Bimodal issues,the median voter model,Legislator's ideology,and abortion

The median voter model is widely used in the public choice literature to explain legislator's behavior. According to the model, if voter preferences are unimodal, a vote-maximizing legislator should mirror the position of the median voter. However, the median voter model has not been tested on bimodal issues. This paper fills this critical void by empirically testing the applicability of the median voter model on an issue which clearly meets the criteria for being bimodal: abortion. Using a variety of attitudinal measures from large sample public opinion polls and constituency demographics, this study finds that Senate voting on the 1994 Freedom of Abortion Access bill was highly related to the senator's personal characteristics—especially ideology—and not to constituent opinion or demographics.     

The Policy Choices and Reaction Functions of Bank of England MPC Members

The results of an econometric exercise are presented, showing that Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members appointed from outside the ranks of Bank of England staff (outsiders) react differently to forecasts of inflation and output than those appointed from within the Bank (insiders). All results are reinforced by the well‐established findings that, compared with outsiders, insiders choose higher interest rates, are more likely to vote as a bloc, and feature on the winning side of policy decisions more frequently. On the basis of these results, it is argued that the current MPC framework is biased toward the policy choices of insiders.     

AN AXIOMATIZATION OF QUANTILES ON THE DOMAIN OF DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS

In an environment in which the primitive is the space of distribution functions, we characterize the quantile functions by the axioms ordinal covariance, monotonicity with respect to first-order stochastic dominance, and upper semicontinuity. We show how to characterize the VaR in a similar manner.     

Integrated Market-Immersion Approach To Teaching New Product Development In Technologically-Oriented Teams

This article presents a market immersion methodology for teaching NPD in technologically-oriented teams. This methodology was developed during the early 1990s at the Lally School of Management and Technology of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Since then, it has been successfully utilized to train in excess of one hundred MBA-level student teams. The NPD course is taught by a 5-member cross-functional team of faculty with backgrounds in marketing, manufacturing operations, and accounting. The course is modeled on Cooper's stage gate process, and the course is designed to provide a combination of classroom and apprenticeship experiences. The 6-credit, year-long course requires students to work in self-directed teams of approximately 5 to 6 members. Each student team chooses its own industry or technology domain in which to concentrate its efforts, and students undertake intensive market and field research in order to assess any existing market opportunities. Once a specific target market and market need have been identified, students are then required to design a product and an organization to meet that need. In specific, students must produce a detailed marketing, manufacturing, operations, advertising, distribution, and financial plan that can bring their product to market. During the process, students create multiple potential product designs, build mock-ups of their products, and field test the mock-ups. At every phase of the course, the teams are continuously immersed in real customer markets. As a result, teams must struggle to incorporate new market information and learning into their project in a consistent and holistic manner. The following article presents the curriculum content and tools, lessons learned, and student reactions to this original pedagogical approach to teaching NPD. Due to the length of the course, particular attention is paid to the teaming issues that naturally arise when teams work together on long-run projects. © 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.     

An Empirical Comparison of the Four Channel Flow Model and Adventure Experience Paradigm

The objective of this study was to conduct empirical comparisons between two models of optimal experience within an on-site whitewater kayaking setting using a modification of the Experience Sampling Method. Four concerns are examined: (1) differences in explanatory power between the four channel flow model and the Adventure Experience Paradigm, (2) convergent validity among measures used to determine conditions within these models, (3) differences among measures of perceived challenge and risk between test times of Class I-V river difficulty, and (4) differences among measures of perceived skill and competence between test times of Class I-V river difficulty. Questionnaires were administered in the Cheat River Canyon in West Virginia to 52 whitewater kayakers at eight sites of various levels of river difficulty. Data were analyzed at the experience level, rather than between subjects, using 409 experience sampling observations. Hypothesis testing, performed with statistical analyses (stepwise regression, correlations, and repeated measures ANOVA), suggested that the explanatory powers of the four channel flow model and Adventure Experience Paradigm were similar and indicated support for convergent and ecological validity of measures used to determine conditions within each of the two models.     

If You’re Going Through Hell,Keep Going: Nonlinear Effects of Financial Liberalization in Transition Economies

Did increasing the level and pace of financial liberalization during transition expose countries to crises? And if a crisis did strike, did liberalization do more harm or good? Using a database of 28 transition economies over 22 years, this article examines these questions across a host of economic outcomes, including savings and the size of the private sector. The results provide evidence that, while liberalization may initially increase the probability of a crisis, the prospect of a crisis drops dramatically at higher levels of financial openness. Moreover, the benefits of liberalization across several metrics outweigh the risks of these intermediate stages.     

Money and capital

The effects of money (anticipated inflation) on capital formation is a classic issue in macroeconomics. Previous papers adopt reduced-form approaches, putting money in the utility function, or imposing cash in advance, but using otherwise frictionless models. We follow instead a literature that tries to be explicit about the frictions making money essential. This introduces new elements, including a two-sector structure with centralized and decentralized markets, stochastic trading opportunities, and bargaining. These elements matter quantitatively and numerical results differ from findings in the reduced-form literature. The analysis also reduces a gap between microfounded monetary economics and mainstream macro.