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Articles 1 - 13 of 13
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Purchasing Power Parity And Interest Parity In The Laboratory, Eric O'N. Fisher
Purchasing Power Parity And Interest Parity In The Laboratory, Eric O'N. Fisher
Economics
This paper analyses purchasing power parity and uncovered interest parity in the laboratory. It finds strong evidence that purchasing power parity, covered interest parity, and uncovered interest parity hold. Subjects are endowed with an intrinsically useless (green) currency that can be used to purchase another useless (red) currency. Green goods can be bought only with green currency, and red goods can be bought only with red currency. The foreign exchange markets are organized as call markets. In the treatment analysing purchasing power parity, the price of the red good varies. In a second treatment, the interest rate on red currency …
Do Crime-Related Expenditures Crowd Out Higher Education Expenditures?, Michael L. Marlow, Alden F. Shiers
Do Crime-Related Expenditures Crowd Out Higher Education Expenditures?, Michael L. Marlow, Alden F. Shiers
Economics
Fears about insufficient public education spending are often expressed in the area of higher education, whereby it is often argued that increases in expenditures on crime-related programs crowd out expenditures on higher education. This view suggests that higher education and crime-related programs directly compete for government expenditures so that what one program gains the other must lose as in a zero-sum game. A competing hypothesis is that higher crime-related spending leads to higher taxes or public debt issuance or to lower spending on programs other than higher education. We estimate a three-equation model of spending on crime-related programs, spending on …
Bureaucracy And Student Performance In Us Public Schools, Michael L. Marlow
Bureaucracy And Student Performance In Us Public Schools, Michael L. Marlow
Economics
This paper tests the hypothesis that monopoly power of school districts allows bureaucratic expansion and fosters poor academic performance in the public school system in California. Evidence indicates that monopoly power is positively associated with employment of administrators and teachers, and therefore supports the bureaucratic expansion hypothesis. While numbers of teachers do not influence performance measures, numbers of administrators are shown to positively affect performance - results that suggest that too many teachers, but too few administrators, are employed. While bureaucracy theory may explain the resource misallocation, other reasons might include rising public pressures on hiring teachers over administrators, spending …
Dollarization And The Mexican Labor Market, George J. Borjas, Eric O'N. Fisher
Dollarization And The Mexican Labor Market, George J. Borjas, Eric O'N. Fisher
Economics
This paper examines how dollarization affects the internal wage structure in the Mexican labor market, and alters the incentives of Mexican nationals to emigrate to the United States. A simple model shows that by adopting a fixed rate regime tied directly to the U.S. dollar, Mexican policy makers are in effect giving up “a degree of freedom” in their toolkit of policy remedies. If there are imperfections in the Mexican economy, such as downward wage rigidity, an adverse economic shock would generate more unemployment in a dollarized economy, further increasing the propensity of Mexican workers to migrate to the United …
An Analysis Of Second Time Around Bankruptcies Using A Split-Population Duration Model, Arindam Bandopadhyaya, Sanjiv Jaggia
An Analysis Of Second Time Around Bankruptcies Using A Split-Population Duration Model, Arindam Bandopadhyaya, Sanjiv Jaggia
Economics
A significant proportion of firms that reorganize under Chapter 11 file for a second Chapter 11 protection or liquidate. We use a "split-population" duration model that provides useful information regarding factors that could lead to a second bankruptcy. We find that the probability (hazard) of a firm re-entering bankruptcy is lower for firms that take a long time to reorganize, reduce their debt-to-assets ratio, do not divest, belong to an industry that has low capacity utilization and low demand growth. We also find that the probability of an average firm re-entering bankruptcy increases for about 4 years before declining.
Social Norms And The Time Allocation Of Women's Labor In Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Social Norms And The Time Allocation Of Women's Labor In Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Economics
This paper proposes that major determinants of allocation of women's time are social norms that regulate the economic activities of women. Our emphasis on norms contrasts with approaches that view time allocation as determined by household-level economic variables. Using data from Burkina Faso, we show that social norms significantly explain differences in patterns of time allocation between two ethnic groups: Mossi and Bwa. Econometric results show women from the two groups exhibiting different responses to changes in farm capital. Implications are that policies that foster changes in social norms may have more permanent effects on altering women's behavior.
Authority, Social Theories Of, Eduardo Zambrano
Authority, Social Theories Of, Eduardo Zambrano
Economics
Authority is a relation that exists between individuals, in which one does as indicated by another what he or she would not do in the absence of such indication. With this as background, the article presents the ‘premodern’ notions of authority developed by Plato, Aristotle, Machiavelli, and Weber; and then the perspective given by Arendt, according to which these notions are grounded in an ontological tradition whose time has passed. This leads to the point of view of Lukes, according to which it is unavoidable that multiple perspectives exist in the understanding of authority. These perspectives are associated with the …
Microenterprise Lending To Female Entrepreneurs: Sacrificing Economic Growth For Poverty Alleviation?, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Microenterprise Lending To Female Entrepreneurs: Sacrificing Economic Growth For Poverty Alleviation?, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Economics
This research compares the performance of female and male entrepreneurs in a microenterprise credit program in Guatemala. Previous research and field practice has suggested that targeting credit at female borrowers allows for more substantial increases in household welfare, but that male entrepreneurs may more aggressively expand enterprises when given access to credit. In this paper, we develop a model that shows that increases in value of home time during childbearing years for women may substantially account for gender differences in responses to credit access. Empirical results from Guatemalan survey data yield estimations consistent with the predictions from our model.
Group Lending Under Dynamic Incentives As A Borrower Discipline Device., Bruce Wydick
Group Lending Under Dynamic Incentives As A Borrower Discipline Device., Bruce Wydick
Economics
In recent years group lending has become an increasingly utilized tool for providing credit access to the poor in developing countries. Using empirical results from first-hand field research on Guatemalan borrowing groups, this paper develops a simple game-theoretic model of group lending. Results from the model show that through peer monitoring, the threat of group expulsion, and the safety net of intra-group credit insurance, group lending mitigates some risky investment behavior that would otherwise occur under an individual borrowing contract. The credible threat of social sanctions against group members who misallocate borrowed capital further reduces instances of such behavior.
Social Norms And The Time Allocation Of Women's Labor In Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Social Norms And The Time Allocation Of Women's Labor In Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Economics
This paper proposes that major determinants of allocation of women's time are social norms that regulate the economic activities of women. Our emphasis on norms contrasts with approaches that view time allocation as determined by household-level economic variables. Using data from Burkina Faso, we show that social norms significantly explain differences in patterns of time allocation between two ethnic groups: Mossi and Bwa. Econometric results show women from the two groups exhibiting different responses to changes in farm capital. Implications are that policies that foster changes in social norms may have more permanent effects on altering women's behavior.
Microenterprise Lending To Female Entrepreneurs: Sacrificing Economic Growth For Poverty Alleviation?, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Microenterprise Lending To Female Entrepreneurs: Sacrificing Economic Growth For Poverty Alleviation?, Michael Kevane, Bruce Wydick
Economics
This research compares the performance of female and male entrepreneurs in a microenterprise credit program in Guatemala. Previous research and field practice has suggested that targeting credit at female borrowers allows for more substantial increases in household welfare, but that male entrepreneurs may more aggressively expand enterprises when given access to credit. In this paper, we develop a model that seeks to clarify why we might expect gender differences in economic responses to credit access. In general, our empirical results reveal that gender differences in economic responses to credit access are surprisingly small. However, we find that female entrepreneurs in …
Evolving Tenure Rights And Agricultural Intensification In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray
Evolving Tenure Rights And Agricultural Intensification In Southwestern Burkina Faso, Michael Kevane, Leslie C. Gray
Economics
Popular and official representations of the environment in Burkina Faso present soils as fragile and potentially subject to catastrophic collapse in fertility. In the cotton growing zone of southwestern Burkina Faso, researchers and policy makers attribute changes in land cover and land quality to population growth. This paper presents evidence questioning the dominant "population-degradation narrative" as applied to Burkina. We find that farmers are intensifying their production systems. While population has led to land scarcity, farmers are responding to both the resulting uncertainty in land rights and reductions in soil quality by intensifying the production process. Investments are used both …
The Regulatory History Of A New Technology: The Electromagnetic Telegraph, Alexander J. Field
The Regulatory History Of A New Technology: The Electromagnetic Telegraph, Alexander J. Field
Economics
Attitudes toward economic regulation in the United States have, since colonial times, been influenced by an almost schizophrenic oscillation between dirigiste and laissez-faire ideology. The laissez-faire tradition maintains that within a legal system providing elementary guarantees against force and fraud, business enterprise should be allowed the maximum possible freedom. The dirigiste tradition, on the other hand, recommends government intervention in a variety of situations, including those where the social return may exceed the private rate of return to research and development spending, in cases of natural monopoly, or where a firm has erected barriers to entry that give it effective …