Board structure and price informativeness

We develop and test the hypothesis that stock price informativeness affects the structure of corporate boards. We find a negative relation between price informativeness and board independence. This finding is robust to the inclusion of many firm-level controls, including firm fixed effects, and to the choice of the measure of price informativeness. Consistent with the hypothesis that price informativeness and board monitoring are substitutes, this relation is particularly strong for firms more exposed to both external and internal governance mechanisms and for firms in which firm-specific knowledge is relatively unimportant. Our results suggest that firms with more informative stock prices have less demanding board structures.     

Contemporary Indigenous education: A nature-centered American Indian philosophy for a 21st century world

This paper recognizes the need to integrate, synthesize, organize, and give focus to the enormous amount of accumulated materials from a wide range of disciplines about American Indian cultures and American Indian education toward the evolution of a contemporary epistemology for American Indian education that is indigenously inspired and ecologically based. Traditional American Indian forms of education must be given serious consideration as conceptual wellsprings for the “new” kinds of educational thought capable of addressing the tremendous challenges of the 21st century.     

Growth, public investment and corruption with failing institutions

Corruption is thought to prevent poor countries from catching up with richer ones. We analyze one channel through which corruption hampers growth: public investment can be distorted in favor of specific types of spending for which rent-seeking is easier and better concealed. To study this distortion, we propose a dynamic model where households vote for the composition of public spending, subject to an incentive constraint reflecting individuals’ choice between productive activity and rent-seeking. In equilibrium, the structure of public investment is determined by the predatory technology and the distribution of political power. Among different regimes, the model shows a possible scenario of distortion without corruption in which there is no effective corruption but the possibility of corruption still distorts the allocation of public investment. We test the implications of the model on a set of countries using a two-stage least squares estimation. We find that developing countries with high predatory technology invest more in housing and physical capital in comparison with health and education. The reverse is true for developed countries.      

Arbitration systems and negotiations

We consider a model of bargaining by concessions where agents can terminate negotiations by accepting the settlement of an arbitrator. The impact of pragmatic arbitrators—that enforce concessions that precede their appointment—is compared with that of arbitrators that act on principle—ignoring prior concessions. We show that while the impact of arbitration always depends on how costly that intervention is relative to direct negotiation, the range of scenarios for which it has an impact, and the precise effect of such impact, does change depending on the behavior—pragmatic or on principle—of the arbitrator. Moreover the requirement of mutual consent to appoint the arbitrator matters only when he is pragmatic. Efficiency and equilibrium are not aligned since agents sometimes reach negotiated agreements when an arbitrated settlement is more efficient and vice versa. What system of arbitration has the best performance depends on the arbitration and negotiation costs, and each can be optimal for plausible environments.      

RELIGIONS,FERTILITY, AND GROWTH IN SOUTHEAST ASIA

We investigate the extent to which the pronatalism of religions impedes growth via the fertility/education channel. Using Southeast Asian censuses, we show empirically that being Catholic, Buddhist, or Muslim significantly raises fertility, especially for couples with intermediate to high education levels. With these estimates, we identify the parameters of a structural model. Catholicism is strongly pro‐child (increasing total spending on children), followed by Buddhism, whereas Islam is more pro‐birth (redirecting spending from quality to quantity). Pro‐child religions depress growth in its early stages by lowering savings and labor supply. In the later stages of growth, pro‐birth religions impede human capital accumulation.     

Scope of improvement in water usage efficiency in manual dishwashing: A multicountry study by questionnaire survey

Over recent decades, water conservation have become increasingly an utmost important issue for debate, and this includes the domestic sector. Reducing demand water by improving the efficiency of water use in domestic sector requires an understanding of how water is used and in what ways water savings can be realized. The focus of this global, web‐based, consumer questionnaire survey was to analyze individual consumer attitudes towards using water in manual dishwashing and understand the likelihood of a prospect of changing the daily manual dishwashing method resulting to a more efficient domestic usage of water. This study was designed to investigate the manual dishwashing technique used in the 5249 households of nine different countries ‐ China, Germany, Italy, Russia, Indonesia, Brazil, India, South Africa and Argentina. Besides socio‐demographics, technical questions like cleaning steps, hygiene questions motivational question, environmental awareness questions, questions on payment for water and electricity, questions on information sources about household work were included in the study. It was found that the awareness to conserve water was common among the Asian participants but it necessarily was not practiced in the households as individual washing of dishes was found to be quite high. Among the many outcomes, important one was that ‘running tap method’ was found to be most prevalent (86%) among Russian participants, complimenting their detached approach towards conserving domestic water usage. In South American countries like Brazil (66%) and Argentina (51%), high occurrence of ‘running tap rinse’ was found to be a common practice, confirming the lack of conscious use of water in manual dishwashing in the subcontinent. Based on the overall responses, awareness of a new and efficient technique of manual dishwashing could be propagated through the most voted mediums of Internet (81%) and TV (69%).     

Endogenous Future Preferences and Conservation

A dynamic optimization model is developed in whichuncertainty about future preferences is endogenous,namely depending on the state of the environment atthe time the change in preferences occurs.Endogeneizing preferences not only provides economicintuition to previous results but also implies thatoptimal policies are less conservative.     

Occupational sex segregation in agriculture: Evidence on gender norms and socio-emotional skills in Nigeria

Occupational sex segregation is a key driver of the gender gap in earnings. Using data from 11,691 aspiring agribusiness entrepreneurs in Nigeria, this article explores factors that drive sectoral choice, gender differences in the choice decision, and especially the role played by norms around gender roles. When given a choice of 11 agricultural value chains in a government program, we find the majority (54 percent) of the applicants chose to enter into the poultry value chain, and women were more likely to choose poultry than men. This article finds evidence of more restrictive gender norms in Northern Nigeria states, which lowers women's likelihood of entering into agricultural value chains where the potential for profit may be higher. The gender bias in sectoral choice is also attributed to differences in work experience especially in agricultural activities and in the chosen value chain, as well as in land ownership. Women with more experience in male-dominated agricultural value chains exhibit lower self-efficacy, which could reflect the challenges they face when deviating from social norms to operate within nontraditional value chains.     

Countervailing power? Collusion in markets with decentralized trade

We consider the collective incentives of buyers and sellers to form cartels in markets with decentralized trade and pairwise bargaining. Cartels are coalitions of buyers or sellers that limit market participation and compensate inactive members for their abstention. In stable market outcomes, cartels set Nash equilibrium quantities and cartel memberships are immune to deviations. The set of stable market outcomes is non-empty and its full characterization is provided. Stable market outcomes are of two types: (i) at least one cartel restrains trade and market participation is balanced; (ii) only one cartel is active and it reduces trade slightly below the opponent’s.     

Coastal Urban Planning in The ‘Green Republic’: Tourism Development and the Nature–Infrastructure Paradox in Costa Rica

This article examines coastal urban planning in Costa Rica vis‐à‐vis the country's values in the areas of sustainable tourism and community development, focusing on the city of Jacó. I argue that an anti‐urban tourism development strategy, swift coastal urban development and weak planning have nurtured a nature–infrastructure paradox: when people are brought closer to nature without proper urban and governmental infrastructure, this causes social and environmental damage. To assess this paradox and understand local perceptions of development, I analyzed lengthy semi‐structured interviews and survey responses in San José and Jacó in this study. Research methods also encompassed analysis of current tourism planning institutions and regulations, tourism media coverage and reports, real estate data, participant observation of planning and community meetings and activities, and observations of the built and natural environmental conditions in Jacó and its surroundings. The findings show jurisdictional fragmentation, regulatory weaknesses, complexity, poor coordination, slow action, and incoherent planning and development, leading to environmental degradation and socio‐spatial inequities. A more balanced approach to planning and development would seek to improve environmental health and socio‐spatial equity in tandem, by nurturing and advancing both nature and infrastructure development. Lessons from Jacó have global resonance, given the expansion of the worldwide tourism and second‐home/retirement‐housing industries, their recent concentration in urban coastal destinations of developing countries, and the fragility of these socio‐ecological systems.