Is There Persistence in the Impact of Emergency Food Aid? Evidence on Consumption, Food Security, and Assets in Rural Ethiopia

We identify the impact of emergency food aid programs after the 2002 drought in rural Ethiopia on future welfare. Based on a difference-in-differences matching estimator, participation in food-for-work increases growth in total consumption and food consumption eighteen months after the drought. Separately, receiving free food raises growth in food consumption, but, surprisingly, negatively impacts food security. Food-for-work benefited households in the middle and upper tail of the consumption distribution, while the better-targeted free food program benefited the poorest. Evidence suggests these impacts demonstrate accumulated and persistent effects of food aid received in the first twelve months after the drought.     

The Effect of Lead Paint Abatement Laws on Rental Property Values

Lead paint is a source of childhood lead poisoning, a vicious disease with high costs to both the victims and society. Treatment of the disease requires placing the victim in a lead-free environment. Laws have been enacted by many localities, which would require removal of lead from residential property. However, property owners have resisted the enforcement of these laws with threats of abandonment. Theory suggests that abandonment will occur only if the value of the rental property after removal of the paint is less than the cost of removal. This paper shows that these costs have already been discounted into property values. Data from Baltimore, Maryland indicates that the market has placed a value of approximately $15,250 per structure or $3,813 per rental unit on expected abatement costs. This value in most cases is less than the value of the rental property. Thus abandonment should occur infrequently.     

Scale and scope economies in the multi-product banking firm

The multi-product nature of the banking firm is examined utilizing the translog cost function. This analysis indicates that, contrary to conventional wisdom, natural monopoly, scale economies and product-specific decreasing costs are not robust characterizations of the banking industry. There is, however, evidence that the cost function is characterized by economies of scope. The implications of these results are discussed and extensions of this approach suggested.     

Statistical Causality and Strategic Behavior in Industrial Markets

This paper proposes a simple test of the leader-follower model of strategic behavior. This test relates the temporal notions of leadership central to such models to the empirical methods of statistical causality. This test is performed using data from the US softwood plywood industry of the last three decades. Others have productively explored the spatial pricing practices of this industry by applying a leader-follower model. Similarly, we find that a leader-follower model explains well the temporal relations between key strategic variables (prices) in the industry. We conclude that the leader-follower model imposes meaningful restrictions on observable time-series data and that statistical causality is a useful method for testing these restrictions.     

Texas Roundtable on: The Future of Graduate Business School Education

A small group of academics and practitioners discuss the challenges now facing today's business schools. First and foremost is the challenge now being mounted by “online” courses to the traditional methods of classroom lecture and discussion, supplemented in some cases by apprenticeships and other kinds of “experiential” learning. How will traditional universities burdened with high and rising fixed costs for buildings and faculty compete with very low‐cost competitors—programs that reportedly have enabled star lecturers to reach audiences that, in some cases, have exceeded 100,000 students? In assessing the seriousness of the challenge, the panelists start by attempting to articulate what is valuable in current business school education—valuable enough to enable the best business schools to command as much as $175,000 for two‐year (or shorter) programs that confer MBAs. Much of the discussion focuses on establishing the relative importance of the disciplines, or body of knowledge, that are taught in business schools, as compared to the development of “collaborative” habits and interpersonal skills aimed at enabling students to make more effective use of their knowledge within large organizations. Some of the panelists, notably Jeff Sandefer, founder of the (now ten‐year old) Acton School of Business, argue that far too much of today's business school curriculum is devoted to the classroom and conventional learning. And many of the changes in the top business schools during the past decade appear to reflect Sandefer's charges. But, to the extent there is a consensus among the other panelists, it is that the best business schools will continue to try to accomplish both of these goals, though with varying degrees of effectiveness, while most schools attempt to maintain their specialized capabilities, and carve out distinctive niches based on them. For some schools, such specialization is likely to mean continued emphasis on theory and classroom learning—though almost certainly with more attention to practical application and collaborative decision‐making. For other schools, the main focus will continue to be the development of general management and leadership skills.     

Saints and Markets: Activists and the Supply of Credence Goods

This paper contains a theoretical exploration of the potential effects of an information-supplying activist on a market for credence goods. Using a non-cooperative game-theoretic model with incomplete information, we find that such an activist can alter the decisions of firms and consumers and enhance the social welfare of market exchange. We also find that an activist can support equilibria in which firms differentiate their products on some credence characteristic even though this characteristic remains unknown to the consumer both prior and subsequent to consumption. In general, our analysis has several implications for the study of private collective action in markets.     

FINANCIAL CRIME IN AUSTRALIA

Financial crime is increasingly seen as a threat to the integrity of Australia's important financial sector. This paper examines the difficulties of evaluating the costs of financial crime and considers specific initiatives that have been undertaken in recent years to combat such activities.     

Weathering the Storm: The Impact of the East Asian Crisis on Farm Households in Indonesia and Thailand

This article assesses the impact of the East Asian financialcrisis on farm households in two of the region's most affectedcountries. Indonesia and Thailand, using detailed household-levelsurvey data collected before and after the crisis began. Althoughthe nature of the shocks in the two countries were similar,the impact on farmers' income (particularly on distribution)was quite different. In Thailand, poor farmers bore the bruntof the crisis, in part because of their greater reliance onthe urban economy, than did poor farmers in Indonesia. Urban-rurallinks are much weaker in Indonesia. Farmers in both countries,particularly those specializing in export crops, benefited fromthe currency devaluation. Although there is some evidence thatthe productivity of the smallest landholders declined over theperiod in question, it is difficult to attribute this directlyto the financial crisis. At least in Thailand, a rural creditcrunch does not seem to have materialized.