Consumers’ fluid milk consumption behaviors in TURKEY: an application of multinomial logit model

Although consumers’ fluid milk consumption behavior related to skim milk, low fat milk and whole milk have attracted a lot of attention in the last decade, relatively a few studies have examined the consumers’ unprocessed and processed fluid milk consumption. The objective of this study was to analyze consumers’ fluid milk consumption and preference in Turkey by using cross-sectional national survey data. The Chi-square test of independence and multinomial logit procedure were used to investigate the selected socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of consumers that determine households’ fluid milk consumption choices between unprocessed fluid milk, processed fluid milk and non-consumption choices. Empirical results indicate that unprocessed fluid milk preference is related positively to household size, number of children in family, household income, and age of housewife; and negatively to education level and employment status of housewife. On the other hand, processed fluid milk preferences are related positively to household income, number of children in households and education level of housewife and negatively to household size and age of housewife.     

An arbitrator looks at grievance arbitration

This article is an overview of the major considerations that are crucial in the thought processes of an arbitrator in deciding a grievance-arbitration case. An arbitrator’s first obligation is to interpret and apply provisions of the labor agreement in a manner consistent with the intent of the parties. Past practices or precedents are often considered by arbitrators to assess the intent of the parties and to decide certain issues. The most subjective area confronting arbitrators is that of fairness and equity, primarily in discipline/discharge matters where just cause must be demonstrated. Most arbitrators apply the preponderance of evidence standard as the required burden of proof in deciding equity matters. Consistency in handling of prior cases and documentation are especially important in an arbitrator’s weighing of evidence. In summary, grievance arbitration is an extension of democratic due process to the industrial and business world. This article was prepared for presentation at a seminar sponsored by the American Management Foundation, May 6–7, 1993 (Chicago, Illinois). It is a revised, updated version of an article that originally appeared in the October, 1978 issue ofPersonnel Journal.     

Union democracy and the labor-management reporting and disclosure act: An alternative reform proposal

The Labor-Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959 gives union members certain democratic rights, including a decision-making role in various matters affecting their organizations’ finances. The informed exercise of these rights requires access to meaningful financial data, and the LMRDA mandates disclosure of such information. Recently, the Department of Labor has revised disclosure requirements in order to promote these union democracy objectives. This article provides an analytical framework for examining the adequacy of existing and future disclosure requirements. The analysis reveals weaknesses in the disclosure formats, and proposes a set of alternative reforms. In addition, the article attempts to facilitate the financial analysis of unions by applying standard accounting measures to a selected set of unions’ finances. In so doing, it shows the potential utility of suggested reforms.     

Intergenerational Transmission of Fertility Patterns*

Recent studies by economists have focused on cultural transmission from the origin country rather than the origin family. Our paper extends this research by investigating how family‐specific‘cultural transmission’ can affect fertility rates. Following Machado and Santos Silva [Journal of the American Statistical Association (2005) Vol. 100, p. 1226] and Miranda [Journal of Population Economics (2008) Vol. 21, p. 67], we estimate count data quantile regression models using the British Household Panel Survey. We find that a woman's origin‐family size is positively associated with completed fertility in her destination family. A woman's country of birth also matters for her fertility. For a sub‐sample of continuously partnered men and women, both partners’ origin‐family sizes significantly affect destination‐family fertility.     

AFRICAN TRANSITIONS AND THE RESOURCE CURSE: AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Despite periodic rises in commodity prices, resource-rich African countries have been characterised by state failure and low long-term economic growth. Competing explanations for the resource curse are examined with a particular focus on political institutions. The effective privatisation of states is considered within an alternative theoretical framework of non-democratic governance and non-market economics. Given the nature of many African governments, international initiatives to encourage the development of effective markets and democracy may be inadequate to prevent increased resource rents from consolidating existing elites and their patronage regimes.     

Interest Groups, Transfer Seeking and Democratization: Competition for the Benefits of Governmental Power May Explain African Political Instability

A bstract . The effect of permanent interest group transfer-seeking behavior on the degree of democratization is examined, Each permanent interest group is viewed as attempting to maximize its share of wealth transfers through the political process. To maximize the share of transfers, each group undertakes competitive strategies to control the instruments of transfers. Such competition is more intense the larger the number of permanent interest groups in a given country, and the higher the likelihood that the competition would involve non-democratic means to achieve and maintain control of the political machinery in those countries. It is predicted that the more intense the competition for transfers, which is a direct function of the number of permanent interest groups in any given country, the less democratic the system of government in that country is likely to be. This prediction is supported empirically using cross-sectional data for 65 countries.     

Liberal Education: Cornerstone of Democracy

Democracy is a form of government that requires an active and informed citizenry who share material resources sufficiently to enable all members of society to participate. But a minimum of material equality is not a sufficient condition for democracy. Citizens need training in skills beyond those that will enable them to earn a living. Widespread availability of liberal education is an essential component of any society that seeks to sustain democratic institutions. The United States has been fortunate to have had leaders for two centuries who understood the need for liberal education as a cornerstone of democracy. However, the growing demand that universities operate according to the same principles as a business has been undermining the consensus about the need for liberal education.     

Will export taxes replace VERs?

Some economists use an export tax, which alters the domestic relative price of exports, to model a voluntary export restraint, which is a restriction on the quantity of exports with restriction-induced rents accruing to the exporting country. Implicit in this approach is the presumption that the two policies are equivalent. In a very general model that allows for a finite number of goods and factors and intermediated goods and joint production, we demonstrate that, in general, this is, in fact, not the case. Specifically, from the exporting country’s perspective, the real income effects of the two policies are nonequivalent.     

Civil conflict and secessions

This paper studies secessions as the outcome of conflict between regions. We study under what conditions regions will divert costly resources to fight each other over political borders. We derive the probability of secession and the amount of resources diverted to separatist conflict, and show how those variables depend on factors such as heterogeneity costs, economies of scale, relative size, and external threats. We also model civil conflict over types of government, after borders have been determined, and study how this political conflict affects the incentives to secede. This paper has been written in memory of Herschel Grossman, and owes much to his inspiration. I am grateful to Michelle Garfinkel and David Weil, who co-organized a conference in Herschel’s honor at Brown in April 2006, for their encouragement. I thank Michelle Garfinkel and an anonymous referee for useful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Endogenous elites: power structure and patron-client relationships

In weak institutional settings, autocrats barter political and economic concessions for support to remain in power and extract rents. Instead of viewing the favors’ beneficiaries, i.e. the elites, as an exogenous entity, we allow the king to decide whom to coopt provided the subjects are heterogeneous in the potential support—their strength—they could bring to the regime. While the ruler can select the elites on the basis of their personal characteristics, an alternative strategy consists in introducing some uncertainty in the cooptation process. The latter strategy allows the king to reduce the clients’ cooptation price since in the event of a revolution the likelihood of being included in the future body of elites is lower. We show that weak rulers are more likely to coopt the society’s strongest individuals, while powerful rulers diversify the composition of their clientele. Moreover, when agents value more future discounted outcomes, the king is more likely to randomly coopt subjects.     

Bargaining and exclusivity in a borrower–lender relationship

This paper presents a stylized model of a borrower–lender relationship where funds are gradually invested in a project with uncertain return. We show that an exclusive financing relationship arises endogenously in equilibrium due to initial lender’s superior information on the project’s progress. The analysis also identifies a novel distortionary effect of exclusivity and the consequent loss of future rents on the ex-ante choices of the borrower. When she chooses the amount of funds to be initially invested in the project, the borrower chooses to overinvest making the future rent extraction by the initial lender as costly as possible. We would like to thank Alberto Bisin, Andrew Chen, Boyan Jovanovic, Hideo Konishi, David Mauer, Efe Ok, Mike Riordan, Charles A. Wilson, and seminar participants at Society of Economic Design 2002 meetings in New York and Southern Methodist University for helpful comments. The usual disclaimer applies.     

Tullock and Hirshleifer: a meeting of the minds

We introduce the serial contest by building on the desirable properties of two prominent contest games. This family of contest games relies both on relative efforts (as Tullock’s proposal) and on absolute effort differences (as difference-form contests). An additional desirable feature is that the serial contest is homogeneous of degree zero in contestants’ efforts. The family is characterized by a parameter representing how sensitive the outcome is to contestants’ efforts. It encompasses as polar cases the (fair) lottery and the (deterministic) all-pay auction. Equilibria have a close relationship to those of the (deterministic) all-pay auction and important properties of the latter hold for the serial contest, too.      

The Reliability of Family Background Effects on Status Attainment: Multiple Informant Models

This article sets out to investigate to what extent conventional retrospective measurement of family background leads to biases in the effects of family background in status attainment research. Multiple informant models show that the effect of father’s educational attainment on respondent’s educational attainment is 41% greater than conventional research suggests, and that the effect of father’s occupational status on respondent’s educational attainment becomes zero. The direct effect of respondent’s educational attainment on respondent’s occupational status is 21% greater after the unreliability in the respondent’s answers has been taken into account. We conclude that measurement error seriously biases conclusions about the status attainment process in the Netherlands.     

The conservative equal costs rule, the serial cost sharing rule and the pivotal mechanism: asymptotic welfare loss comparisons for the case of an excludable public project

We examine the asymptotic behavior of two strategyproof mechanisms discussed by Moulin for public goods – the conservative equal costs rule (CER) and the serial cost sharing rule (SCSR) – and compare their performance to that of the pivotal mechanism (PM) from the Clarke–Groves family. Allowing the individuals’ valuations for an excludable public project to be random variables, we show under very general assumptions that expected welfare loss generated by the CER, as the size of the population increases, becomes arbitrarily large. However, all moments of the SCSR’s random welfare loss asymptotically converge to zero. The PM does better than the SCSR, with its welfare loss converging even more rapidly to zero.     

Understanding Income Inequality in China: A Multi-Angle Perspective

Economic reforms have brought about spectacular growth and vast improvements of people’s living standards in China since 1978. In the meantime, unbalanced regional growth and income inequality have become two important concerns of future development. Most available studies on income distribution have either focused on the rural population or on the urban citizens. This paper stresses the importance of adopting a multi-angle approach to fully understand income inequality in China. We first use some top-down information to form a general picture of inequality for the whole country, and then use some bottom-up household survey data to explain in detail the development of inequality over time regarding rural/urban inequality, rural inequality, urban inequality and inter-regional inequality, the relative importance of different income sources to overall inequality. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Corruption in transition economies: Effects of government size, country size and economic reforms

This paper uses annual pooled data over 1998–2002 for transition countries to examine whether government size or country size matters more in its impact on corruption; and whether piecemeal reforms or comprehensive transition reforms are desirable for corruption reduction. Our results show that greater economic prosperity leads to lower corruption, and contrary to findings for other nations, a bigger government size seems toreduce corruption in transition nations. The geographic size of a country is positive and significant, suggesting that more spread out countries would have a harder time controlling corruption. Comprehensive transition reforms might work best at corruption reduction. A version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting of the Mediterranean Programme of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, Montecatini Terme, March 2005. Comments of participants at the Mediterranean meetings, especially Utku Teksoz, and two anonymous referees are appreciated. Insightful comments by Prof. Vojmir Franicevic on an earlier version and research assistance of Richard Connelly are also appreciated. Remaining errors are our own.     

Economic rents and mutual fund performance: An empirical investigation

We investigate the monthly returns of 377 open-end mutual funds during the September 1981–1994 period to learn whether economic rents can be garnered through the judicious selection of the advertising and sales method in the mutual fund industry. Specifically, we seek to learn whether direct sales or mass marketing produces economic rents under the assumption that those rents would be passed on to consumers to build a “high quality” image to differentiate the product line. Results suggest that no-load funds produce superior net returns except in the aggressive growth category.     

Identity, reputation and social interaction with an application to sequential voting

We analyze binary choices in a random utility model assuming that agent’s preferences are affected by conformism (with respect to the behavior of the society) and coherence (with respect to identity). We show that multiple stationary equilibria may arise and that the outcome looks very different from a society where all the agents take their decisions in isolation. We quantify the fraction of agents that behave coherently. We apply the analysis to sequential voting when voters “like to win”. Compared to the present literature, we enrich the setting assuming that each voter is endowed with an ideology and we consider the interplay between coherence and the desire to vote with the (perceived) majority.     

对贯彻落实科学发展观 构建企业和谐领导班子的思考

把企业建设成为一个适应市场竞争的和谐团队,必须要有一个和谐的领导班子。党政＂一把手＂思想的统一,是领导班子和谐的首要条件;领导班子成员间的相互信任,是领导班子和谐的重要基础;坚持领导班子民主＂议事会＂制度,是领导班子和谐的基本途径;定期＂讲评、批评、自我批评＂,是领导班子和谐的长效机制。只有领导班子和谐统一,才有可能提高领导能力,才能树立领导威信,增强领导班子凝聚力和号召力,带领企业又好又快发展。