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Articles 1 - 15 of 15
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Ranking And Selection Of Motor Carrier Safety Performance By Commodity, William C. Horrace, Thomas P. Keane
Ranking And Selection Of Motor Carrier Safety Performance By Commodity, William C. Horrace, Thomas P. Keane
Economics - All Scholarship
We use recent safety performance data to rank US motor carrier commodity segments (e.g., Tank segment or Produce segment) in terms of several driver-related, vehicle-related, and crash-related safety measures. Ranking and selection inference techniques are used to determine the best and worst performing commodity segments at the 95% confidence level. The results are mixed, however the Passenger segment is generally best, while the Produce, Intermodal, and Refrigerated segments tend to be worst.
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
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 …
November 2004, Syracuse Department Of Economics
November 2004, Syracuse Department Of Economics
Economics - All Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Shelter Strategies For The Urban Poor: Idiosyncratic And Successful, But Hardly Mysterious, Jerry Kalarickal, Robert M. Buckley
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 …
Educational Investments In A Dual Economy, Andrew G. Mude, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Cheryl R. Doss
Educational Investments In A Dual Economy, Andrew G. Mude, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Cheryl R. Doss
Economics - All Scholarship
This paper presents a simple two-period, dual economy model in which migration options may affect the informal financing of educational investments. When credit contracts are universally available and perfectly enforceable, spatially varied returns to human capital have no effect on educational investment patterns. But when financial markets are incomplete and informal mechanisms subject to imperfect contract enforcement must fill the breach, spatial inequality in infrastructure or other attributes that affect the returns to education create spatial differentiation in educational lending and consequently, in educational attainment. Although migration options can increase the returns to education, they can also choke off the …
On Ranking And Selection From Independent Truncated Normal Distributions, William C. Horrace
On Ranking And Selection From Independent Truncated Normal Distributions, William C. Horrace
Economics - All Scholarship
This paper develops probability statements and ranking and selection rules for independent truncated normal populations. An application to a broad class of parametric stochastic frontier models is considered, where interest centers on making probability statements concerning unobserved firm-level technical inefficiency. In particular, probabilistic decision rules allow subsets of firms to be deemed relatively efficient or inefficient at prespecified probabilities. An empirical example is provided.
Bayesian Herders: Asymmetric Updating Of Rainfall Beliefs In Response To External Forecasts, Travis J. Lybbert, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Winnie Luseno
Bayesian Herders: Asymmetric Updating Of Rainfall Beliefs In Response To External Forecasts, Travis J. Lybbert, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Winnie Luseno
Economics - All Scholarship
Temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world's poor. Model-based climate forecasts could benefit such populations, provided recipients use forecast information to update climate expectations. We test whether pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya update
their expectations in response to forecast information and find that they indeed do, albeit with a systematic bias towards optimism. In their systematic optimism, these pastoralists are remarkably like Wall Street's financial analysts and stockbrokers. If climate forecasts have limited value to these pastoralists, it is due to the flexibility of their livelihood rather than an inability to process forecast information.
Social Identity And Manipulative Interhousehold Transfers Among East African Pastoralists, Marieke Huysentruyt, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak
Social Identity And Manipulative Interhousehold Transfers Among East African Pastoralists, Marieke Huysentruyt, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak
Economics - All Scholarship
We model interhousehold transfers between nomadic livestock herders as the state-dependent consequence of individuals' strategic interdependence resulting from the existence of multiple, opposing externalities. A public good security externality among individuals sharing a social
(e.g., ethnic) identity in a potentially hostile environment creates incentives to band together. Self-interested interhousehold wealth transfers from wealthier herders to poorer ones may emerge endogenously within a limited wealth space as a means to motivate accompanying migration by the recipient. The distributional reach and size of the transfer are limited, however, by a resource appropriation externality related to the use of common property grazing lands. …
Entry Deterring Capacity In The Texas Lodging Industry, Michael Conlin, Vrinda Kadiyali
Entry Deterring Capacity In The Texas Lodging Industry, Michael Conlin, Vrinda Kadiyali
Economics - All Scholarship
We test whether capacity is used to deter entry and whether the amount invested in entry deterring capacity is related to market concentration and market presence. We use a unique dataset containing all lodging properties in Texas from 1991 through 1997. For each of the 3,830 properties, we have information on occupancy rate, number of rooms, location and ownership. This information is augmented by market level information such as tax rates, travel expenditures and retail wages. We find that there is higher investment in capacity relative to demand (i.e. idle capacity) in markets with larger Herfindahl index and by firms …
Social Interactions And The Health Insurance Choices Of The Elderly: Evidence From The Health And Retirement Study, Eldar Beiseitov, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran
Social Interactions And The Health Insurance Choices Of The Elderly: Evidence From The Health And Retirement Study, Eldar Beiseitov, Jeffrey D. Kubik, John R. Moran
Economics - All Scholarship
Using data from the 1998 Wave of the Health and Retirement Study, we examine the effect of social interactions on the health insurance choices of the elderly. We find that having more social interactions, as measured by contacts with friends and neighbors, reduces the likelihood of enrolling in a Medicare managed care plan relative to purchasing a medigap policy or having coverage through Medicare alone. Our estimates indicate that social networks are an important determinant of the health insurance choices of the elderly and provide suggestive evidence that "word-of-mouth" information sharing may have played a role in the preference of …
Bayesian Herders: Optimistic Updating Of Rainfall Beliefs In Response To External Forecasts, Travis J. Lybbert, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Winnie Luseno
Bayesian Herders: Optimistic Updating Of Rainfall Beliefs In Response To External Forecasts, Travis J. Lybbert, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Winnie Luseno
Economics - All Scholarship
Temporal climate risk weighs heavily on many of the world's poor. Model based climate forecasts could benefit such populations, provided recipients use forecast information to update climate expectations. We test whether pastoralists in southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya update their expectations in response to forecast information and find that they indeed do, albeit with a systematic bias towards optimism. In their systematic optimism, these pastoralists are remarkably like Wall Street's financial analysts and stockbrokers. If climate forecasts have limited value to these pastoralists, it is due to the flexibility of their livelihood rather than an inability to process forecast information.
April 2004, Syracuse Department Of Economics
April 2004, Syracuse Department Of Economics
Economics - All Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Habitat Destruction By Collectors Associated With Decreased Abundance Of Rock-Dwelling Lizards, Matthew J. Goode, William C. Horrace, Michael J. Sredl, Jeffrey M. Howland
Habitat Destruction By Collectors Associated With Decreased Abundance Of Rock-Dwelling Lizards, Matthew J. Goode, William C. Horrace, Michael J. Sredl, Jeffrey M. Howland
Economics - All Scholarship
Declines in biodiversity caused by habitat loss have been well documented on large spatial scales, however, effects of habitat loss on small scales have received little attention. Some common methods of reptile collection, primarily for commercial harvest, result in destruction of cracks, crevices, and other cool, moist microhabitats in desert rock outcrops. We developed a method for identifying habitat destruction associated with reptile collecting. We surveyed lightly and heavily disturbed areas near Phoenix, Arizona to determine if microhabitat loss caused by collectors was associated with decreased relative abundance of reptiles. Of four diurnal lizard species studied, relative abundance of two …
Life-Cycle Consumption And The Age-Adjusted Value Of Life, Thomas J. Kniesner, W. Kip Viscusi, James P. Ziliak
Life-Cycle Consumption And The Age-Adjusted Value Of Life, Thomas J. Kniesner, W. Kip Viscusi, James P. Ziliak
Economics - All Scholarship
Our research examines empirically the age pattern of the implicit value of life revealed from workers' differential wages and job safety pairings. Although aging reduces the number of years of life expectancy, aging can affect the value of life through an effect on planned life-cycle consumption. The elderly could, a priori, have the highest implicit value of life if there is a life-cycle plan to defer consumption until old age. We find that largely due to the age pattern of consumption, which is non-constant, the implicit value of life rises and falls over the lifetime in a way that the …
Does Fund Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? The Role Of Liquidity And Organization, Joseph Chen, Harrison G. Hong, Ming Huang, Jeffrey D. Kubik
Does Fund Size Erode Mutual Fund Performance? The Role Of Liquidity And Organization, Joseph Chen, Harrison G. Hong, Ming Huang, Jeffrey D. Kubik
Economics - All Scholarship
We investigate the effect of scale on performance in the active money management industry. We first document that fund returns, both before and after fees and expenses, decline with lagged fund size, even after adjusting these returns by various performance benchmarks. We then explore a number of potential explanations for this relationship. We find that this relationship is most pronounced among funds that have to invest in small and illiquid stocks, which suggests that the adverse effects of scale are related to liquidity. Controlling for its size, a fund's performance actually increases with the asset base of the other funds …