Self‐employment among women: Do children matter more than we previously thought?

This paper presents an estimation approach that addresses the problems of sample selection and endogeneity of fertility decisions when estimating the effect of young children on women's self‐employment. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, 1982–2006, we find that ignoring self‐selection and endogeneity leads to underestimating the effect of young children. Once both sources of biases are accounted for, the estimated effect of young children roughly triples when compared to uncorrected results. This finding is robust to several changes in the specification and to the use of a different dataset.     

Does a Nearby Murder Affect Housing Prices and Rents? The Case of Sydney

We measure the impact of murders on prices and rents of homes in Sydney. We find that housing prices fall by 3.9 per cent for homes within 0.2 miles of the murder in the year following the murder, and weaker results in the second year after a murder. We do not find any effects of murders on rents. Higher media coverage and being located closer to the murder (within 0.1 mile) have no additional effect on prices. Taken together, our findings suggest that proximity to a murder affects nearby property prices, particularly in the first year after the incident.     

A Crisis of the Overcrowded Future: Shadow Banking and the Political Economy of Financial Innovation

This article focuses on the role the shadow banking system played in the financial crisis of 2007–9. Engaging with emergent theories of shadow banking, I inquire into its structural role in contemporary capitalism. My main premise here is that the crisis of 2007–9 is distinct in financial history because it did not centre on any organised market. Rather, it was crisis of the overcrowded financial channels bridging the present and the future, which have become congested because of the massive concentration of financial values generated, yet not sustained, through the shadow banking network. My analysis suggests that shadow banking has determined the nature of financial crisis of 2007–9 and continues to play a necessary role in financial capitalism based on futurity. Drawing on scholarship in financial Keynesianism, contemporary legal studies and early evolutionary political economy, I argue that shadow banking is best seen as the organic institutional infrastructure of financialised capitalism based on debt and geared towards futurity, a concept originally developed by John Commons.     

Remittances of Immigrants in Greece

The present paper is a case study of the remittance behavior of immigrants in Greece. In addition to some of the usual factors affecting remittance behavior, it examines five factors than have received little attention in the literature: relative deprivation, existence of property in the country of origin, expectation on inheritance, stability of employment, and more than one migrant in the family. We use Heckman's selection model with survey data from 607 immigrants. Significant factors for the decision to remit are the existence of children living with the migrant, stability of employment, and gender. The basic factors affecting the size of remittances are the level of income, the existence of children living with the migrant, and the length of time in Greece.     

Performance assessment of ensemble learning systems in financial data classification

Financial data classification plays an important role in investment and banking industry with the purpose to control default risk, improve cash and select the best customers. Ensemble learning and classification systems are becoming gradually more applied to classify financial data where outputs from different classification systems are combined. The objective of this research is to assess the relative performance of existing state‐of‐the‐art ensemble learning and classification systems with applications to corporate bankruptcy prediction and credit scoring. The considered ensemble systems include AdaBoost, LogitBoost, RUSBoost, subspace, and bagging ensemble system. The experimental results from three datasets: one is composed of quantitative attributes, one encompasses qualitative data, and another one combines both quantitative and qualitative attributes. By using ten‐fold cross‐validation method, the experimental results show that AdaBoost is effective in terms of low classification error, limited complexity, and short time processing of the data. In addition, the experimental results show that ensemble classification systems outperform existing models that were recently validated on the same databases. Therefore, ensemble classification system can be employed to increase the reliability and consistency of financial data classification task.     

State intervention and the microcredit market: the role of business development services

We analyze in this paper how various forms of state intervention can impact microfinance institutions’ lending behavior. Using a simple model where entrepreneurs receive individual uncollateralized loans, we show that, not surprisingly, state intervention through the loan guarantee increases the number of entrepreneurs receiving a loan. However, after modeling business development services (BDS) provided by the microfinance institution, we show that the loan guarantee can have a counterproductive effect by reducing the number of entrepreneurs benefiting from such services. We therefore analyze an alternative policy: BDS subsidization. We show that if BDS are efficient enough and are targeted toward less performing borrowers, then—for fixed government expenditures—such subsidies do better in terms of financial inclusion than the loan guarantee. Moreover, we argue that—under similar conditions—BDS subsidization alone does better in terms of financial inclusion than a mix of policies.     

Banking inefficiency in Central and Eastern European countries under a quadratic loss function

We employ a quadratic loss function using a forward-looking rational expectations model to estimate the dynamics of banking inefficiency scores in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) over the period 1998–2005. Results show that there is heterogeneity in the speed of adjustment to the long run equilibrium across countries and over time, while it appears that the recent accession to the EU has not led to an increase in the speed of adjustment, as it would be expected in light of the integration process prior to the accession. Ownership asserts certain influence on the speed at which banks correct past-period inefficiency.     

Evaluating an Environmental Right: Information Disclosure, Public Comment, and Government Decision Making in Ontario

In 1993, the Ontario government enacted the Environmental Bill of Rights (EBR). The EBR guarantees residents of the province, among other things, the right to comment on permit requests to take water and to discharge into the air and a guarantee that these comments are taken into account in the decision to approve or deny a permit. We model the firm's decision to request a permit, a resident's decision to provide public comment, and the government's decision to approve or deny permit requests to use water or air. Our examination of 1,000 government decisions regarding permit requests leads to two key findings: (1) few permit requests receive any public comment; and (2) to the extent that the public does comment, we find no empirical evidence that comments affect the likelihood that the government will deny a permit request. Our theoretical model anticipates the first result: there are few comments observed for permit applications, because each individual has an incentive to undercontribute to the provision of a public good. The second result did not support the theoretical argument we advance: government, acting to maximize social welfare, takes public concern as a signal of environmental damage. En 1993, le gouvernement de l'Ontario a édicté la Charte des droits environnementaux (CDE). La CDE garantit aux résidents de la province, entre autres, le droit de faire des observations sur les demandes de permis pour puiser l'eau et rejeter des quantités limitées de substances polluantes dans l'air, et garantit aussi que ces observations seront prises en considération dans la décision d'accorder ou de refuser un permis. Nous avons modélisé la décision d'une entreprise de déposer une demande de permis, la décision d'un résident de faire des observations et la décision du gouvernement d'accorder ou de refuser les demandes de permis pour l'usage de l'eau ou de l'air. L'examen de 1000 décisions du gouvernement concernant des demandes de permis a menéà deux principaux constats: 1. peu de demandes de permis reçoivent des observations du public; 2. lorsque le public soumet des observations, aucune évidence empirique ne laisse supposer que les observations influent sur la probabilité que le gouvernement rejette une demande de permis. Notre modèle théorique a anticipé le premier constat: les demandes de permis reçoivent peu d'observations parce que chaque individu a un incitatif à sous–contribuer à la fourniture d'un bien collectif. Le deuxième constat n'a pas appuyé notre argument théorique voulant que le gouvernement, qui agit afin de maximiser le bien–être collectif, tienne compte des préoccupations du public comme un signal de dommage environnemental.     

The effect of human resource management policies on organizational performance in Greek manufacturing firms

This article investigates if human resource management (HRM) policies have an impact on organizational performance in the Greek manufacturing context. The research is based on a sample of 178 firms. The “universalistic model” of HRM is adopted to conduct the investigation. The results show strong support for the model, indicating that the HRM policies of recruitment, training, promotion, incentives, benefits, involvement, and health and safety are positively related with organizational performance. The study both contributes to HRM theory and has important implications for practitioners. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.