The demand for game day attendance in college football: an analysis of the 1997 Division 1‐A season

This paper develops a predictive model which includes game, team and university specific factors that are likely to influence game day demand for Division 1‐A college football. Attendance during the 1997 regular season is used as the dependent variable. Tobit estimates of two separate equations reveal that the quality of both teams, traditional rivalry and membership of specific conferences have a significant influence on demand. In addition, colleges with lower enrollments and a higher percentage of off‐campus students attract smaller crowds. The presence of a nearby professional football team also detracts from a college team's drawing power. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Institutions matter,but which ones?

The purpose of this paper is to go beyond the narrow focus of the current institutional economics literature in development on the institutions protecting individual property rights, and to look at the economic effects of some other aspects of institutional quality on the development process (like democratic participation rights and institutions to address coordination failures). Another purpose is to suggest an alternative instrumental variable in quantifying the effects of property rights institutions. Finally, we speculate how, on account of distributive conflicts, institutions that have an adverse effect on economic performance often tend to persist for long periods of time in many poor countries.     

Skill-Specific rather than General Education: A Reason for US–Europe Growth Differences?

In this paper, we develop a model of technology adoption and economic growth in which households optimally obtain either a concept-based, general education or a skill-specific, vocational education. General education is costly to obtain, but enables workers to operate new production technologies. Firms weigh the cost of adopting and operating new technologies against increased profits and optimally choose the level of adoption. We show that an economy whose policies favor vocational education will grow slower in equilibrium than one that favors general education. More importantly, the gap between their growth rates will increase with the growth rate of available technology. By characterizing the optimal Ramsey education policy we also demonstrate that the optimal subsidy for general education increases with the growth rate of available technology. Our theory suggests that European education policies that favored specialized, vocational education might have worked well, both in terms of growth rates and welfare, during the 1960s and 1970s when available technologies changed slowly. However, in the information age of the 1980s and 1990s when new technologies emerged at a more rapid pace, they might have contributed to an increased growth gap relative to the United States.     

Wealth inequality and collective action

We study the effect of inequality in the distribution of endowments of private inputs (e.g., land, wealth) that are complementary in production with collective inputs (e.g., contribution to public goods such as irrigation and extraction from common-property resources) on efficiency in a class of collective action problems. We focus on characterizing the joint surplus maximizing level of inequality, making due distinction between contributors and non-contributors, in a framework that allows us to consider a wide variety of collective action problems ranging from pure public goods to impure public goods to commons. We show that while efficiency increases with greater equality within the groups of contributors and non-contributors, so long the externalities (positive or negative) are significant, there is an optimal degree of inequality between these groups.     

Financial crisis and persistence: evidence from sticky expectations consumption growth model

We estimate the degree of stickiness in aggregate consumption growth for the U.S. considering the effects of the Great Recession. The behavior of stickiness estimate in the crisis is somewhat as the U-shaped pattern. Our findings imply that during the crisis consumers’ attentiveness to aggregate information has slightly increased, thereby reducing the persistence of aggregate consumption growth. However, the reduction in persistence is transitory. Since 1980, the U.S. faced five recessions and in most of them the degree of stickiness declined, albeit temporarily.     

Does the World Bank have any impact on human development of the poorest countries? Some preliminary evidence from Africa

In an attempt to better understand the impact of the World Bank on human development in poor countries, we use cross-country data on African countries for the 1990–2002 period to examine this relationship. The coefficient estimates of our parsimonious fixed-effects models indicate that while loans and grants of the Bank have had a positive impact on some relatively short-term indicators of health and education in an average African country, there is little evidence to suggest that such loans and grants have helped these countries to consolidate on the short-term gains.     

Bank lending rules for managing sovereign risk

A simple domestic lending rule is one that ensures that the loan rate exceeds the bank's cost of capital and the borrower's expected cashflows exceed the terminal value of the loan. Because a sovereign loan is not collateralized and lacks recourse, the domestic lending rule is not adequate for making sovereign lending decisions. Three modifications are suggested. First, the sovereign borrower's time preference for consumption needs to be considered. Second, the domestic borrower's decision to default voluntarily is made after observing the value of the collateral whereas the sovereign borrower's decision is made after observing earnings. In this paper, the sovereign borrower upgrades expectations in a Bayesian manner. Although no lending rule will completely prevent a default, the probability of default can be managed leading to a third modification.     

Money,working capital and production in a developing economy: A disequilibrium econometric model of production for India, 1950–1980

The paper formulates and estimates for India for the period 1950–1980 an aggregate production function wherein the supply of real money balances in the economy appears as a limitational factor of production. The rationale for the formulation is argued from the importance of working capital funds in organising production, and how the supply of money, or the lack thereof, may constrain its availability in a financially underdeveloped economy characterized by imperfect capital markets.Comments and suggestions by annonymous referees for the journal as well as by the participants in the seminar at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, India and the session on money and production at the Windsor meetings of the Canadian Economic Association are gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are also due Mr. Salah Foda for programming assistance.     

The hydroelectricity consumption and economic growth in Asian countries - evidence using an asymmetric cointegration approach

ABSTRACT

This study examines the four commonly tested hypotheses in hydroelectricity consumption – economic growth literature for 12 Asian countries. Our results from a recently developed hidden cointegration technique uncover rich and significant relationships between negative and positive components of the variables under consideration. In particular, we find evidence to support the neutrality hypothesis in five countries (Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan, Philippines, and Thailand), the growth hypothesis in four countries (India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan), and both growth and conservation hypotheses in three countries (China, Malaysia, and New Zealand). These findings suggest that appropriate economic policies should be elaborated on the basis of the country’s specific hydroelectricity consumption–growth nexus. Finally, our new evidence suggests that the lack of stable relationship between hydroelectricity consumption and economic growth documented in previous studies for some of these countries could be due to the failure to properly account for the nonlinearity property in the data.