The Domestication of Geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim Conflict and the Policing of Marriage and the Body in Ladakh,India

This paper approaches intimacy as a site of geopolitical practice. What happens when the body is the territory through which geopolitical strategies are played out? In the Leh district of India's Jammu and Kashmir state Buddhist/Muslim conflict is articulated at the site of the body and geopolitical strategies impinge on personal decisions. Over the past century religious identity has increasingly taken on political meaning in Leh, particularly since the 1980s. Interestingly, for average Ladakhis political conflict is described in terms of bodies – that is, through discussions of who should or should not eat together, get married, or have children. By destabilising the global geopolitical scale, we can arrive at a richer and more nuanced understanding of the everyday ways in which our bodies are incorporated into or reject incorporation into geopolitical strategies to control territory.

In the past, the Buddhists were more. Now, it's the Buddhists, mostly, I think, who have used family planning. Among the Shia Muslims, if you look in Kargil and Chushot, even now, they have nine each or eight each. Rinpoches say that our Buddhists are getting fewer, and then our Hill Council, in the future it's going to be run by Shia Muslims. What the Buddhist Association did, it said to all the Buddhists, “You should think. Up to four, or up to six, or up to five, let them be born. Don't sterilize after two.” (Yangdol, 45-year-old Buddhist mother of three) ¹ 1. Names of research participants have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout. Yangdol uses here the term “Balti,” to refer to Shia Muslims. In Ladakh the terms Balti and Kache are frequently used to distinguish between Shia and Sunni Muslims. These terms however, are somewhat misleading as they are geographic markers – Balti means a person from Baltistan and Kache means Kashmiri. These terms are regularly applied to Ladakhis to denote their religious identity, but in my interviews I have found it is more common for Buddhists to deploy these words and that Muslims more often differentiate using the terms Shia and Sunni. In later interviews throughout this paper I have translated Balti and Kache as Shia and Sunni, however, I have bracketed the term to indicate this substitution. A rinpoche is a high monk, generally the reincarnated spiritual leader of a particular monastery. Kargil is the district to Leh's west, dominated by Shia Muslims, and Chushot is a Shia-majority village that meanders along the Indus River, just southeast of Leh.

In the beginning, in the very beginning, the relationship was very good. We were like one person. There were Buddhists who married with Muslims, and Muslims who married with Buddhists. Now, times have changed, and things are different. Now people don't understand, and they have bad hearts. (Razia, 45-year-old Sunni mother of two)     

Politics of religiously motivated lending: An empirical analysis of aid allocation by the Islamic Development Bank

We investigate whether lending by the Islamic Development Bank mirrors Saudi Arabia's political interests based on religious affinity using panel data for its 56 member countries over the 1970–2007 period. Our results indicate that Sunni regime countries receive favorable treatment in terms of loan allocation, as well as Shia majority populated countries in exceptional occasions of conflict with other religious minority groups, while non-Muslim countries are the least favored. There is also evidence that lending by the World Bank to the same group of countries and over the same time frame does not respond to the political stance of Saudi Arabia founded on religion. These findings reveal the advantage that Saudi Arabia gains by assuming the leadership of a Regional Development Bank in contrast to coordinating common strategies in a global International Financial Institution with other large shareholders for whom religion might not be essential for political alliances.     

Expected utility theory and prospect theory: one wedding and a decent funeral

Choice behavior is typically evaluated by assuming that the data is generated by one latent decision-making process or another. What if there are two (or more) latent decision-making processes generating the observed choices? Some choices might then be better characterized as being generated by one process, and other choices by the other process. A finite mixture model can be used to estimate the parameters of each decision process while simultaneously estimating the probability that each process applies to the sample. We consider the canonical case of lottery choices in a laboratory experiment and assume that the data is generated by expected utility theory and prospect theory decision rules. We jointly estimate the parameters of each theory as well as the fraction of choices characterized by each. The methodology provides the wedding invitation, and the data consummates the ceremony followed by a decent funeral for the representative agent model that assumes only one type of decision process. The evidence suggests support for each theory, and goes further to identify under what demographic domains one can expect to see one theory perform better than the other. We therefore propose a reconciliation of the debate over two of the dominant theories of choice under risk, at least for the tasks and samples we consider. The methodology is broadly applicable to a range of debates over competing theories generated by experimental and non-experimental data.     

Courses or individual counselling: does job search assistance work?

How does labour market policy affect welfare recipients and long-term unemployed people? We investigate whether job search assistance (JSA) helps disadvantaged individuals to find jobs and whether courses or individual counselling is more successful in reaching this goal. To evaluate individual employment effects, we apply a quasi-experimental design and construct suitable comparison groups using propensity score matching methods. We compare participants to nonparticipants as well as participants of both schemes directly. Our article benefits from access to rich administrative data from the German Federal Employment Agency. When comparing participants to nonparticipants, results suggest that the individual JSA does not affect participants’ employment prospects at all and that the course JSA even decreased their employment chances. At the same time, differences in these effects can be ascribed to programme design differences and to differences in the groups of participants. Therefore, we compare both programmes directly to each other, that is, we use the other programme participants as a comparison group, respectively. We found some evidence that individual JSA performs better than course JSA.     

Preferential trade agreements and manufactured goods exports: does it matter whom you PTA with?

This article explores two questions. First, do preferential trade agreements (PTAs) affect manufactured goods exports of developing countries? Second, does it matter for developing countries whom they sign the PTAs with? We find that the answer to both questions is yes. Using bilateral manufactured goods exports data from 28 developing countries during 1978–2005; we find that South–South PTAs have a significantly positive effect on manufactured goods exports. In contrast, no such effect is detected in the case of South–North PTAs. We confirmed the robustness of these findings to estimation methodology, sample selection, time period, zero trade flows and multilateral trade resistance.     

The effects of (incentivized) belief elicitation in public goods experiments

Belief elicitation is an important methodological issue for experimental economists. There are two generic questions: 1) Do incentives increase belief accuracy? 2) Are there interaction effects of beliefs and decisions? We investigate these questions in the case of finitely repeated public goods experiments. We find that belief accuracy is significantly higher when beliefs are incentivized. The relationship between contributions and beliefs is slightly steeper under incentives. However, we find that incentivized beliefs tend to lead to higher contribution levels than either non-incentivized beliefs or no beliefs at all. We discuss the implications of our results for the design of public good experiments.     

PRICES IN THE NATIONAL ACCOUNTS FRAMEWORK: A CASE FOR COST-BENEFIT ANALYSIS*

There are serious questions about the social costs and benefits of extending the role of prices in the national accounts. The costs may be greater, and the benefits smaller, than is commonly supposed. Many important uses of price (and other) data do not require that these data be organized within an elaborate—or even any—framework of national accounts. Also, the basic price (and other) data are still too often very scanty and rough. Would it not be better to devote available resources to improving these data rather than trying to force them, prematurely, into an elaborated set of national accounts?     

Network externalities in consumer spending on lottery games: evidence from Spain

We use data from two nationally representative Spanish surveys in 2005 and 2006 to investigate spending on lottery games. Estimates from Tobit and double hurdle models of participation in lottery markets and spending on lottery tickets find that frequent participation in one game is not associated with an increased or decreased probability of participating in other games, but is associated with increased spending on other games. Consumer spending on different lottery games exhibits inter-related consumption decisions. Also, the assumptions underlying the double hurdle model, but not the Tobit model, better describe consumer spending on lottery tickets in Spain.     

Literacy and the Migrant–Native Wage Gap

Being able to read and write is one of the most important skills in modern economies. Literacy frequently is a prerequisite for employment and its relevance for productivity and wages is magnified by the fact that it is only through literacy that many other skills become usable. More so than for natives, this argument applies to migrants: even those with high levels of human capital acquired in the country of origin often have it rendered worthless by the absence of literacy in the host‐country language. Using novel data from a large‐scale German adult literacy test (“leo.—Level‐One Studie”, or “LEO”), we investigate the determinants of literacy and show that migrants have systematically lower language skills than natives. We find that any observed raw employment and wage gaps between natives and migrants can be fully explained by these differences.     

Public and private capital productivity in Russia: a non-parametric investigation

The productivity of public capital has been very popular research topic for US and other OECD countries, while studies using data from transitional countries are almost non-existent. In this paper, we analyze the productivity of public and private capital in Russia with parametric and non-parametric regression methods utilizing a unique regional level panel data from 2003 to 2007. More specifically, we assess public capital’s spillover effects, i.e., the productivity of public capital on private output, as well as the productivity of different capital ownership types on total output. We find that public capital has a clear positive effect on private output. However, our estimates and test statistics show that parametric methods are not able to grasp vast non-linearities and heterogeneity present among Russian regions, while the non-parametric approach can capture these important features of the data better. Furthermore, we find that multicollinearity is an important methodological problem which should be accounted for in analysis concerning capital data. Our results also suggest that the impact of public capital in Russia is heterogeneous in the sense that for some regions its contribution to private output is insignificant or even negative while it has a considerable positive role for most regions. Concerning the capital elasticities of total output, we find that public capital is less productive than private capital and roughly as productive as joint private-public capital.     

Experimental evidence on tax salience and tax incidence

Although a basic theoretical principle in public economics assumes that individuals optimize fully with respect to the introduction of a tax, a growing body of research is proving that several heuristics are in place when people take decisions. We re‐examine the well known liability side equivalence principle in the light of the concept of salience. While these two topics have been extensively investigated in isolation, this paper innovates on the previous literature in that it focuses on their joint effects. Is tax incidence dependent on whether the subjects face a salient rather than a nonsalient tax? Does the salience of a tax exert a different effect depending on who is legally committed to bear the tax burden? We address these questions through a laboratory experiment in which one unit of a fictitious good is being traded through a double‐auction market institution. Based on a panel data analysis, our contribution shows that point of collection matters and determines the economic incidence of tax. Additionally, we find that the joint effect of salience and statutory incidence does not alter the informative efficiency, but has a positive effect on buyers’ allocational efficiency when the tax is levied on sellers.     

National Sentiment and Consumer Choice: The Iraq War and Sales of US Products in Arab Countries

Did the rise in anti‐American sentiment caused by the Iraq war affect sales of US goods abroad? We address this question using data on soft drinks and fabric detergents sales in nine Arab countries. We find a statistically significant negative impact of the war on sales of US soft drinks in seven countries. The impact dissipates after a few months in two countries but persists in the other five. In the case of detergents, we only find a significant negative impact in one country. We conclude that international politics can sometimes affect consumer behavior and market outcomes.     

Eldercare hours,work hours and perceived filial obligations

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we take a fresh look at the magnitude of the trade-off between caring informally for a parent and paid work. We adopt a simultaneous approach with a primary focus on how hours of care are influenced by hours of work rather than the other way round. We also investigate the role that filial obligations play in choices of caring versus working. Using the SHARE data (2004 and 2006) we find that the elasticity of informal care hours in response to working hours is between ?0.17 in the caregivers sample and ?0.19 in the women-only caregivers sample; small but not negligible. Moreover, we find that a 10%increase in the index measuring the strength of filial obligations increases weekly hours of care by about two and a half hours.     

On smoothing macroeconomic time series using the modified HP filter

In business-cycle research, smoothing data is an essential first step to evaluate the extent to which model-generated moments stand up to their empirical counterparts. We put to test McDermott’s (1997) modified version of Hodrick and Prescott’s (1997) smoothing filter. On the one hand, our simulations suggest that relative to other filters, the modified HP-filter replicates better artificially generated series with known properties. On the other hand, using true data we find that autoregressive properties of smoothed series are not affected by the choice of smoothing HP filters, but the same does not hold when it comes to multivariate analysis. The later result is especially strong for annual data. We report results for a large set of countries.     

Learning,forecasting and optimizing: An experimental study

Rational Expectations (RE) models have two crucial dimensions: (i) agents on average correctly forecast future prices given all available information, and (ii) given expectations, agents solve optimization problems and these solutions in turn determine actual price realizations. Experimental tests of such models typically focus on only one of these two dimensions. In this paper we consider both forecasting and optimization decisions in an experimental cobweb economy. We report results from four main experimental treatments: (1) subjects form forecasts only, (2) subjects determine quantity only (solve an optimization problem), (3) they do both and (4) they are paired in teams and one member is assigned the forecasting role while the other is assigned the optimization task. All treatments converge to Rational Expectation Equilibrium (REE), but at different speeds. We observe that performance is the best in treatment 1 and the worst in Treatment 3. We further find that most subjects use adaptive rules to forecast prices. Given a price forecast, subjects are less likely to make conditionally optimal production decisions in Treatment 3 where the forecast is made by themselves, than in Treatment 4 where the forecast is made by the other member of their team, which suggests that “two heads are better than one” in term of the speed of finding the REE.     

Lineage-based heterogeneity and cooperative behavior in rural China

This paper investigates how lineages, the commonly found organizations in rural villages of China, affect people's intra- and cross-lineage cooperative behavior. We use data from the Chinese Household Income Project Survey 2002, which exclusively contains information about the lineage structure in these villages allowing us to classify three levels of lineage-based heterogeneity. Our identification strategy relies on the exogeneity of lineage-based heterogeneity. We find evidence that people in a village with higher lineage-based heterogeneity are less likely to exhibit reciprocity behavior within lineages or contribute to the provision of public goods that are jointly shared across lineages. The estimation results remain robust to the inclusion of various control variables and additional background characteristics. Finally, we examine a number of other economic outcomes and find that more homogenous villages do better than other types of villages.     

Payoff dominance and risk dominance in the observable delay game: a note

We examine whether the payoff dominant sequential-move (Stackelberg) outcome is realized when timing is endogenized. We adopt the observable delay game formulated by Hamilton and Slutsky [Games Econ Behav 2(1):29–46, 1990]. We find that if one sequential-move outcome is payoff dominant, either (i) the outcome both players prefer is the unique equilibrium; or (ii) two sequential-move outcomes are equilibria and the one both players prefer is risk dominant. In other words, no conflict between payoff dominance and risk dominance in the observable delay game exists, in contrast to other games such as (non pure) coordination games. We also find that even if one of two sequential-move outcomes is the unique equilibrium outcome in the observable delay game, it does not imply that the equilibrium outcome is payoff dominant to the other sequential-move outcome.      

Dualistic Discourse and Immigration Policy

Abstract:

The central question in immigration policy is whether to support less immigration through more “restrictive” laws and procedures or whether to support more immigration through a “relaxation” of existing laws. Recently, however, a second debate has arisen on one side of this debate regarding the appropriate types of arguments that may be used to support “restrictive” immigration. Ross Douthat refers to this dispute as the “race versus economics” question: using “race-based” arguments is not legitimate; while an “economic” or a “fact-based” argument is regarded as legitimate. We argue that this distinction in anti-immigration rhetoric is more apparent than real. Using the two most common historical “tropes” in immigration policy, “criminal” and “worker,” we find that racist, anti-ethnic, and classist assumptions pervade U.S. immigration law and policy and have been far more influential in formulating actual policy than either economic or “fact-based” analysis. The central problem with restrictive immigration policy is that its primary purpose is to determine who is eligible to be an American, and who is not; in other words, immigration policy is, by its fundamental intent, invidious. The question is whether it is possible to exclude individuals on these “legitimate” grounds without relying on “illegitimate” invidious distinctions?     

Risk management of pensions from the perspective of loss aversion

This paper studies two interrelated questions. First, is a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) pension component beneficial from a risk management point of view? Second, does optimal risk management of old-age consumption differ between different income groups? The analysis is based on so-called lexicographic loss aversion preferences. Interest in these preferences stems from the fact that they explain the cross-section of individuals' savings and asset allocation choices better than alternative models. I find that all income groups benefit from the presence of a substantial PAYG component. Only for the two highest income quintiles old-age provision should heavily rely on equity investments.     

Are natural gas spot and futures prices predictable?

We answer two questions concerning natural gas spot and futures prices. The first is: Can natural gas futures prices predict natural gas spot prices? The second is: Are natural gas spot and futures prices weak form efficient or can they be predicted based on examination of historical data? To answer these questions, we use daily data for Henry Hub natural gas spot and futures prices. Our answer to the first question is that natural gas futures prices do not predict the magnitude of future natural gas spot prices any better than what would be predicted by a random walk model. This result has important implications for many financial analysts and policy institutions that have used commodity futures prices to predict movements in spot prices. The answer to the second question is that when we apply a unit root test that allows for heteroskedasticity and two structural breaks, natural gas spot and futures prices are predictable. We then simulate a contrarian trading strategy for spot and futures prices to show under what circumstances trading in spot and futures prices are also profitable. The results point to the need to accommodate heteroskedasticity when applying unit root tests to model energy spot and futures prices with high-frequency data, such as daily data.