The determinants of NCAA basketball recruiting outcomes

Using recruiting rankings from Rivals.com, the authors examine the determinants of recruiting success among D1 NCAA men’s basketball programmes. After controlling for a host of potentially relevant variables, the authors find that recruiting outcomes are correlated with recent on-court success, historical on-court success, stadium size and playing in a ‘power’ conference. Additionally, teams with a history of sending players to the NBA receive heightened recruiting outcomes. A team with a new coach can expect difficulties with recruiting, while head coaches with national championships receive a recruiting boost. Finally, the authors show that recruiting strategies for guards may differ from recruiting strategies for other players.     

The relationship between athletic participation and academic performance: evidence from NCAA Division III

This paper examines athletes' grades and graduation rates at an NCAA Division III institution. Thirty-seven per cent of all college athletes compete in Division III, yet this group has received little attention in the literature. Nontransfer student-athletes have higher GPAs than nonathletes, while transfer student-athletes have grades similar to nonathletes. Graduation rates are higher for athletes. Thus, athletic participation does not impair students' academic performance.     

Pay for play: the financial value of NCAA football players

We explore the financial value of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football recruits and establish a wage schedule based on the star ratings assigned to high school athletes by an independent talent evaluation agency. Evidence suggests that the contribution of higher-ranking recruits to team wins significantly increases revenues. While the NCAA currently prohibits universities from paying student-athletes, we estimate that if amateurism rules were rescinded and college football players were compensated according to their revenue-generating abilities then five-, four-, three-, and low-star players would be entitled to annual salaries of $799,000, $361,000, $29,000, and $21,000, respectively, in addition to athletic scholarships covering tuition, books, and room and board.     

Point shaving: Corruption in NCAA college football?

Several recent studies suggest the presence of point shaving in NCAA college basketball. While similar asymmetric incentives between athletes and gamblers exist, evidence for point shaving in college football does not appear to exist.     

Labour productivity and rice production in Bangladesh: a stochastic frontier approach

During the NCAA basketball tournaments from 2002 to 2005, men's games produced 27% more upsets than women's games. To test whether these unpredictable results were due to gender differences, we conduct logit analysis to explain upsets by gender and other potentially significant variables, including differences in competing teams’: (i) RPI scores, (ii) percentage of freshmen, (iii) percentage of seniors, (iv) top scorer's total points and, (v) top three scorers’ total points. These analyses suggest that gender plays a significant role in explaining predictability.     

DOES ATHLETIC SUCCESS INFLUENCE PERSISTENCE AT HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTIONS? NEW EVIDENCE USING PANEL DATA

This study examines the relationship between athletic success and student persistence toward a degree. We build an updated panel of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I institutions and utilize within‐institution variation to identify the effects of athletic success. Using a ranking of all institutions, we find that having more successful men's basketball and football teams has a significant positive effect on first‐year retention rates. We also find some evidence that improved basketball rankings increase graduation rates, and that success in the NCAA tournament may have a sizable impact on retention. Although the estimated effects are generally modest in scale, we find rather limited evidence of other institutional factors affecting persistence, suggesting that athletics can be one avenue for institutions of higher education to engage and retain students. (JEL I23, Z20, L83)     

Economic Analysis in Plain English: A Course in Economic Journalism

The authors describe an experimental economics course designed as a journalism workshop. Students were reporters, writing articles on economic events and issues and about prominent economists and their ideas. The articles were read and discussed by the entire class. The requirement to explain economics to lay readers clearly but accurately developed the students' own economic literacy.     

MARCH MADNESS: NCAA TOURNAMENT PARTICIPATION AND COLLEGE ALCOHOL USE

While athletic success may improve the visibility of a university to prospective students and thereby benefit the school, it may also increase risky behavior in the current student body. Using the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, we find that a school's participation in the NCAA Basketball Tournament is associated with a 47% increase in binge drinking by male students at that school. Additionally, we find evidence that drunk driving increases by 5% among all students during the tournament. (JEL I12, I23, Z28)     

The Political Economy of IMF Conditionality: A Common Agency Model

The paper models the relationship between an aid‐providing international financial institution (IFI) and an aid‐receiving government whose economic policy choices are influenced by a domestic interest group. Two assistance schemes are evaluated: conditional aid in which the IFI makes assistance contingent on less‐ distorting economic policies and unconditional aid which is provided without such conditions. Conditional aid is shown to raise welfare of the receiving country and the world as a whole relative to unconditional aid. The paper also examines how conditional and unconditional aid schemes are influenced by the IFI's opportunity cost of providing assistance and the receiving government's political dependence on a domestic interest group.     

COMPLEMENTARY MEASURES TO FOREIGN AID: TAIWAN AND THE PRC UNDER DIPLOMATIC RIVALRY

The competition on foreign aid, as a means for securing foreign policy and other benefits by the donor, can lead to diplomatic rivalry. This article utilizes a game theoretic model to analyze the existing rivalry for foreign aid and international status between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. Similar to the role of political contributions in the public choice theory, foreign aid is taken a means of international lobbying, to realize the donor's objective. Research results, based on the policy effect consideration, indicates that the equilibrium aid policy, which is endogenously determined, renders an inability on the part of the donors, which affects the recipient's optimal foreign policy. How does a donor obtain favorable outcomes when such rivalry exists? Strengthening diplomatic endeavors to realize the access effect has been proved an effective method. Analytical results have shown that this method not only complements aid rivalry but also increases the welfare of the donor.     

Rogue aid? An empirical analysis of China's aid allocation

Foreign aid from China is often characterized as “rogue aid” that is guided by selfish interests alone. We collect data on Chinese project aid, food aid, medical staff and total aid money to developing countries, covering the 1956–2006 period, to empirically test to what extent self‐interests shape China's aid allocation. While political considerations shape China's allocation of aid, China does not pay substantially more attention to politics compared to Western donors. What is more, China's aid allocation seems to be widely independent of recipients' endowment with natural resources and institutional characteristics. Overall, denoting Chinese aid as “rogue aid” seems unjustified.     

Enhancing the teaching of introductory economics with a team-based,multi-section competition

The authors describe a unique approach to enhancing student learning at the introductory economics level that utilizes a multi-section, team-based competition. The competition is structured to supplement learning throughout the entire introductory course. Student teams are presented with current economic issues, trends, or events, and use economic tools and theories to comprehensively examine the topics. Students present their analyses in their own sections with one team from each section moving on to compete in an inter-section round. Students are judged on technicality, creativity, and applicability of economic concepts. The competition has the potential to advance students' creativity, collaboration, communication, and critical and analytical thinking skills, while enhancing their ability to apply foundational economic concepts to real-world settings.     

Aiding regional instability? The geopolitical paradox of Japanese development assistance to China

During the past decade, Japan established itself as the largest bilateral donor of development aid in the world, with more of it directed toward projects in China than any other recipient. Japan sees its aid flows to China as maintaining economic stability in East Asia, particularly as China's raw material and energy resources are articulated into regional markets. In this article, I argue that Japan's aid to China may unintentionally diminish Japan's and the East Asian region's long‐term security for two reasons. First, similar to other nations receiving such assistance, this aid may allow China to reallocate scarce capital to military modernisation. Such military modernisation may enable China to both better suppress internal dissent and carry out a more aggressive foreign policy. Second, this aid does not address the fundamental structural aspects of China's present instability. Long‐term structural instability has many sources, but the two discussed here are socio‐economic inequality (both interregional and intraregional), and sustainable production and environmental problems. Taken together these have important regional and geopolitical implications and repercussions. This article fills a gap in the existing literature on East Asian geopolitics. Namely, that by attending only to relatively short‐term corporate and perceived state interests of China and Japan, Japanese aid to China does little to ameliorate and potentially exacerbates long‐term structural social and environmental problems for China's vast majority living in rural hinterlands. The potential for internal turmoil springing from this uneven and unsustainable development inside China is the real basis for China's ‘threat’ to East Asian security. Thus what appears to make good development and geopolitical sense at first look, Japan's current aid regime with China, paradoxically may actually be the worst path to follow.     

China's Foreign Aid at a Transitional Stage

By estimating China's foreign aid as a proxy for China's bilateral Official Development Assistance and by analyzing its implementation structure and policy, this paper sheds some light on China's foreign aid activities, which have been at a transitional stage. Based on our estimates, the level of foreign aid in terms of net disbursement has increased sharply since 2004, reaching around US$7.1 billion in 2013. Some measures to strengthen the implementation structure to deal with this expansion have been introduced by the central government; however, this transition process needs more time. To facilitate this process, China is attempting to absorb knowhow on development assistance from multilateral institutions and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development's Development Assistance Committee countries that are eager to share their knowledge, with the expectation that China will eventually play a major role in international development.     

Foreign aid and economic growth: The role of flexible labor supply

This paper examines the link between foreign aid, economic growth, and welfare in a small open economy. External transfers impinge on the recipient's macroeconomic performance by affecting resource allocation decisions and relative prices. The endogeneity of the labor–leisure choice plays a crucial role in the propagation of foreign aid shocks. The efficacy of foreign aid also depends on externalities associated with the public good that it helps finance. The impact of tied and untied aid on the recipient government's intertemporal fiscal balance is examined. Finally, the transitional adjustment to a foreign aid shock is shown to be sensitive to the elasticity of substitution in production and the relative importance of the labor–leisure choice in utility.     

Six guidelines for teaching intermediate macroeconomics

This is the first article that compares terminal master's degree programs in economics from universities that have a PhD program in economics with those that do not offer PhD programs in economics. The authors compare these differences based on surveys in 2002 and 2012. They examine differences in general program characteristics, department faculty, admission requirements, student characteristics, financial aid, and graduation and placement rates. They find statistically significant differences in all of these categories and also find that some of the differences and similarities have changed over time.     

Estimating the Effect of Financial Aid Offers on College Enrollment: A Regression–Discontinuity Approach*

An important problem faced by colleges and universities, that of evaluating the effect of their financial aid offers on student enrollment decisions, is complicated by the likely endogeneity of the aid offer variable in a student enrollment equation. This article shows how discontinuities in an East Coast college's aid assignment rule can be exploited to obtain credible estimates of the aid effect without having to rely on arbitrary exclusion restrictions and functional form assumptions. Semiparametric estimates based on a regression–discontinuity (RD) approach affirm the importance of financial aid as an effective instrument in competing with other colleges for students.     

The NBA and the influx of international basketball players

The determinants of salaries for professional athletes in the National Basketball Association (NBA) are examined to investigate how international athletes have fared relative to athletes trained in the United States. It is found that international basketball players were paid a large premium above other players of similar skills and characteristics for the 1996–97 and 1997–98 seasons, after which the premium disappeared. This temporary premium is likely attributable to a?‘winner's curse’?experienced by NBA teams before investing significant resources in scouting and evaluating international players.     

Early decision and financial aid competition among need-blind colleges and universities

This paper presents a stylized theoretical model of competition among need-blind colleges and universities that implement early decision admissions. Under need-blind admissions, an applicant's financial aid status cannot affect their likelihood of admission. In the model, a need-blind school can use early decision admissions as a screening mechanism to indirectly identify a student's ability-to-pay, while superficially maintaining a need-blind policy. As a result, in equilibrium, non-financial aid students are more likely to be admitted than financial aid students of comparable quality.     

Is tied aid bad for the recipient countries?

This paper examines the welfare effects of the exclusivity of foreign aid taking consideration of donor countries' strategic and self-interested economic motivations. Based on an oligopolistic model with strategic interactions between firms and governments providing foreign aid, we demonstrate that a higher exclusivity of foreign aid, taking the form of tied aid, increases the equilibrium amount of aid and the social welfare of the recipient country when the foreign aid policies are decided in a non-cooperative fashion between donor countries. However, when donor countries coordinate aid policies to maximize joint-welfare including recipient country's welfare, the lower exclusivity of foreign aid, taking the form of untied aid, will increase the equilibrium amount of aid and the global social welfare. The results implicate that when a credible enforcement mechanism for the cooperative regime for foreign aid is not available, tied aid is welfare dominant policy for both donor and recipient countries than untied aid.