Growth and Development Commons^™

Challenges Facing Female Leaders Of Color In U.S. Higher Education, Fredah Mainah, Vernita Perkins

International Journal of African Development

Despite a myriad of challenges including the slow pace of rising to the top and the low compositional diversity in most university leadership, women of color are becoming increasingly visible in higher education leadership. This paper investigates the phenomena of the growing numbers of women of color in top positions, with the aim of debunking the myth of the invisibility of black women in leadership positions in higher education. The findings indicate that although women in the U.S. earn the majority of postsecondary degrees and 26.4% of college presidents are women, with 4.5% of them being women of color, women …

International Journal Of African Development, Vol. 2, Issue 2

International Journal of African Development

Complete issue of International Journal of African Development, Volume 2, Issue 2 - Spring 2015.

The Nexus Of Financial Deepening, Economic Growth, And Poverty: The Case Of Pakistan, Abdur Rehman Aleemi, Muhammad Azam

Business Review

This study investigates the nexus of financial development, economic growth, and poverty for Pakistan over a prolonged period of time, 1960- 2012. Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL)-Bounds testing approach to co integration and Unrestricted Error Correction Model (UECM)along with VECM Granger causality have been applied to examine the long-run dynamic relationship among financial development, economic development and poverty. For that purpose, we have developed two models and adopted a new and relatively strong proxy for financial development. The results suggest that financial development negatively affects both long-run and short-run economic growth. However, financial development is found to be positively affecting per …

Does Esg Investment Enhance Investment Returns, Ca. Hemlata Chelawat, I.V. Trivedi

Business Review

Over the past decade, Environmental, Social and Governance Investment or ESG Investment has become a mainstream investment approach in the investment community around the world, especially in the US and Europe. There is increasing evidence from academic and practitioner research around the world that better ESG performance by companies leads to reduction in risks, improvement in financial performance, higher stock market valuations and hence, enhanced returns for investors investing in stocks of such companies. Hence, incorporating ESG factors can lead to better informed and improved investment decisions. This has led to development of ESG indices and fonds, to enable investors …

Mountain Monitor - 1st Quarter 2015, Kenan Fikri, Siddharth Kulkarni

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

This analysis of employment, output, unemployment, and house prices finds that the 10 major metropolitan areas of the Mountain West, despite significant economic headwinds, weathered the first quarter of 2015 with robust economic growth. Eight of the region’s 10 major metro areas advanced on all four metrics of economic performance, and the remaining two metro areas slipped only on a single front.

The national economic slowdown that arrived in early 2015 did not entirely bypass the Mountain West, but the region resisted the drag better than any other. As U.S. economic output contracted by 0.3 percent in the first quarter, …

Making The Invisible Challenges And Opportunities Visible, Maureen A. Scully, Lisa Deangelis, Katie Bates

Emerging Leaders Program Team Projects

The 41 fellows in the 2015 Emerging Leaders Program worked with community partners to generate the theme, “Making the Invisible Challenges and Opportunities Visible: Collaborative leadership for economic and social well-being."

The projects provide fellows an opportunity to practice elements of collaborative leadership in peer-led teams working with multiple stakeholders. The projects focus on civic engagement, building a leadership base for Greater Boston that is ready to tackle the big challenges that ensure the broader economic and social well-being of the region. The project sponsor with whom each team works is a nonprofit or governmental organization with big goals. Each …

The Great Recession And U.S. Safety Nets: The Case Of Temporary Assistance To Needy Families (Tanf), Vicky Albert

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

The Great Recession

• Officially lasted from December 2007 to June 2009
• Most severe recession since Great Depression
• In the first quarter of 2012 about 30% of jobless workers had been unemployed for a year or longer
• From 2007 to 2009, real personal income per capita fell by 8.3 percentage points and many individuals dropped from the labor force

The Safety Nets for Families with Children

• Unemployment Insurance
• Medicaid
• Earned Income Tax Credit
• Supplemental Security Income (SSI)
• Subsidized Housing
• Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Program (TANF)

A Royal Problem: Planning Induced Supply Constraints In London, Elizabeth P. Armstrong

Lawrence University Honors Projects

We explore the impact of regulatory supply constraints on house price levels following boom and bust periods in London. We hypothesize that when regulatory restrictiveness increases during a boom period, house prices will be higher in the following year compared to house prices in less restricted areas. We also hypothesize that when regulatory restrictiveness increases during a bust period, house prices will be lower in the following year compared to house prices in less restricted areas. We empirically test our hypothesis using a multilevel mixed-effects model with a panel data set of 32 boroughs of London, ranging from 2001 to …

Public-Private Partnerships, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

There is unanimity of view that Pakistan faces enormous deficiencies in its infrastructure, particularly the energy sector, that is slowing down the rate of growth and creating stress and disenchantment among business and society. It is also true that the federal Public Sector Development Programme does not have enough fiscal space to accommodate all priority projects. At the same time, there is a buoyant private sector that is sitting on ample cash surpluses and looking for profitable opportunities. So there is a demand for infrastructure projects and there is supply of resources available from investors willing and able to finance …

The Thailand Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growth, Institute For Societal Leadership, John W. Ellington, Serene Chen

Institute of Societal Leadership Research Collection

Thai migrants first began trickling into the Chao Phraya river valley from Southern China in the eleventh century. Thai chieftains established petty kingdoms in modern-day Myanmar, Thailand and Laos, initially as tributaries to more established Burmese and Khmer rulers. However, both the diminishing influence of the Khmer Empire and the Mongols’ sacking of the Burmese capital Bagan in 1287 left a political vacuum in mainland Southeast Asia, which was soon filled by Thai kingdoms such as Sukhothai (1238–1463), Chiang Mai (1296–1775), Ayutthaya (1351–1767) and eventually Bangkok (f. 1 782). In the process, the up-and-coming Thai polities supplanted the Khmer Empire …

Is All Foreign Aid The Same? : An Empirical Comparison Of The Effect Of Multilateral And Bilateral Aid On Growth, Scott B. Jeffrey

Undergraduate Economic Review

Despite decades of research on foreign aid, there is little to no consensus on foreign aid’s effect on growth. While most in the field study recipient country characteristics, such as institutional quality, this paper also breaks down foreign aid by donor characteristics, specifically by bilateral and multilateral donors. Since about 75% of foreign aid is bilateral, my bilateral findings are in line with previous literature that finds high institutional quality key (Burnside and Dollar 2000; 2004), but I find that multilateral aid works best in low-income countries with poor policy environments, due, perhaps, to lacking political goals of donor countries.

Chutes And Ladders: Climate Variability And The Decision To Enter Sex Work In India, Kate Pennington

Master's Theses

There is widespread consensus that climate change will drive large-scale changes in poverty distributions, migration, and participation in risky informal labor markets, especially for poor households in developing countries which are both more likely to depend on the environment for their livelihood and less able to insulate against climate shocks. Within poor households, gender inequality means that women and children will bear a disproportional amount of welfare losses. I examine the impact of climate variability on migration and participation in risky informal labor markets for a particularly vulnerable population: female sex workers in India. Using a unique survey of 5,498 …

Unintended Consequences Of Enforcement In A Fisheries Institution: Results From An Artefactual Experiment In Tanzania, Spencer Maccoll

Master's Theses

Overfishing and the destruction of fishing commons in developing countries is a growing problem. Policymakers and local community leaders are looking for solutions to keep their fishing commons sustainable. Fines and enforcement mechanisms are commonly suggested to help preserve the commons. This paper discusses a novel artefactual experiment conducted throughout several fishing communities in Tanzania to determine the effect of enforcing a ban on illegal fishing gear on fishing behavior. Results indicate that the fishers in the enforcement treatment group depleted the fish stock significantly faster than the unenforced control group. One possible explanation for this result is that the …

A Test Of The Household Separation Hypothesis In Rwanda, James E. Anderson

Master's Theses

How does a farm household in rural Africa react when the government decides crop selection? In developing countries, agricultural households strive to optimize a risk mitigating utility function rather than a traditional agricultural production function. These households are termed “non-separated” as their farming efforts are directed towards family food security rather than maximizing agricultural profits. The lack of integration with labor and commodity markets makes these non-separated households difficult to influence with policy initiatives. Various tests for household separation have been developed.

We use a unique dataset from Rwanda to evaluate these separation tests. The data include households forced into …

Making Ice Cream In Tehran: A Field Experiment On The Impact Of Attendance Incentives For Street Working Children, Elnaz Safarha

Master's Theses

A substantial body of literature has focused on educational attainment and children’s performance to foster human capital. Despite the common goal, there is a debate on how to best approach it (Duflo et al. 2013). While in some studies incentives are effective in changing people’s behavior, by inducing more effort and higher performance, other works point to crowding out of intrinsic motivations and other externalities. This study reports the results of an experiment conducted with children usually working in the streets of Tehran (Iran) on the effectiveness of non-monetary incentives on school attendance and related behaviors. My within-subject design (dictated …

Does Poverty Really Impede Cognitive Function? Experimental Evidence From Tanzanian Fishers, Virginia Graves

Master's Theses

Does the feeling of scarcity really impede cognitive function? Using experimental evidence from Tanzanian fishers, this study examines the connection between poverty and cognitive function. Fishers in the experiment are tested on how exposure to a ‘scarcity trigger’ impacts cognition and productivity through measuring performance on problem solving tasks. The study also creates an index of distractions to test how existing problems in an individual’s life, which contribute to limited attention, relates to cognitive function and productivity. Experimental results do not find that mental and financial scarcities significantly impact test performance. Although the study finds no significant causal evidence, this …

Privatization & Fdi: Examining Growth In Vietnam's Provinces, William T. Clark

Master's Theses

Over the past three decades many developing countries have looked toward privatizing investment markets and relying more on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to supply needed capital investment for their emerging private sectors. In their pursuit of foreign capital, developing countries have enacted several changes in economic policy and regulation in hopes of transforming formerly rural and undeveloped countries into highly urbanized centers of global production. This is particularly true for a transitioning economy such as Vietnam, which has seen increasing privatization of industry and investment since the reforms of 1986 known as “Doi Moi.” In this study I …

The Impact Of Migration And Remittances On Children's Education In El Salvador, Philip H. Jakob

Master's Theses

The effect that migrant remittances have on school enrollment is a challenging relationship to empirically define, requiring both an analysis of the circumstances that lead a household member to emigrate from their home and equally, but not always independently, how the family makes investment decisions in the education of one or more of their children. This study presents a new strategy to determine the nature of this relationship for households in El Salvador, using a 2SLS estimation with a wealth-stratified panel constructed from household survey data over a nine-year period. Employing this methodology to estimate the combined effects of both …

Social Identity-Based Threats To Human Security: Gender Practice In Sustainable Development And Conflict Transformation, Emma W. Buck

Capstone Collection

I seek to advocate for practitioners in conflict transformation and/or sustainable development to build awareness around the peoples who, according to the status afforded them by their identities within a social context, experience threats to their own sense of human security within situations of violent conflict and/or underdevelopment. This capstone does so by examining gender -- that is, the context-specific distinctions between men and women-- as a social context that influences an individual’s feelings of human security. The capstone then expands a practitioner’s means of addressing gender-based threats to human security in situ. I will first define and situate …

Crime, Institutions And Sector-Specific Fdi In Latin America, Luisa Blanco, Isabel Ruiz, W. Charles Sawyer, Rossitza Wooster

School of Public Policy Working Papers

In this article, we explore how crime and institutions affect the flow of capital in the form of foreign direct investment (FDI) to Latin American and Caribbean countries in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors during the 1996-2010 period. We use three different variables related to violent crime: homicides, crime victimization, and an index of organized crime. We find that there is a correlation between the institutional and crime variables, where the significance of institutional variables tends to disappear when the crime variables are added to the model. We find that higher crime victimization and organized crime are associated with …

Education And Women In The Informal Sector: A Cross-Country Analysis, Linh T. Nguyen

Undergraduate Economic Review

This study investigates the effects of education on the participation of women in the informal sector of 40 developing countries using OLS linear regression. Through some econometric adjustments, the final model suggests that education, represented by years of schooling, is correlated with a 2.74% increase in women’s chances of being employed in this sub-sector of the economy. This means that the better educated still end up doing the jobs that do not require such knowledge. An implication of the result is that the current way which schooling is delivered to the poor might not be the most efficient way.

The Impact Of Research And Development On Economic Growth And Productivity In The U.S. States: Online Appendix, Luisa Blanco, James Prieger, Ji Gu

School of Public Policy Working Papers

This online appendix accompanies the article forthcoming in the Southern Economic Journal. This appendix contains additional information on the data and methodology used in the article, as well as results from additional and supplementary estimations.

Gold Mining And Unequal Exchange In Western Amazonia: A Theoretical Photo Essay, Gordon L. Ulmer

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory

I combine fieldwork photography and ethnographic documentation of gold mining in Madre de Dios, Peru, to examine the localized material, social, environmental, and health outcomes of the global gold boom. This 'theoretical photo essay’ examines how local and global forces coalesce around gold mining and influence peoples and environments in Western Amazonia. I use embodiment theory in anthropology, ecological economics, and theories of underdevelopment to understand local consequences of the global gold trade and to elucidate how opulence and the machinations of capital accumulation in economic centers of the world occur at the expense of human lives and environments in …

The Metro Manila Report: National Landscape, Current Challenges And Opportunities For Growth, Institute For Societal Leadership, John W. Ellington

Institute of Societal Leadership Research Collection

Although Western colonisers have, to varying degrees, shaped the political structures and economies of nearly all modern Southeast Asian nations, they achieved an unmatched level of cultural and institutional penetration in the Philippines. Far from the Indic influences that inspired Angkor Wat, Borobudur and Bagan, the island group was only marginally sanskritised during the pre-colonial period. With some notable exceptions in the south, Muslim communities were also never able to establish firm roots. Mindanao, Sulu and even southern Luzon were home to maritime sultanates beginning in the late 14th century, but a Spanish victory over the Muslim Rajah of Maynila …

A Study In How Linking Social Capital Functions In Community Development, Julie Burress Jordan

Dissertations

This qualitative dissertation explores how linking social capital is mobilized in community development and proposes an analytical framework for studying linking social capital relationships unique from bonding and bridging social capital. Linking social capital defines those relationships that are acting to bridge individuals across institutional boundaries and can be particularly important in rural, less developed regions. Although not frequently used in empirical studies, linking capital is typically measured by counting membership in external groups or associations. This study revealed the most direct benefit from linking social capital was financial support from intermediary agencies. Additionally, linking social capital has indirect community …

Planet Of The Celtic Tiger, Alexid Wai Kit Lam

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Due to the vast developments in technology and information sharing, developing countries now have instant access to a library full of articles documenting the growth of various developed countries in the world. As these countries are searching for an economic model and hoping to replicate its result, they often come across Ireland’s economic success during the Celtic Tiger times. During this period, Ireland transformed from the “poorest of the rich” to “one of Europe’s shining lights.” Although Ireland's economic growth seems extremely appealing, how likely is it that another country could follow Ireland’s success by adopting its economic approach?

This …

An Indentured Generation? The Effect Of Student Debt On Entrepreneurship In The United States, Lidia P. Medina

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This paper discusses the topical issue of rising student debt and the effect it has on employment decisions, particularly entrepreneurship. This paper aims to analyze this relationship using labor economic theories on investing and saving, labor decisions and risk aversion. Additionally, it discusses the role of entrepreneurship on economic growth and globalization using both historical and present-day data gathered from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (1997—2011), The Kauffman Research Center, and the US Department of Education.

A New Approach To Measuring Poverty In The United States: A Household's Ability To Consume, David Ashelman

Applied Economics Theses

The definition of poverty is a social construct. As such, quantitatively measuring poverty is problematic, and creates ineffective poverty-alleviation policy. This thesis examines the historical measure of poverty in the United States, compares U.S. poverty measurements to Great Britain and Canada, and then proposes a new way to measure poverty. Instead of measuring income as the defining factor of poverty, the new poverty measurement suggested eliminates income factors and focuses on a household’s ability to consume in a non-comparative manner. When quantifying a household’s ability to consume, implications arise in economic policy for anti-poverty programs, defining the middle class, minimum …

Economic Growth And Development In Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, And Latin America: The Impact Of Human Capital, Angui D. Macham

Applied Economics Theses

My thesis is that human capital has been important to growth, but has had differential impact in three areas: Sub-Sahara Africa; Asia; and Latin America. I estimated three regional models to determine the impact of human capital on the growth of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. Each model was estimated using the pooled OLS approach with a sample of 10 countries within each region. I make use of data from the Penn World Table- international comparisons of production data bank. I found that only the African region had statistically significant coefficients for both physical and human capital. For the …

The Economic And Social Effects Of Casino Development In Macau, Christopher Benton

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

This paper explores the economic impacts that took place in Macau after the gaming monopoly ended in 2002, as well as the resulting social effects to the local region. The broader research on casino gaming was analyzed, and was then compared to the social and economic impacts that took place in Macau. Specifically, economic indicators such as employment and GDP were evaluated, along with social issues such as problem gambling, crime, and educational attainment. Many countries, specifically Asian countries, are now entertaining the idea of introducing casinos to their local communities in an effort to try and replicate the type …