The Structure of the Introductory Economics Course in United States Colleges

The authors examine class size, teaching methods, and the one-semester/two-semester organization of the first course in economics, where colleges and universities are classified into five broad categories, from liberal arts colleges to research institutions. Student satisfaction with respect to their institution is also reported.     

Overtime pay regulation and weekly hours of work in Canada

The idea that overtime pay regulation can be used to create employment continues to receive attention in a variety of countries. Standard hours, beyond which a statutory overtime premium must be paid, varies across Canadian provinces, as do coverage rules. Exploiting this variation produces a smaller estimated response of weekly hours to standard hours than previous researchers have found in other countries. Combined with evidence of substantially more moonlighting and higher wages in jurisdictions with lower standard hours, these results support a somewhat pessimistic view of the idea that reducing standard hours can be used promote work-sharing in Canada.     

Materialism,fashion consumers and gender: a cross‐cultural study

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationships among materialism, gender and fashion consumer groups from two countries – one representative of an individualistic culture (US) and one representative of a collectivistic culture (Korea). Participants were 397 students from a university in Korea (n = 221) and a university in the US (n = 176) who completed the questionnaire. The materialism construct showed adequate reliability for participants in both cultures. Fashion change agents scored higher on materialism (centrality and success) than fashion followers. Females scored higher on materialism than males which seemed to be based on higher scores on the centrality subscale. Participants from the US and Korea differed on all three subscales of materialism with US participants scoring higher on centrality but lower on success and happiness than Korean participants. The findings of this study provide valuable implications for fashion marketers and retailers in Korea and US. The findings are limited to Korean and US consumers and cannot be generalized to other cultures. This paper fills a gap in the literature by comparing materialistic values between genders and fashion consumer groups in an individualistic culture (US) and a collectivistic culture (Korea).     

Mundane heroines: Conflict,Ethnicity, Gender,and Female Headship in Eastern Sri Lanka

For the last twenty years, eastern Sri Lanka has witnessed a bitter and bloody civil conflict. This paper explores the experience of female-headed households in the region. Only partially the product of war, such households cannot be bundled together as a social problem with a single solution. Our study endorses the feminist suspicion of falsely homogenizing accounts of women's lives and suggests instead an alternative emphasis on the many ways in which gendered relations of dominance and subordination are maintained. With its co-existing Muslim, Tamil, and Sinhala groups, eastern Sri Lanka facilitates the exploration of ethnicity as a source of variation. The households included in this study share a common structure and face the same economic problems, yet ethnic differences divide them. The paper charts the problems, strategies, and partial triumphs of these lone mothers and proposes policies to help them in their mundane but heroic struggle.     

Satisfaction of disabled rural elders and adults with the quality of community‐based long‐term care services

This study estimates the probability of being satisfied with community‐based health care services in a rural area and compares the formation of satisfaction for elders and younger disabled adults. Using data from a state in New England, USA, a multivariate binomial logit model was used to estimate the probability of being satisfied. The formation of satisfaction differs for rural disabled adults and elders. Two out of five need characteristics were found to influence satisfaction with quality of care, and four out of six enabling characteristics were found to influence satisfaction. The impact of these characteristics differs for disabled elders and adults, pointing to the need to differentiate the disabled population when developing systems of home‐based care.     

Institutional Usury and the Banks

Although usury is no longer widely discussed in economic discourse, the concept of usury is useful in explaining financial upheavals such as the recent and on-going crisis. The Scholastics began the study of interest with their teachings on usury, and Keynes brought the usury debate back into the discussions during the period around the Great Depression. Bernard Dempsey, a Jesuit economist, wrote a definitive assessment of scholastic theory in the early 1940s under the direction of Schumpeter. Dempsey developed his own theory of financial crises which he attributed to the presence of what he termed “institutional usury.” The recently implemented policy by the Federal Reserve of paying banks interest on reserves is examined in light of Dempsey's concept of institutional usury. The scholastic concept of the just price is used to analyze market power wielded by large financial institutions in the modern economy.