Digital Commons Network^™

An Overview Of Nigeria's Economic Reform In-House Seminar On "Current Economic Reforms In Nigeria: The Case Of Deregulating The Downstream Petroleum Subsector", For Cbn Executive Staff, G.J. Donli

Economic and Financial Review

The article discusses the different reforms adopted by different administrations in addressing the crisis faced by our economy since 1960, most especially the current reforms being pursued by the Obasanjo administration. To achieve this, the rest of the paper is divided into four parts. Part two gives an Overview of the State of the Nigerian Economy with greater emphasis on the various economic reform programs put in place by successive governments to fine tune the economy to desired results.. The third part reviews the Current Economic Reform with particular emphasis on the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), while …

Employment Guarantee For Rural India, A Ganesh-Kumar, Srijit Mishra, Manoj Panda

Srijit Mishra

A report of a round-table discussion held in Mumbai in November 2004 on the proposed employment guarantee programme.

Poverty Rates Of Refugees And Immigrants, Christopher R. Bollinger, Paul Hagstrom

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

No abstract.

The Economic Impact Of Methamphetamine Use In Benton County, Arkansas, Jeffery T. Collins

Publications and Presentations

Methamphetamine use among the employed population is on the rise as general methamphetamine use increases. Many employers are unaware of the extent of the methamphetamine crisis and the harmful effects that employee methamphetamine use has on the firm. While methamphetamine use is associated with tremendous expenses for society in the form of direct health care, law enforcement, and environmental costs, this study focuses exclusively on the increased costs that firms bear as a result of the methamphetamine use of their employees. The Benton County Methamphetamine Task Force commissioned this project from the Center for Business and Economic Research in the …

Review Of Western Welfare In Decline: Globalization And Women's Poverty. Catherine Kingfisher. Reviewed By Silvia Borzutsky., Silvia Borzutzky

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

Book review of Catherine Kingfisher, Western Welfare in Decline: Globalization and Women's Poverty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. $49.95 hardcover, $21.95 papercover.

Who Survived The Titanic? A Logistic Regression Analysis, Lonnie K. Stevans, David Gleicher

Lonnie K. Stevans

A logistic regression analysis of an extensive data set on the Titanic passengers is presented which tests the likelihood that a Titanic passenger survived the accident--based upon passenger characteristics. The main finding is that underneath the strong overt preference afforded in the rescue by the authorities to women and children over men, there was a complex class determination of survival rates among men, on the one hand, and women and children, on the other. We hypothesize that the statistical interactions of gender and class are explained by two crucial decisions made by the ship’s authorities: 1. to encourage, and perhaps …

The Welfare Implications Of Increasing Disability Insurance Benefit Generosity, John Bound, Julie Berry Cullen, Austin Nichols, Lucie Schmidt

Economics: Faculty Publications

In order to evaluate whether workers are over- or under-insured through the Disability Insurance (DI) program, we develop a framework that allows us to simulate the benefits as well as the costs associated with marginal changes in payment generosity from a representative cross-sectional sample of the population. Under the assumption that individuals are reasonably risk averse, we find that the typical worker would value increased benefits somewhat above the average costs of providing them. However, whether the benefit increases tend to lower or raise utility when we average across all individuals in our sample is sensitive to assumptions that affect …

Front Matter, Journal Of Microfinance

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

No abstract provided.

Scoring Arrears At A Microlender In Bolivia, Mark Schreiner

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

Can scoring models help microlenders in poor countries as much as they have helped credit-card lenders in rich countries? This paper presents a scorecard that predicts the probability that loans from a microlender in Bolivia will have arrears of 15 days or more. Although arrears in microfinance depend on many factors difficult to include in scorecards, the paper shows that inexpensive, simple-to-collect data does have some predictive power. In micro-finance, scoring will not replace loan officers, but it can flag high-risk cases and act as a cross-check on loan officers' judgment.

Impact Of Microfinance Programs On Children's Education: Do The Gender Of The Borrower And The Delivery Model Matter?, Nathalie Holvoet

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

This article highlights the effects particular features of microfinance programs have on childhood education. Using data from a South India household survey, the article examines how microfinance impacts schooling and literacy, how credit enters the household, and who brings it in. Regression results show that, in the case of direct bank-borrower credit delivery, it does not matter whether credit enters the household through the mother or the father. However, large differences occur when mothers obtain credit through women's groups. Analysis indicates that combined financial and social-group intermediation leads to higher educational inputs and outputs, mainly for girls. Individual interviewis with …

Microleasing: The Grameen Bank Experience, Asif Dowla

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

Grameen Bank was the first microfinance institution (MFI) to introduce microleasing on a large scale. This paper provides a preliminary evaluation of Grameen's leasing program. Instead of providing a full-fledged impact assessment study, we examine the terms and conditions of the leasing program and evaluate its success in terms of outreach, repayment rate, and asset ownership.Analysis of program level data shows that the program is successful in terms of outreach and repayment performance. Through the program, poor men and women have become owners of power tillers, power looms, shallow machines, cellular phones, and even computers. The success of leasing suggests …

Vol. 06 No. 2 Journal Of Microfinance, Journal Of Microfinance

Journal of Microfinance / ESR Review

No abstract provided.

Appendix D: The Econometric Analysis Of The Benefits Of School-Based Mentoring, Amanda Bayer

Economics Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Examining The Relationship Between Community Residents' Economic Status And The Outcomes Of Community Development Programs, Christopher R. Larrison, Eric Hadley-Ives

The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare

In designing and implementing community development interventions the economic status of targeted participants is a demographic characteristic worth considering. The findings from this research indicate that even within the limited economies of rural Mexican villages there are variations in economic status that affect the ways in which the outcomes of community development programs are perceived. The poorest of the poor are likely to be less satisfied with development projects than those with average or better-off economic status. This is true whether a development project uses a bottomup approach or a top-down approach. The more participatory approach does not attenuate the …

Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together: Pricing In Anticommons Property Arrangements, Ben Depoorter, Sven Vanneste

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Recently, a new theory has drawn considerable attention in the literature on common property. A number of scholars have pointed to the danger of excessive propertization in the context of what are termed "anticommons" property regimes. Although this theory has found its way into numerous legal and economic applications, the empirical and cognitive foundations of the theory of fragmentation remain unexplored. Based on experimental data, this Article conducts an investigation into the social and personal processes involved in the anticommons.

The results confirm the theoretical proposition that anticommons deadweight losses increase with the degree of complementarity between individual parts and …

Pastoralist Livestock Marketing Behavior In Northern Kenya And Southern Ethiopia: An Analysis Of Constraints Limiting Off-Take Rates, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Winnie Luseno, Peter D. Little, Sharon M. Osterloh, Hussein Mahmoud, Getachu Gebru

Economics - All Scholarship

Pastoralists in East Africa's arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) regularly confront climatic shocks that plunge them into massive herd die-offs and loss of scarce wealth. One of the most puzzling features of pastoralist behavior in times of stress has been their relatively low and non-responsive rate of marketed off-take of animals when faced with likely losses to herd mortality. As Figure 1, from Desta (1999), finds in 17-year herd history data from Borana pastoralists in southern Ethiopia, mortality always exceeds net sales as a share of beginning period herd size, with the latter never exceeding three percent and moving hardly …

Probabilities As Similarity-Weighted Frequencies, Antoine Billot, Itzhak Gilboa, Dov Samet, David Schmeidler

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A decision maker is asked to express her beliefs by assigning probabilities to certain possible states. We focus on the relationship between her database and her beliefs. We show that, if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the belief formation process follows a simple formula: beliefs are a similarity-weighted average of the beliefs induced by each past case.

Estimated Age Effects In Athletic Events And Chess, Ray C. Fair

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Rates of decline are estimated using record bests by age for chess and for various track and field, road running, and swimming events. Using a fairly flexible functional form, the estimates show linear percent decline between age 35 and about age 70 and then quadratic decline after that. Chess shows much less decline than the physical activities. Rates of decline are generally larger for the longer distances, and for swimming they are larger for women than for men. An advantage of using best-performance records to estimate rates of decline is that the records are generally based on very large samples. …

Shelter Strategies For The Urban Poor: Idiosyncratic And Successful, But Hardly Mysterious, Jerry Kalarickal, Robert M. Buckley

Economics - All Scholarship

In 1986 the World Bank prepared a strategy for low-income housing in developing countries. This work grew out of the Bank's efforts to support the urban poor through an extensive housing assistance program that was launched by Bank President McNamara's speech on urban poverty. By that time, the Bank had provided more than $4 billion of such assistance, and had undertaken an extensive research effort to design support for that lending. Much has changed since that time, not only in the way the Bank provides shelter assistance, more than doubling its support since that review, but also in the changing …

The Past, Present And Future Of Community Reinvestment Act (Cra): A Historical Perspective, Akm Rezaul Hossain

Economics Working Papers

This paper takes a historical approach to understand the evolution of one of the most controversial banking regulations in recent history, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1978 and its effects on access to credit and banking services to community borrowers. The paper lays out the historical milieu of credit markets in the late seventies and describes the early justification of this legislation. The paper explores the implementation of the act through regulations on lending institutions and the effects of the regulations on depository lenders and community borrowers. Detailed description of the reactions to CRA regulations by different parties involved …

The Effects Of Malpractice Tort Reform On Defensive Medicine, Katherine D. Hennesy, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

Positive defensive medicine occurs when physicians order additional tests or procedures primarily to avoid malpractice liability. This paper shows the degree of defensive medicine occurring across states is related to the malpractice environment in the states. As the environment changes due to malpractice tort reform, defensive medicine practices also change. This paper shows the existence of positive defensive medicine and how it adds to total health care expenditures for head trauma victims in 23 states in 2000. Moreover, given different malpractice environments across states, we witness variations in defensive medicine practices leading to differences in health care expenditures.

Annual Income, Hourly Wages, And Identity Among Mexican Americans And Other Latinos, Patrick Leon Mason

Patrick L. Mason

This paper examines heterogeneity and income inequality among Hispanic Americans. Two processes that influence Hispanic heterogeneity include acculturation and labor market discrimination because of skin shade/phenotype. I focus on Hispanics because of their variation in phenotype, color, nativity, and language usage, and also because of their recent large-scale integration into a society that has been historically characterized by bi-polar racial categories that are putatively based on phenotype. This process provides a natural experiment for appraising the relative importance of acculturation, discrimination, and income inequality. I use data from two periods, 1979 and 1989, to determine the stability of identity formation …

A Preliminary Financial Analysis Of The Focus Hope Loan Fund, Kelly Derango

Reports

No abstract provided.

What Kind Of Labor Market Awaits Low-Income Workers?, Françoise Carré

New England Journal of Public Policy

This essay highlights changes in the context of the labor market for low-income people, particularly mothers. It briefly reviews labor market trends and policies. It then highlights the challenges faced by such workers. The essay argues for a shift in thinking and policy advocacy to encompass the world of work, and its domination by business imperatives and language, and thus better represent poor people’s concerns in the policy world.

Income, Work And Freedom, Philip L. Harvey

ExpressO

The ability of public policies to secure the economic and social rights recognized in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is proposed as a trumping supplement to the utility-maximization criterion of neo-classical welfare economics. Two progressive proposals for ending poverty and promoting personal development and freedom are then compared using this assessment criterion. The first proposal is that society guarantee everyone an unconditional basic income (BI) without imposing work requirements in exchange for the guarantee. The second proposal is that society use direct job creation to provide employment assurance (EA) for anyone who is unable to find decent work in …

Justification Of Antisocial Behavior, Wiliam Robert Walton

Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to further the study of conditional reasoning (CR) methodology to study personality. The direction of the expansion was two fold. First was to increase the content area of the study of aggressive personality by developing justification mechanisms (JMs) for antisocial behaviors. Second, was to determine the feasibility of using different reasoning-based tasks to measure JMs. Thus the development of a CR based reading comprehension task to measure antisocial JMs was undertaken. This study represents the preliminary investigation of the viability of this measure.

The Conditional Reasoning Reading Comprehension test (CR2C) was administered to 833 …

"Competing Conceptions Of Globalization" Revisited: Relocating The Tension Between World-Systems Analysis And Globalization Analysis, Thomas Clayton

Linguistics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Spanish Regiones And Sustainable Development: Measurement Of Advances From Rio To Johannesburg Through Multidimensional Synthetic Indexes, Fernando González-Laxe, Federico Martín Palmero

Fernando González-Laxe

No abstract provided.

Asking The Right Questions: Making A Case For Sexual Orientation Data, Lee Badgett

Lee Badgett

Currently, very little information is collected on sexual orientation in the nationally representative surveys that guide much of the investigation of social, economic, and health policy. Asking questions on sexual orientation will help to fulfill the mission of such surveys to measure outcomes both for the population as a whole and population sub-groups where a policy role is evident. In many cases, the stated purposes and current uses of survey data may even be seen to require the collection of personal characteristics such as sexual orientation. This paper will first outline the particular areas of research and policymaking that are …

Xenophobia And Distribution In France: A Politico-Economic Analysis, John E. Roemer, Karine Van Der Straeten

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Anti-immigrant feeling (xenophobia) among voters has been proposed as a key factor explaining why, in the 2002 French national election, Jean Le Pen’s National Front Party won second place. Here, we study the effect of anti-immigrant sentiments among voters on the equilibrium position of political parties on the economic issue, which we take to be the size of the public sector. We model political competition among three parties (Left, Right, and Extreme Right) on a two-dimensional policy space (public sector size, immigration issue) using the PUNE model. We calibrate the model to French data for the election years 1988 and …