Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Change In Sraffa's Philosophical Thinking, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

The availability of Piero Sraffa's unpublished manuscripts and correspondence at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, has made it possible to begin to set out a more complete account of Sraffa's philosophical thinking than previously could be done with only his published materials and the few comments and suggestions made by others about his ideas, especially in connection with their possible impact on Ludwig Wittgenstein's later thinking. This makes a direct rather than indirect examination of Sraffa's philosophical thinking possible, and also shifts the focus from his relationship to Wittgenstein to his own thinking per se. I suggest that the previous …

Identity Problems (An Interview With John B. Davis), Thomas Wells, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

In this interview, Professor Davis discusses the evolution of his career and research interests as a philosopher-economist and gives his perspective on a number of important issues in the field. He argues that historians and methodologists of economics should be engaged in the practice of economics, and that historians should be more open to philosophical analysis of the content of economic ideas. He suggests that the history of recent economics is a particularly fruitful and important area for research exactly because it is an open-ended story that is very relevant to understanding the underlying concerns and concepts of contemporary economics. …

International R&D Transfer And Technical Efficiency: Evidence From Panel Study Using Stochastic Frontier Analysis, Miao Wang, M. C. Sunny Wong

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

We study the effect of foreign research and development (R&D) transferred through imports and foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic technical efficiency using stochastic frontier analysis. Unbalanced panel results from a 77-country sample over 1986–2007 show that FDI- and imports-transferred foreign R&D have a significant impact on domestic country’s technical efficiency. Furthermore, we observe a complementarity between FDI-transferred R&D and domestic human capital. In other words, the domestic country needs to obtain a threshold level of human capital to benefit from FDI-transferred R&D. Other macro conditions such as infrastructure, political stability, and urbanization also help to improve the technical efficiency …

Size Of Home, Home Ownership, And The Mortgage Interest Deduction, Andrew Hanson

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This paper offers an empirical test of the effect of the mortgage interest deduction (MID) on both the extensive (own vs. rent) and intensive (size of home) housing purchase margins. Using state level differences in MID availability to identify, I examine this relationship using standard ordinary least squares, instrumental variables, regression discontinuity, and sample selection estimation techniques. I find the MID to be responsible for a 10.9–18.4% increase in the size of home purchased, but that no relationship exists between the MID and home ownership. These results imply an elasticity of home size with respect to changes in user cost …

The Geographical Dimension Of The Development Effects Of Natural Resources, Abdur Chowdhury, Fabrizio Carmignani

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

We study the contribution of natural resource intensity to long-term development along different dimensions: per-capita income, institutional quality, and education. We allow natural resources to affect these dimensions differently in different regions of the world. The evidence suggests that natural resources are generally a positive driver of development, but in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) their contribution is almost negligible, if not even negative. We explain these cross-regional differences with the fact that in SSA more than anywhere else large resource endowments are combined with a particularly bad disease environment. Some historical evidence and formal econometric results support this hypothesis.

Examining Megachurch Growth: Free Riding, Fit, And Faith, Joseph P. Daniels, Marc Von Der Ruhr

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose – Megachurches are thriving in religious markets at a time when Americans are asserting their ability as consumers of religious products to engage in religious switching. The apparent success of megachurches, which often provide a low cost and low commitment path by which religious refugees may join the church, seems to challenge Iannocconne's theory that high commitment churches will thrive while low commitment churches will atrophy. This paper aims to investigate this issue.

Design/methodology/approach – This paper employs a signaling model to illustrate the strategy and organizational forms megachurches employ to indicate a match between what the church produces …

Subsidizing Religious Participation Through Groups: A Model Of The “Megachurch” Strategy For Growth, Joseph P. Daniels, Marc Von Der Ruhr

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

Either despite or because of their non-traditional approach, megachurches have grown significantly in the United States since 1980. This paper models religious participation as an imperfect public good which, absent intervention, yields suboptimal participation by members from the church’s perspective. Megachurches address this problem in part by employing secular-based group activities to subsidize religious participation that then translates into an increase in the attendees’ religious investment. This strategy not only allows megachurches to attract and retain new members when many traditional churches are losing members but also results in higher levels of an individual’s religious capital. As a result, the …

Warren J. Samuels (1933-2011), John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This paper examines the research and career of the late Warren J. Samuels (1933-2011), an influential institutionalist economist in the Wisconsin John Commons tradition and well-known historian and methodologist of economics. It discusses four main positions Samuels developed and held regarding the history of economic thought as intellectual history, the theory of economic policy, methodological pluralism, and the invisible hand doctrine. Among the views considered are: his matrix approach to meaningfulness, his characterization of intellectual systems, his emphasis on the centrality of the social order, his theory of economic policy as a neglected subject, his discourse analysis of language, his …

The Ecological And Civil Mainsprings Of Property: An Experimental Economic History Of Whalers’ Rules Of Capture, Bart J. Wilson, Taylor Jaworski, Karl E. Schurter, Andrew Smyth

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This article uses a laboratory experiment to probe the proposition that property emerges anarchically out of social custom. We test the hypothesis that whalers in the 18th and 19th centuries developed rules of conduct that minimized the sum of the transaction and production costs of capturing their prey, the primary implication being that different ecological conditions led to different rules of capture. Ceteris paribus, we find that simply imposing two different types of prey is insufficient to observe two different rules of capture. Another factor is essential, namely, as Samuel Pufendorf theorized over 300 years ago, that the members of …

Does The Stock Market's Equity Risk Premium Respond To Consumer Confidence Or Is It The Other Way Around?, Abdur Chowdhury, Barry K. Mendelson

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

The increase in the equity risk premium during the 2007- 2009 Great Recession and the aging of the baby boomers in the United States have led analysts and financial industry experts to believe that risk aversion among stock investors has moved to a more-permanently higher range. If so, stocks would cease being an attractive asset class to be investing in for the future. In the past few years private investors have by and large shunned equities, just when stocks have become attractively priced and offer long-term potential for superior above-historical-average returns. Our empirical findings show that the recent increase in …

Foreword To Microfoundations Reconsidered: The Relationship Of Micro And Macroeconomics In Historical Perspective, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Drive ‘Til You Qualify: Credit Quality And Household Location, Andrew Hanson, Kurt Schnier, Geoffrey K. Turnbull

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

A deeper understanding of the credit-sorting process is essential when considering the extent to which home foreclosures are driven by price contagion or an underlying spatial pattern of mortgage quality. Adapting household location theory, we find that credit constrained households follow “drive-'til-you-qualify” behavior leading to rising credit quality with distance from the CBD while unconstrained households exhibit declining credit quality. Individual level mortgage loan-to-income data for the 100 largest MSAs show credit constrained behavior either throughout the urban area or concentrated in the suburbs. Meta analysis of the credit sorting estimates identify MSA characteristics associated with each pattern.