Search

We examine the equity premium puzzle with the perspective of the theory of Rational Beliefs Equilibrium (RBE) and show that from the perspective of this theory there is no puzzle. In an RBE agents need to be compensated for the endogenously propagated price uncertainty which is not permitted under rational expectations. It is then argued that endogenous uncertainty is the predominant uncertainty of asset returns and its presence provides a natural explanation of the observed premium. Utilizing data on the asset allocation of 63 U.S. mutual funds, we test some empirical implications of the theory of rational beliefs as well as estimate the parameters of risk aversion of mutual fund managers. Our tests show that the predictions of the theory are consistent with the empirical evidence. We then construct a simple two agent model of the U.S. economy in which the agents hold rational beliefs and calibrate it to the empirical experience in accord with the parameters of the Mehra and Prescott (1985) paper. The results of our calculations show that for a large set of parameter values the model predictions fit closely the historical record.

On what grounds does the law punish attempted offenses? The dominant answer is that the law punishes attempts to commit an offense precisely because they are attempts (extra-legally), and it is true as a general moral principle that if one should not X, one should not attempt to X. If this is right, then the proper contours of the law of attempts should track the contours of what are attempts (extra-legally). At least to a first approximation, that is, law should track metaphysics. Call this the “Attempt Theory” of attempt liability. Gideon Yaffe’s recent book, "Attempts," is a rigorous and philosophically sophisticated critical analysis of attempt law predicated on just this foundational assumption — the assumption, to repeat, that attempts to commit an offense should be criminalized because they are attempts as a pre-legal or extra-legal matter. However, there is another possible answer to the question. Possibly, those things that are in fact attempts are properly criminalized not because they are attempts, but because the best reasons for criminalizing the complete or “perfect” offense are also good reasons to criminalize this conduct, and there are no compelling reasons, of policy or justice, not to. We can call this the “Underlying Reasons Theory” of attempt liability. The Underlying Reasons Theory does recognize that there are things in the world that are attempts and that one who attempts to do what the criminal law forbids should be punished. It just maintains that the fact that an actor attempted to commit an offense is not, strictly speaking, what justifies our punishing her. This short review of Yaffe’s book explicates the difference between the Attempt Theory and the Underlying Reasons Theory as approaches to criminal liability for what we presently call “attempts.” In a nutshell: paradigmatic attempts would be criminalized on both accounts, but the Underlying Reasons Theory is likely to endorse criminalization of some conduct that the Attempts Theory would not. This paper advocates the Underlying Reasons Theory and argues that we can and should assess the proper scope of “attempt law” without working through the metaphysics of attempts.

Economic theorizations of political bias and war as laid out in Bargaining Theory (Jackson and Morelli 2007; Anderton and Carter 2009) have demonstrated that a political leadership’s penchant for war may be much higher than that of the people they represent, and the calculus of war for internal political gains can spur them on to inter-state violence. To put this assertion to the test, this working paper examines the BJP under Narendra Modi as instigator of the Pulwama War and the India-Pakistan standoff of 2019. The findings of the working paper indicate that the BJP government’s expediency of war conforms to, and resonates with, the bargaining theory of political bias and war, as theorized in the game-theoretic economic literature.

The study analyzed 2013 bilateral trade data between Malawi and each of the following three trading partners; Mozambique, South Africa and China. Using data from the World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS), the study employed a simple Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) model to estimate the impacts of tax rates on tariff evasion and conducted some robustness checks. We found that tax rates applicable to Mozambique and South African Imports reduce the evasion gap. This is interpreted to mean that other countries' exports to Malawi are declared as originating from Mozambique and South Africa in order to enjoy the preferential rates of duty due to the bilateral trade agreements that exist between each of the two countries and Malawi. We also found out that tax rates have a positive significant effect on tax evasion of Chinese imports. Consequently, the paper established that higher tax rates induced tax evasion.

Organizations have gone through many changes. They have reinvented themselves to meet the changing needs of their customers, the external influences and the cost pressures over which they have limited control. With the changes required, as a result of the housing transfer, there is an opportunity to refresh and invigorate what they are about as an organization. To work towards aspiration goals that will make us proud of what we achieve. This effort sets out an approach on how organization can continue improvement journey in ‘Shaping up for Excellence’. It can be argued that the fine words in this paper, by themselves, do not improve anything. The key to change is in the culture of the organization; how they deliver the services to their customers and the improvements that will come through ensuring the skills, experience, motivation and the tools to deliver an excellent service are developed and available. The purpose of this document is to set a corporate framework and improvement plan for how we can ‘shape up’ collectively and achieve our goal of excellence in all aspects of our approach and delivery.

This paper explores the use of the Prevention of Terrorism Act of 1979 by the Government of Sri Lanka in their war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), including discussions on the use of international humanitarian law (IHL) on non-state actors in time of armed conflict, the definition of "terrorism", and both domestic and international law reform efforts.

A post-industrial society and economy depends deeply on the effectiveness of creative work, particularly in research and development, and the quality of organizations that sustain it. One question we face as students of the Tavistock method is whether or not our inherited framework, often specified by the acronym BART, (Boundaries, Authority Role and Task), is adequate for our understanding this kind of knowledge work. This paper argues that it is not, and suggests that instead we need a new conception of what I am calling “developmental projects” (DPs). These projects create a novel and distinctive rhythm of work and pose a new kind of risk, which I call existential risk. In turn, this risk shapes a different constellation of anxieties and social defenses. We need to develop a working theory of the psychodynamics of knowledge work.

Despite years of rich academic production of research on information systems success, companies are still struggling to achieve expected return from their internal IS implementations. Billions of euros are spent in projects, which too often fail to deliver the expected returns on investments (Nelson 2005). In the meantime, researchers have noticed that the game industry is able to tap into human psyche to get players to engage voluntarily with some unparalleled intensity and duration (Przybylski, Rigby, and Ryan 2010). In this context there is growing interest on how organizations can learn from gaming to foster similar levels of interest, enjoyable experience and commitment in non-gaming Information Systems (Robson, Plangger, Kietzmann, McCarthy and Pitt 2015). Initially emerged in digital media industry before becoming an academic topic (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled, Nacke 2011), the concept and practice of Gamification consist in applying game elements to utilitarian applications. This paper examines how gamification of utilitarian information systems in B2B can contribute to achieve greater benefit from IS investment. More specifically, it aims to answer the following questions: how does Gamification impact utilitarian IS success? What roles do motivation levers play in that process? What are the design principles for effective gamification of utilitarian IS? In order to respond to those research questions, we use a 2 cycles Canonical Action Research design to introduce gamification features in a customer relationship management software CRM utilized by an European Sales organization at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. This effort resulted in conceptualization and adjustment of a research model inspired from the Information Success Model (DeLone and McLean 2003), and Self Determination Theory (Deci and Ryan 1985). The model highlights 4 main situated motivational affordances of gamification and clarify inter relations between concepts, resulting in description of 7 design principles.

A single principal interacts with several agents, offering them contracts. The crucial assumption of this paper is that the outside-option payoffs of the agents depend positively on how many "free agents" there are (these are agents who are not under contract). We study how such a principal, unwelcome though he may be, approaches the problem of contract provision to agents when coordination failure among the latter group is explicitly ruled out. Two variants are studied. When the principal cannot re-approach agents, there is a unique equilibrium, in which contract provision is split up into two phases. In phase 1, simultaneous offers at good (though varying) terms are made to a number of agents. In phase 2, offers must be made sequentially, and their values are "discontinuously" lower: they are close to the very lowest of all the outside options. When the principal can repeatedly approach the same agent, there is a multiplicity of equilibria. In some of these, the agents have the power to force delay. They can hold off the principal's overtures temporarily, but they must succumb in finite time. Furthermore, even though the maximal delay does go to infinity as the discount factor approaches one, the (discount-normalized) payoff of the agents must stay below and bounded away from the fully free reservation payoff. It is in this sense that "things [eventually] fall apart" as far as the agents are concerned.

Fertility and the provision of long-term care are connected by an aspect that has not received attention so far: both are time consuming activities that can be produced within the household or bought at the market and are, thus, connected through the intertemporal budget constraint of the household that accounts for time and money. This paper models that link and analyzes the effect of intervention in the long-term-care market on female labor-market related decisions. It shows that women’s fertility as well as their labor supply when young are affected by such policies. The overall effect can be decomposed into an opportunity-cost effect and a consumption-smoothing effect that each impact fertility as well as labor supply in opposite directions. Using European survey data, the paper shows that the consumption-smoothing effect is dominant.

This paper attempts to measure the size of South-South FDI in developing East Asia and the trends in it, and the characteristics of the investing countries and the investments themselves. It also summarizes the findings of studies in individual countries of the effects of these investments. The studies of individual countries will be used to try to find some consensus on differences between South-South FDI and North-South FDI. Among the comparisons of the two types of FDI we try to summarize are be findings about their industrial composition, their effects on their host countries and their host-country firms’ productivity, wages, and employment, and how these differ across industries.

China’s strategy for technological advancement since 1949 can be divided into four distinct phases, alternating between technological dependence and technological autonomy. Why does China pursue technological autonomy in some periods but adopt technological dependence in others? This paper argues that when the security environment intensifies, the strategy of technological autonomy prevails. In contrast, when China’ security environment relaxes, it is inclined to adopt technological dependence as the alternative strategy. Although the anarchic nature of the international system compels the state to pursue technological autonomy, the relaxed security environment makes the strategy of technological dependence possible. By examining the four phases, from the “lean to one side” of the 1950s, and “fighting with both fists” in the 1960s, to the “open door” and the post-Cold War era, this paper seeks to demonstrate how the security environment has reshaped China’s technological strategy, including the First Five Year Plan, the Third Front construction, the technology transfer in the 1980s and the launching of “indigenous innovation”. To this end, it is necessary to investigate the security environment.

This paper explores the effect of Temasek Holdings Pte Ltd, one of Singapore’s two prominent sovereign wealth funds, on the corporate governance of its target companies in Singapore. It compares companies associated with Temasek with the other listed companies on the Singapore Exchange that form the components of the Straits Times Index. Based on these companies’ 2012 annual reports, this paper finds that the companies in which Temasek has direct stakes have a higher proportion of independent directors and are more likely to have an independent director serving as chairman, indicating a higher quality of corporate governance. However, Temasek’s success is not necessarily a result of law, but may have more to do with its self-disciplinary nature and the hands-off approach of the Singaporean government. This means that the Temasek model may not easily be copied by state-owned enterprises in other countries. However, the fact that Temasek plays like an active investor and complies with corporate law may prove that state-owned enterprises may still enjoy a higher quality of corporate governance, and that sovereign wealth funds may behave akin to responsible investors.

This paper provides a new explanation to the gradual information diffusion puzzle from the perspective of information asymmetry. I document a strong cross-predictability of stock returns driven by institutional investors' private information about firms' fundamental relations. A value-weighted arbitrage portfolio yields a monthly alpha of 1.65%. Contrary to the limited attention hypothesis, the magnitude of predicted returns increases with firm size, number of institutional shareholders, and institutional trading intensity while not decreasing with analysts following. Further evidence confirm that institutional investors strategically trade a stock in response to shocks to its peers, which subsequently causes lagged permanent price movements.

In this paper we offer an explanation for the empirical anomaly that most raiders do not acquire the maximum possible toehold prior to announcing a takeover bid. By endogenously modeling the target value following an unsuccessful takeover we demonstrate that a raider may optimally choose to acquire a small toehold even if the toehold acquisition does not drive up the pre-tender offer target price. This occurs because although a large toehold increases profits if the takeover succeeds it also conveys a higher level of managerial entrenchment, and hence a lower firm value, if the takeover fails. In the paper we derive new predictions regarding how the optimal toehold and how target firm value following a failed takeover vary in the cross section. Extending the basic model we examine the impact of the presence of a rival bidder and of dilution on the initial bidder's toehold strategy.

We explore cultural aspects of globalization and provide a model to illuminate some possible effects of globalization on the politics of redistribution within nations. The argument of the paper is as follows. Globalization is an extension of nationalism (not its antithesis) with regard to some aspects of culture and economic structure: it promotes cultural standardization and economic integration across national boundaries. But unlike nationalism, globalization does this without providing either the international cultural solidarity or governmental institutions capable of supporting egalitarian redistribution and insurance on a global scale, while weakening the nation-based institutions for the same. In this respect a globalized world may recreate the social structure of the archetypal agrarian empire: a dominant English-speaking class of cosmopolitans presiding over a heterogeneous and provincial underclass with little solidarity across the language groups and weak nationally-based instruments of social insurance and egalitarian redistribution. The politics of social insurance may thus increasingly pit the cosmopolitans against the provincials (not capital against labor, or even the high earners against the low earners, as many of the cosmopolitans are far from rich.) The result need not be institutional convergence to a world of uniformly minimalist welfare states, however, for the process of specialization induced by greater integration may support distinct institutional arrangements appropriate to each economy's divergent product mixes. Countries specializing in goods characterized by volatile demand or requiring high levels of specific skills may be induced by globalization to strengthen their systems of social protection.

This paper tests the hypothesis that cash-rich, but low-innovation firms can use acquisitions as a strategy to "catch-up" on innovation. We examine whether cash-rich, but low-innovation firms can use acquisitions in general, and diversifying acquisitions in particular, to increase innovation inputs (i.e. R&D). We also show that low-innovation, but cash rich firms can respond to industry-shocks, in the form of a M&A wave or a tariff reduction in their industry, by using their cash to acquire a target and increase innovation. These results are consistent with the use of acquisitions to facilitate strategic repositioning in the presence of industry shocks.

Nineteenth-century America provided an unusually fertile ground for economic and social experimentation. The combination of young nation's commercial and religious freedom and its expansive frontier enabled hundreds of social entrepreneurs to attempt utopian societies and--according to their ambitions--a template for changing the world. None of them succeeded, but their parallel challenges provide clear lessons from their failures. This paper focuses on the some of the best organized and longest-lived experiments, each starting with the compelling vision promoted by the community's founder, tracing the problems that plagued their community as it grew, and how their responses to those responses led to further problems in a cycle that eventually undid their societies. We follow up those examples with a discussion how progress was ultimately achieved in the larger societies that these experimental communities had inhabited, including how the lack of ideological constraints enabled them to succeed where the utopians had failed. The overall paper is developed in three parts: Part 1: The Other American Dream Part 2: This Company Town Will Be Wonderful Part 3: Intelligent Design vs. Evolution of Societies The present submission is Part 1, describing the rise and fall of Hopedale, Oneida, and Amana as socialistic communities, and their respective revivals as successful for-profit corporations. We describe the fundamental challenges to societal viability that they all faced, including the incentive problem, the public choice problem, and the knowledge problem.

2008 world financial meltdown highlighted significant shortcomings on procedures used by the banking sector to provide credit to the real economy. A long period of indulgence granting personal loans and mortgages that boosted a credit bubble all over the world has been followed by an era of suspicion within the banking sector, precipitating the liquidity crunch and the credit squeeze to private agents. The efficient market hypothesis (EMH) claims that asset prices are equal to their fundamental values either because all investors are rational or, if not all them are so, arbitrage does eliminate pricing anomalies. But empirical evidence on stock markets seems to contradict EMH in many cases. During the last thirty years, Behavioral Finance has emerged as an alternative approach to analyze efficiency on financial markets, revealing a world with less than fully rational investors and arbitrageurs limited by risk aversion, short time horizons and agency problems. On this paper we consider on one hand the possibility to extend Behavioral Finance topics such as investor sentiment, overconfidence, heuristics or herd instinct to analyze banks behavior when providing credit to private agents; and on the other hand, how the absence of arbitrageurs in the credit market could justify the role of public banking as a countercyclical policy maker.

Outsourcing of labor intensive activities challenges the welfare state and undermines the protection of low-skilled workers. The stylized facts are that profits are concentrated among the high-skilled, involuntary unemployment is mostly among the low-skilled, and private unemployment insurance is missing. This paper analyzes the effectiveness of redistribution and insurance policies when heterogeneous firms can outsource labor intensive components to low-wage economies. The main results are: (i) Social insurance props up wages, leading to more outsourcing and unskilled unemployment. (ii) Redistribution from the skilled to the working poor acts as a wage subsidy to unskilled workers, thereby reducing gross wages, outsourcing and unemployment. (iii) A trend to outsourcing, induced by lower transport costs of imported components, depresses low-skilled wages, raises unemployment, and boosts profits. The resulting polarization of society and the increased income risk of unskilled workers emphasize the social gains from redistribution and insurance and thus call for a more active role of the welfare state in more open economies.

This report addresses two questions: To what extent does public spending mitigate or exacerbate gender inequities in welfare in developing countries? How can existing allocations of public expenditure be changed to improve gender equity in the use of services such as health and education? It does this through a detailed review and interpretation of the existing literature and through primary analyses on a large sample of developing country data sets. Regarding the first question, we integrate gender considerations into standard benefit incidence analysis, and address in particular the issue of whether and how gender gaps in benefits vary across the income distribution. The second question is addressed through gender-disaggregated econometric analysis of the demand for public services, including health care, education, and water. The paper also sets out the appropriate methodologies for integrating gender into benefit incidence analysis and for comparing impacts by gender of policies affecting the demand for services. The main lesson drawn from the empirical analysis - as well as from a careful reading of the existing literature - is that gender differences in the use of services, and the response of these gaps to changes in incomes and policies, are not universal and do not always occur where they might be most expected. Therefore, they need to be investigated on a case by case basis.

This paper shows that the characteristics of convertible bond funds (CBFs) differ considerably based on the regional asset allocation of the fund. More specifically, U.S. CBF returns correlate more strongly with equity returns, while European and Asian CBFs returns show a higher correlation with bond returns. This is a consequence of the finding that U.S. convertibles are more equity-like in nature than European and Asian convertibles, which are constructed more like a bond. Moreover, we show that global CBFs have different characteristics depending on the nationality of the asset management company. A global CBF managed by a European (U.S.) asset management firm exhibits more bond (equity) like features because portfolio managers tend to compose home biased portfolios. Our results have important repercussions for both investors and researchers, as the characteristics of a convertible bond fund will differ, not only based on the regional asset allocation of the fund, but also based on the domicile of the asset management firm. Thus, the performance of the fund and its correlation with other assets may turn out to be different from the investor’s ex ante expectations and expectations of fund managers and clients risk to be divergent.

This paper uses a unique panel of data from rural China to analyze the impact of expanding connections to off-farm labor markets on the income and consumption of farm households. With stronger village ties to both migrant and local off-farm labor markets, households in previously autarkic village communities experience reduced exposure to shocks affecting agricultural production. The analyses presented in this paper control for the persistent effect of past shocks influencing income and consumption, and endogeneity of household demographic composition, land holdings and village network connections to migrant and local labor markets. Finally, we present results corrected for bias that may be introduced if attrition is correlated with current and past shocks to agricultural production.

Unlike previous research, this study examines the relation between the reputation of investment bankers and the long-term performance of IPOs in a framework that simultaneously controls for the influence of venture capital. Using 456 IPO transactions over the 1989-1994 period, our analysis provides no evidence in support of the view that the quality of underwriters exerts more influence on the long-term performance of IPO firms than venture capital. The findings of this paper suggest that previous studies overstate the relation between the quality of underwriters and the long-term performance of IPOs by ignoring the role of venture capital. Consistent with Brav and Gompers (1997), it is also shown that venture-backed IPOs outperform non-venture-backed IPOs. When returns are adjusted for size, book-to-market and industry characteristics, the performance of IPOs is not significantly different from that of their peers. Overall, the evidence suggests that it pays for investors to rely on the venture capital than the reputation of investment banker in certifying the quality of IPOs.

This paper examines what type of insights can be extracted from a given dataset. This analysis is intended to encourage those collecting data to engineer their collection processes with data usability in mind. It is also meant to caution researchers against the pitfalls of trying to squeeze out more information from data than the data actually warrants. The ideas presented are illustrated through a concrete example of using CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) dataset to identify risk factors associated with hypertension. A complete end-to-end predictive modeling process is described in detail from data conversion and pre-processing, to model building, and interpretation of results. Python code to process the data as well as Matlab code to build, train, and evaluate the models are included in full and are sufficiently general in nature to be used for other analyses beyond hypertension.

The paper I am proposing draws on my earlier analysis of hard borders, violence, fluid identities and political space. Given our contemporary landscapes of mobility and immobility, failing sovereigns and competing ethnocrats, new global actors, and modes interaction, we need to be rethinking our notions of political association beyond container states and fixed territorial spaces. The practices of fixing identities into differential political statuses and arbitrary geographic borders are particularly dangerous as responses to “crises.” While many pundits suggest that it is the lack of defined or secure borders that encourages violent conflicts, facilitates terror-bent incursions, and tempts traffickers to defy border guards, I argue that it is the proliferation of hard borders (symbolic, legal, and material walls, fences, and frontiers) that incites violence, provides mechanisms for domination, and undermines opportunities for peaceful and sustainable political association. In the face of “hard times,” this is not a utopian argument for world government, but an attempt to rethink the relationship of borders, violence, and space.This paper draws on my earlier interrogation of traditional notions of sovereignty in the context of ongoing processes of fragmentation and integration and my concern that the linkage of citizenship to nationality in this context exposes many individuals to conditions of extreme vulnerability and violence. Using the theme of crises to frame moments of conflict, multiple strains, uncertainty, and vulnerability in symbolic and physical borderlands, the paper will attempt to pose both the dangerous securitizing pressures to close and harden borders and the liberating possibilities of fluidity and malleability, opening and softening of borders. Softening borders undermines the construction of power relations around fixed definitions of difference and institutionalized practices of domination and violence. While the instinct toward closure is often built into narratives of “hard times” and the language of crisis; I hope to offer resistance to this turn through both an analysis of moments of crisis and a re-thinking of borders, violence, and space.

Entrepreneurship is very important criteria for economic development. The role of women entrepreneurs cannot be ignored in this process. There is a significant contribution of women entrepreneurs in the growth of developed nations. The development of women entrepreneurship is low in India, especially in rural areas. Women entrepreneurs face lot of problems right from the beginning till the enterprise functions. This paper focuses on the status of women entrepreneurs.

Joan Robinson was a self admitted, mathematically illiterate economist who had no idea about what Keynes was doing or saying in the period 1930-1936. She relied completely for her understanding of economics on her very close, personal relationship with R. Kahn. Kahn would explain and develop the ideas that he suggested to her into her published works. However, there is one article that Joan Robinson wrote herself without any input from Kahn. It is her 1953 article, titled “A Lecture Delivered at Oxford by a Cambridge Economist”. It represents a total, direct attack on J. M. Keynes and the General Theory. Joan Robinson is the economist who started the myths that Keynes was a partial equilibrium, strictly Marshallian, anti formalist, who realized that formal, mathematical modeling was impossible. Such an analysis, done in the face of a pervasive, all encompassing, radical, fundamental, irreducible uncertainty, where no one could ever know anything about what was likely to happen in the future, as opposed to the neoclassical belief that everyone knew everything that could happen in the future, meant that no macroeconomic mathematical model building was possible. The foundation for her claims about Keynes and the General Theory rests completely on the type of rationale contained in a 1983 Journal of Economic Literature article by Gram –Walsh, where they express their belief that, since she worked directly with Keynes on the writing of the General Theory, then she therefore knew what Keynes really meant. The problem here is that a careful study of Volumes 13, 14, and 29 of the CWJMK provide no evidence at all that J.Robinson contributed even one sentence to the General Theory. The Myths of Joan Robinson are part of the foundation for the recent history of macroeconomics published by de Vroey and de Vroey and Malgrange. However, it is quite easy to find hundreds of other such articles published over the last 70 odd years. This paper will examine several of these works and show that they are simply passing along Robinson’s myths that she made up about Keynes.

The paper is about the political consequences of increasing economic inequality in Western economies. Political theorists have often stressed that democracy is in troubles when its population is not broadly uniform in income and wealth because unequal economic resources can easily translate into a surplus of political resources in the hands of the few. The connections between economic inequality and democracy, however, are not easy to detect and the body of literature is not so large to provide robust assessments of their complex relationship. The aim of this paper is to review the links between the two and to offer some hints on the political relevance of the inequality consequences, if any, on democracy.

This paper maps and assesses the role of Australian Indigenous Elders when sentencing partner violence offenders in Indigenous sentencing courts. The paper is based on research that focuses on the courts in New South Wales and Queensland, and on the views of Magistrates, Elders, court workers and domestic violence support workers associated with those courts. The paper begins by firstly giving an overview of the Indigenous sentencing courts in Australia and describing in more detail the different processes of five of the courts: Brisbane, Mt Isa, Rockhampton, Nowra and Dubbo. Next, the paper outlines what feminist and critical race scholars have said about using alternative justice forums to deal with family violence offences. There has been a great deal of debate surrounding the appropriateness of using alternative justice practices such as restorative justice and Indigenous-controlled justice practices, for the resolution of partner, sexual and family violence offences. Those that support the use of alternative justice processes do so because they recognise that victims and the community are given more of an opportunity to participate in the process and voice their concerns. However, some feminist scholars have warned against the use of informal justice practices because they claim such practices cannot correct power imbalances between victims and offenders of family violence, and that ultimately more punitive responses should be adopted despite a victim’s desire to maintain family unity. These debates will be further explored by placing them within a critical race framework. Finally, the chapter will use data collected from 39 interviews and observations at the five court sites to determine what role Elders have in addressing some of the concerns outlined in the abovementioned debates. In particular, the findings will focus on explaining how the role of the Elders and the particularities of the court processes can assist in bringing about changes to an offender’s behaviour.

Basel Committee proposal of liquidity measures (LCR&NSFR) contain quantification of risk of various deposit classes. According to Basel 3, there is no significant difference in stability between time deposits with early withdrawal option and demand deposits. Only deposits where there is no early redemption option (or, for retail, if withdrawal penalty is higher than interest) receive better regulatory weights. Such deposits, most stable in terms of systemic risk, cannot be introduced in Poland, because civil code and banking law regulations, their interpretations and related court rulings make them practically impossible. It is proposed that the regulations be adequately amended and the most stable class of deposits be supported by regulatory tools similar or identical to Basel 3 constructs.The Polish version of this paper can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2274108

This paper presents an estimate of the costs of reducing CO2 emissions as agreed in Kyoto by Annex 1 countries. Unlike most of the existing literature, this paper uses an Almost Ideal Demand System model for energy products to estimate the role of each country within the Annex 1 market. A major result is the provision of marginal (and total) abatement costs for each. The recent position of the US is also discussed, showing the cost of some alternative outcomes.

This paper examines the eect of peers on academic achievement for the ninth grade in German schools. Using the 2003 extended PISA survey, I disentangle the eect of classmates’ scores from classmates’ characteristics on individual scores for mathematics, reading, science and problem solving. The mixed regressive spatial autoregressive type model considers correlated eects in the form of grade fixed eects and identifies all social interaction parameters stemming from grade and classroom size variation. The empirical findings uncover the presence of positive contemporaneous eects of peer achievement for all four subjects, which lingers even after excluding schools that report nonrandom assignment of students into classrooms. Using the social-multiplier matrix to calculate marginal eects from changes in each of the explanatory variables, I find that peers’ age and socio-economic status have a significant impact on own scores. Interestingly, I cannot establish the presence of gender or immigration-background peer eects.

This paper considers the association between regulatory management evaluations and bank accounting returns and risk. For robustness, we estimate our tests using a matched sample with equal numbers of banks with and without weak regulatory management evaluations. We document a strong association between weak ex-ante regulatory assessments of management and poor accounting returns not explained by other financial or regulatory indicators. We do not find robust evidence that weak management evaluations are linked with risk. Our results suggest that regulatory assessments of bank management are informative and that better managed banks perform better without necessarily taking on greater risk.

The classical, deterministic resource-constrained project scheduling problem has been the subject of a great deal of research during the previous decades. This is not surprising given the high practical relevance of this scheduling problem. Nevertheless, extensions are needed to be better able to cope with situations arising in practice such as multiple activity execution modes, activity duration changes and resource breakdowns. In this paper we analytically determine the impact of unexpected resource breakdowns on activity durations. Furthermore, using this information we develop an approach for inserting explicit idle time into the project schedule in order to protect it as well as possible from disruptions caused by resource unavailabilities. This strategy will be compared to a traditional simulation-based procedure and to a heuristic developed for the case of stochastic activity durations.

A central challenge in estimating the causal effect of TV advertising on demand is isolating quasi-random variation in advertising. Political advertising, which topped $14 billion in expenditures in 2016, has been proposed as a plausible source of such variation and thus a candidate for an instrumental variable. We provide a critical evaluation of how and where this instrument is valid and useful across categories. We characterize the conditions under which political cycles theoretically identify the causal effect of TV advertising on demand, highlight threats to the exclusion restriction and monotonicity condition, and suggest a specification to address the most serious concerns. We test the strength of the first stage category-by-category for 274 product categories. For most categories, weak-instrument robust inference is recommended, as first-stage F-statistics are less than 10 for 221 of 274 product categories in our benchmark specification. The largest first-stage F-statistics occur in categories that typically advertise locally, such as automobile dealerships and restaurants. Failure to use the suggested specification leads to results that suggest violations of exclusion and monotonicity in a significant number of categories. Finally, we conduct a case study of the auto industry. Despite a very strong first stage, the IV estimate for this category is imprecise. Institutional subscribers to the NBER working paper series, and residents of developing countries may download this paper without additional charge at www.nber.org.

There are many viewpoints surrounding illegal immigration into the United States, especially concerning illegal immigrants from Latin America. This paper addresses the economic perspectives of the various stakeholders, starting with the perceptions of those most affected - the illegal immigrants themselves - and then examines economic points of view and impacts on other stakeholders. This paper does not deal directly with politics or political opinion, although those are forces that certainly influence the economic landscape. The research presented here covers the period of December 2005 through July 2007.

The paper studies Bulgaria's cost and trade competitiveness in the triple challenge of transition, accession to the EU and currency board arrangement. It studies unit labor cost (ULC) dynamics in the industrial sectors and their impact on export shares. Bulgaria's textile and apparel industries scored considerable competitive gains in the period 1997-2002 both in terms of ULC and export share. Those seem to reflect mainly significant drop in wages rather than productivity gains. Conversely, in footwear industry export expansion occurred despite deteriorated ULC. Other traditional export earners such as ferrous metals preserve their leading share in export receipts, but show deterioration in export/import ratio. This mixed evidence should be accepted as indicative and preliminary, rather than conclusive, due to the large share of the shadow economy and underreporting of labor costs. Emerging patterns of competitive advantages and export specialization, however clearly show, that Bulgaria has not entered yet into competition in differentiated products. It rather sustains and develops competitive advantages in the homogenous labor-intensive and material-intensive products, where cost competitiveness has primary importance. In this context the major short-term challenges in the policy agenda of competitiveness are seen here in increasing labor market flexibility, alleviation of payroll tax burden, reduction of administrative and regulatory costs of doing business and liberalization of the market of services. In the medium and long run the major policy challenge would be to facilitate the transition of the manufacturing sector from competition in homogenous material and labor intensive products into technology and knowledge intensive products. This would depend on the economic policy's capacity to encourage technology diffusion and innovation.

A substantial and rapidly growing literature has developed around estimating earnings gains from 2‐year college degrees using administrative data. These papers almost universally employ a person‐level fixed‐effects strategy to estimate earnings premia net of fixed attributes. We note that the seminal piece on which these papers build—Jacobson, Lalonde, & Sullivan, Journal of Econometrics, 2005, 125(1–2), 271–304—provides theoretical and empirical evidence for the importance of additionally differencing out individual time trends. The subsequent literature has not followed suit. Through replication we ask whether this matters. We show that it does, and further that these person‐level time trends need not be computationally burdensome in large administrative data. We recommend them as a unifying econometric standard for future work.

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics (2008). Vol. 70 issue 1, pages 23-51. This paper investigates business cycle relations among different economies in theEuro area. Cyclical dynamics are explicitly modelled as part of a time series model. Weintroduce mechanisms that allow for increasing or diminishing phase shifts and for time-varyingassociation patterns in different cycles. Standard Kalman filter techniques are used toestimate the parameters simultaneously by maximum likelihood. The empirical illustrationsare based on gross domestic product (GDP) series of seven European countries which are comparedwith the GDP series of the Euro Area and that of the United States. The original integratedtime series are band-pass filtered. We find that there is an increasing resemblance between thebusiness cycle fluctuations of the European countries analysed and those of the Euro area,although with varying patterns.

This paper, using Japanese firm-level data, presents findings about innovative activities in the service sector and the role of patents and trade secrets on innovation. According to the analysis, first, service firms have fewer product innovations than do manufacturing firms, but the productivity of innovative service firms is very high. Second, service firms have a low propensity for holding patents, but their holding of trade secrets is comparable to that of the manufacturing firms. Third, patents and trade secrets have positive relationships with product innovations, and the effects are quantitatively similar in magnitude, in both the manufacturing and the service sectors. On the other hand, a positive relationship between trade secrets and process innovations is found only in the manufacturing sector. These results suggest a pivotal role of the law protecting trade secrets on innovation and productivity growth in the service sector.

Several papers have identified the uncertainty of the investors and signaling intentions of the issuers behind IPO underpricing. This paper tests the implications of these models for the Indian IPOs over the last decade. The empirical findings show that there exists positive relationship between IPO underpricing and ex-ante measures of risk proxies. It also shows that a subset of companies' decision to raise funds subsequently depended on the initial returns and/or on the aftermarket returns.

Sector Wide Approaches (SWAps) are an approach to aid management that aim to support recipient government leadership. Health aid has grown rapidly in the past 20 years and in this time SWAps have become an important health aid delivery approach. However, the empirical evidence is that the performance of health SWAps is, at best, mixed. Outcome and impact benefits of health SWAps are inconclusive, and overall process level performance is poor. The key insight offered by this paper is that a divergence has developed between the underlying theory of change of health SWAps, and their implementation. The paper argues the theory of change underlying SWAps is highly consistent with effective aid, however the practice is not. Health SWAps have been characterised by cumbersome architecture that is partially implemented and used, and which does not facilitate government ownership and commitment to indigenous institutional development. A core stream of the analysis as to why this is the case relates to technical shortcomings within the SWAp architecture itself, however this is not sufficient to understand the reasons for the limited success of SWAps. Rather it is clear there are a range of broader incentives and understandings within both donors and governments that have shaped the implementation of SWAps at a process level. The paper concludes with some suggested actions which may assist in realigning health aid with the underlying SWAp theory of change, whilst taking into account at least some of the incentives and understandings that have cut across SWAp implementation. The essence of the proposed approach is a more realistic understanding of the nature of health systems, combined with a more politically informed set of strategies to support the development of these systems.

The paper tests two popular asset based models of speculative attacks--Krugman and Rotemberg (1992) and Calvo and Mendoza (1995)--and in particular, their emphasis on the second moments of monetary aggregates. Analyzing monthly panels of appropriate countries in three regions, it finds evidence for the importance of money/reserve ratios predicted by both models, and their variance as predicted by C-M. The variance of velocity does not appear important, however, casting some doubt on the K-R target zone framework and the interpretation of the C-M results.

(Revised 4/29/15, with minor edits by Craig William French)Abstract by Craig William FrenchThis paper reprints a slightly edited version of Jack L. Treynor's 1961 CAPM manuscript, which has previously been unavailable to the public. The author's facsimile of the original was obtained thanks to the kind generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Treynor. Edits in the present version, which differ from the original, include minor typographical corrections and minor notation differences for some variables in the formulae. Pagination is as in the original. In 1958, Jack Treynor was employed by Arthur D. Little. That summer he took a three-week vacation to Evergreen, Colorado, during which he produced forty-four pages of mathematical notes on capital asset pricing and capital budgeting. Over the next two years, Treynor refined his notes into what is in all likelihood the first CAPM. Treynor gave a copy of this early model to John Lintner at Harvard in 1960. While in business school at Harvard from 1953 through 1955, Mr. Treynor had taken nearly every finance course offered, and though he signed up for Lintner’s economics course he was forced to cancel due to a schedule conflict. In 1960, John Lintner was the only economist he knew even slightly. Treynor refined his 1960 model into the 45-page “Market Value, Time, and Risk” [the present paper]. This paper, Treynor (1961), develops the CAPM using the concept of experiment space to quantify risk and risk relations. Without his knowledge or encouragement, one of Mr. Treynor’s colleagues sent the draft to Merton Miller in 1961, after Miller had moved to the University of Chicago from Carnegie Institute of Technology. Miller sent the paper to Franco Modigliani at MIT in the spring of 1962, and Modigliani invited Treynor to embark on a program of graduate work at MIT under his supervision. Treynor did so during the 1962-1963 academic year; in addition to Modigliani’s course, he took Bob Bishop’s price theory and Ed Kuh’s econometrics courses, among others. By the fall of 1962, Treynor had consolidated the first part of Treynor (1961), on the single-period model, into “Toward a Theory of Market Value of Risky Assets,” and presented it to the MIT finance faculty.A more complete description of the development of the Treynor CAPM may be found in French, Craig W., The Treynor Capital Asset Pricing Model. Journal of Investment Management, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 60-72, 2003. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=447580.A reprint of Treynor's 1962 paper, “Toward a Theory of Market Value of Risky Assets,” may be found in French, Craig W., Jack Treynor's 'Toward a Theory of Market Value of Risky Assets' (December 28, 2002). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=628187.

I discuss Aoki’s fundamental model of institutions in its most recent version, building on a comment that Aoki contributed to a paper by Hindriks and Guala in 2015. These authors advance a ‘rules in equilibrium’ approach to institutions that claims to reduce a Searlian social ontology of institutions to mere linguistic conventions and theoretical terms. Against this view I posit ‘institutional naturalism’ and reinstate the analytical need for recognizing the ontological autonomy of institutions, reflected in their causal powers. I show how this follows from a proper reconstruction of the Aoki model, building on advanced cognitive sciences which are also deployed by Aoki. In this view, notions such as collective intentionality reflect the material embodiments of distributed cognition and distributed agency. This approach has been dubbed ‘Neo-Hegelian’ by Aoki in his comment.

This conceptual paper investigates Boyer’s ‘plurality of scholarship’, and whether the scholarship of application naturally aligns with the DBA format. We propose that – while the DBA provides a natural home for the scholarship of application – it must also engage with other forms scholarship. There are opportunities on both sides of the divide – academic and practitioner. The key issue for the scholarship of application is to find a way to convey ‘truths’ revealed by discovery to an audience with plural perspectives. The accompanying need is for practitioners to be involved early in the life cycle of a new construct.We conclude that there is the opportunity to enrich the development of theory by broadening the scope of enquiry, especially in terms of practical utility (Corley and Gioia, 2011). Applications of the practice of management developed by this approach to scholarship provide mechanisms for new theories to find a wider and more engaged audience. Such applications will also enhance practice by enabling the users of theory to test them in the real world. This should help practitioners to make the most of knowledge generated by those whose focus is on the scholarship of discovery. Finally, the pursuit of the scholarship of application provides DBA programmes with a focus that is distinct from the PhD programmes run within the same business school.

The rise of the new Left has had an important impact on the politics of poverty reduction in Central America, upsetting the status quo for elites in the case of Honduras. After Hurricane Mitch in 1998, international pressure on elites to focus on poverty reduction had only a limited effect. But from 2006, the availability of aid and other resources from Venezuela facilitated a break with donor-sponsored agendas and heralded a new phase in the politics of poverty reduction. Then, in 2009, a coup against Liberal President Manuel Zelaya was precipitated by his ‘shift left’ whilst in office. This crisis unfastened the apparent stability and long-standing norms of Honduran political life. Drawing on recent fieldwork, this paper uses a political settlements approach to analyse the commitment and capacity to address social policy issues in Honduras through this period. The paper considers the significance and impact of external ideas on the changing distribution of power in society, and the implications for inclusive development.

This paper integrates the impact of different approaches in implementing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology, namely supply chain inventory management system based on RFIDs to address the challenges encountered in the operation of the warehouses, item-level inventory tracking at retail stores, and customer order processing and distribution using RFIDs; to eventually propose RFID based supply chain management. Supply chain management (SCM) involves an effective information sharing, inventory management, transportation, sourcing and pricing strategies. This paper highlights upon how RFID can improve SCM drivers, one by one, and together that improve overall synergy. This paper extends the solutions of case studies and proposed improvements to RFID solutions in ERP applications. The paper also highlights the motivation to such implementations as these solutions offer further cost savings and performance gains. Consequently we conclude that RFID is a vital technology for the success of SCM and bridging the gaps among the existing enterprise applications.

This paper debunks three persistent myths: that creativity is greatest in youth, that wisdom hinders creativity, and that every discipline has a single peak age of creativity. These myths systematically neglect the achievements of experimental innovators – including such figures as Charles Darwin, Mark Twain, Paul Cezanne, Robert Frost, Virginia Woolf, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alfred Hitchcock – who develop their work gradually over long periods to arrive at major contributions. Recent research has shown that experimental innovators are greatest late in life, that their wisdom increases their creativity, and that virtually every intellectual domain has great experimental old masters as well as conceptual young geniuses. In a society that devotes as much effort as ours to eliminating such pernicious forms of discrimination as racism and sexism, it is past time to recognize that these myths about creativity make a damaging contribution to ageism.