Functions During The Interwar Gold Standard: A View From The Periphery, Kirsten Wandschneider

Kirsten Wandschneider

The years between the two World Wars were ones of economic turmoil and crisis. The inter-war gold standard, created as an attempt to rebuild the pre-1914 gold standard, lasted a mere six years from 1925–1931 and failed to generate economic growth and prosperity. Many scholars have attempted to explain the fragility of the inter-war gold standard, focusing on different aspects of the regime, such as structural problems within the system, gold imbalances, the lack of an international hegemonic power, persistent deflation, and the changing social and political structures in the inter-war years. One particular area of focus with regard to …

Estimated State And Local Fiscal Effects Of The Nurse Family Partnership Program, Timothy Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

This short paper estimates the state and local fiscal benefits of the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP) program. NFP provides nurse home visiting services to low-income first-time mothers. In addition to social benefits, NFP provides state and local fiscal benefits by reducing costs of social services, welfare, and crime, and increasing tax receipts due to increased earnings of mothers and former child participants when they grow up. Based on previous studies, this paper estimates that the present value, in 2007 dollars, of these state and local fiscal benefits is a little over $15,000 per NFP case.

Trade And Natural Resources, Edward Barbier

Edward B Barbier

No abstract provided.

Trade Liberalization And Unemployment: Evidence From Indian States, Rana Hasan, Devashish Mitra, Priya Ranjan

Priya Ranjan

A widely held view among the public is that trade liberalization increases unemployment. In this paper we use state-level data on unemployment rates and trade protection from India to examine what the data say. We find little evidence to support the view that unemployment rises with trade liberalization. On the contrary, there is evidence that unemployment, especially urban unemployment, declines with trade liberalization in states with more flexible labor markets. Urban unemployment also declines with liberalization in states with a large employment share in net exporter industries. We additionally find a positive impact of trade liberalization on urban wages. These …

Substance Or Mere Technique? A Precis On Good Faith Performance In England, France And Germany, Luigi Russi

Luigi Russi

This paper attempts to offer a concise discussion of good faith performance and other functionally equivalent doctrines in the laws of England, Germany and France. The study’s goal is that of appraising the consistency of existing differences. More specifically, of whether they relate merely to technique - not being paralleled by diverging final outcomes - or whether the rift is deeper and goes to the very substance of the approach to the solution of similar practical problems. For this purpose, the work first shows the close connection between good faith performance (of contractual obligations) and good faith enforcement (of contractual …

Capitalized Amenity Value Of Urban Wetlands: A Hedonic Property Price Approach To Urban Wetlands In Perth, Sorada Tapsuwan, Gordon Ingram, Michael Burton, Donna Brennan

Sorada Tapsuwan

Up to 60 per cent of potable water supplied to Perth, Western Australia, is extracted from the groundwater system that lies below the northern part of the metropolitan area. Many of the urban wetlands are groundwater-dependent and excessive groundwater extraction and climate change have resulted in a decline in water levels in the wetlands. In order to inform decisions on conserving existing urban wetlands, it is beneficial to be able to estimate the economic value of the urban wetlands. Applying the Hedonic Property Price approach to value urban wetlands, we found that distance to the nearest wetland and the number …

Cross-Validated Bandwidths And Significance Testing, Christopher Parmeter, Zhiyuan Zheng, Patrick Mccann

Christopher F. Parmeter

The link between the magnitude of a bandwidth and the relevance of the corresponding covariate in a regression has recently garnered theoretical attention. Theory suggests that variables included erroneously in a regression will be automatically removed when bandwidths are selected via cross-validation procedure. However, the connections between the bandwidths of the variables that are smoothed away and the insights from these same variables when properly tested for statistical significance have not been previously studied. This paper proposes a variety of simulation exercises to examine the relative performance of both cross-validated bandwidths and individual and joint tests of significance. We focus …

The Impact Of A Phased Retirement Program: A Case Study, Marta Lachowska

Marta Lachowska

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Natural Resources In Economic Development, Edward Barbier

Edward B Barbier

No abstract provided.

Analysis Of Kiren Sales Corporation’S Survey Data, Safdar Khan

Safdar Khan

No abstract provided.

Financial Sector Reforms And Banking Sector Soundness: A Multivariate Evaluation, Safdar Khan

Safdar Khan

No abstract provided.

Anemia In Low-Income Countries Is Unlikely To Be Addressed By Economic Development Without Additional Programs, Sebastian Linnemayr, Harold Alderman

Sebastian Linnemayr

Although governments may decline to invest in iron fortification or supplementation influenced by the view that income growth will address the problem, the data do not support this view. Looking at the rates of anemia among children and adult women across 40 Demographic and Health Surveys from 32 countries, this study found that although anemia rates do decrease as income increases, the decrease is modest. Indeed, overall anemia rates decline roughly a quarter as fast as income increases and at only half the speed at which rates of underweight decline.

How Do The Effects Of Local Growth On Employment Rates Vary With Initial Labor Market Conditions?, Timothy Bartik

Timothy J. Bartik

This paper examines how the effects of increased employment growth on a metropolitan area's employment to population ratio varies with the initial tightness of the metropolitan area's labor market. This examination is relevant to evaluating the benefits of local economic development policies in different metropolitan areas. Much of the benefits of such policies are in higher employment rates. The empirical estimates suggest that the effectiveness of employment growth in increasing the employment to population ratio is lower in metropolitan areas with "tight" labor markets. In addition, some estimates suggest that growth has the greatest long-run effects on the employment to …

The Effects Of Bargaining On Market Outcomes: Evidence From Buyer And Seller Specific Estimates, Subal Kumbhakar, Christopher Parmeter

Christopher F. Parmeter

In this paper we examine wage dispersion in labor markets across currently employed workers. We argue that differences in the potential productivity of a match (typically assumed to be known in the previous literature) generates a surplus between the minimum wage the worker is willing to accept and the maximum wage the firm is willing to offer for the job. Existence of this surplus leads to wage dispersion due to negotiating over the amounts extracted by each agent. Our objective is to estimate the surplus extracted by each firm-worker pair and the effect of the net extracted surplus on the …

Older Workers Access To Employer-Sponsored Retiree Health Insurance, 2000-2006, Alice Zawacki, Christine Eibner, Elaine Zimmerman

Christine Eibner

No abstract provided.

What Drives Long-Run Biodiversity Change? New Insights From Combining Economics, Paleoecology And Environmental History, Nick Hanley, Dugald Tinch, Konstantinos Angelopoulos, Althea Davies, Edward Barbier, Fiona Watson

Edward B Barbier

No abstract provided.

Has Globalization Increased Australian Inequality?, Noel Gaston, Gulasekaran Rajaguru

Gulasekaran Rajaguru

No abstract provided.

Imposing Economic Constraints On Nonparametric Regression: Survey, Implementation And Extensions, Daniel Henderson, Christopher Parmeter

Christopher F. Parmeter

Economic conditions such as convexity, homogeneity, homotheticity, and monotonicity are all important assumptions or consequences of assumptions of economic functionals to be estimated. Recent research has seen a renewed interest in imposing constraints in nonparametric regression. We survey the available methods in the literature, discuss the challenges that present themselves when empirically implementing these methods, and extend an existing method to handle general nonlinear constraints. A heuristic discussion on the empirical implementation for methods that use sequential quadratic programming is provided for the reader, and simulated and empirical evidence on the distinction between constrained and unconstrained nonparametric regression surfaces is …

Is Financial Innovation A Still Relevant Issue?, Paola Bongini, Luisa Anderloni

Paola Bongini

In this study we investigate the effects of financial innovation on performance and asset growth for a sample of EU large banks. The novel contribution of this study is the use of a unique dataset that identifies banks’ attitude towards innovation across time and the level of information conveyed to market participants in order to understand: a) to what extent, in recent years, banks have focused their attention on financial innovation; b) to what extent an innovating attitude translates into greater asset growth and higher profitability;

The Outlook For U.S. – China Textile And Apparel Trade In 2009: From The Trade Policy Perspective, Sheng Lu

Sheng Lu

Despite the low ebb in trade volume, the year 2009 could be a golden opportunity for the textile and apparel industry both in the United States and China to reform and change. The U.S. textile industry at present urgently needs to figure out some new business models and explore more overseas markets to meet the challenges of lessening domestic demand. On the other hand, the task for the Chinese is to further reduce reliance on exports while absorbing the production capacity of the industry by stimulating more domestic consumption. With the economic interests between the U.S. and Chinese textile and …

Medicare Savings Programs: Analyzing Options For Expanding Eligibility, Baoping Shang, Stephen Zuckerman, Timothy Waidmann

Baoping Shang

The Medicare Savings Programs (MSPs) are designed to provide financial assistance to Medicare beneficiaries who do not qualify for full Medicaid coverage. This paper considers changes in eligibility that would better align MSP program rules with those related to receiving low-income subsidies for the Medicare Part D drug benefit. These changes would make more people eligible for the MSPs and could encourage greater participation; similar changes were incorporated in recently passed legislation. Our analysis, based on 2006 data from the Health and Retirement Study, shows there is a trade-off between making larger numbers of beneficiaries eligible by eliminating resource requirements …

Pricing Nature: Cost-Benefit Analysis And Environmental Policy-Making, Edward Barbier, Nick Hanley

Edward B Barbier

No abstract provided.