Enhancing economic literacy of classroom teachers

For the past two summers, the Division of Education and the Division of Business and Economics at Indiana University at Kokomo have collaborated to produce an intense teamtaught summer economics course for pre-service education majors and in-service classroom teachers. The dual emphasis on content and application allows economics to integrate every aspect of the classroom and allows Praxis achievement. This paper explores the essential nature of Praxis in making the content or practice link—so critical for successful implementation of economics in K-12 classrooms. To determine their attitudes toward and knowledge of economics education, a pretest and post-test format was adopted. In addition, the institutional enhancers and inhibitors that dramatically affected the development and implementation of the new course of study are presented. This paper was presented at the Forty-Fourth International Atlantic Economic Society Conference in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, October 9–12, 1997. Discussants' comments are incorporated.     

Agri-environmental policies in the EU and United States: A comparison

Agri-environmental policies (AEPs) in the United States and the European Union are examples of payments for environmental services that pay farmers to reduce the negative externalities of agricultural production, while serving as a means to transfer public funds to farmers. We show that despite similar origins, AEPs in the two regions differ both in their specific objectives and in their implementation. For example, AEPs in most member states of the EU-15 have the additional objective of using agriculture as a driver for rural development. This objective is achieved by compensating farmers for the private delivery of positive public goods, such as attractive landscapes, produced by agriculture. The rationale is market failure, and there is empirical evidence that Europeans are willing to pay for such positive externalities. No comparable provision exists in U.S. policy. By contrast, U.S. AEPs focus almost entirely on reducing agriculture's negative externalities, such as soil erosion. Second, we find that U.S. programs are more targeted than their EU counterparts, and take opportunity cost into account. The EU programs, on the other hand, address a wider range of externalities, and are focused more on the paying for a particular farming process than reducing specific negative externalities. The EU takes a broader view of AEPs than does the United States, both in terms of type of activity that can be funded, and by using less targeting by land characteristics, and so the European program could be more easily used as a mechanism for transferring income to producers. Despite this, we find evidence that many of the amenities targeted by the programs are demanded by the population.     

Trading frenzies and their impact on real investment

We study a model in which a capital provider learns from the price of a firm's security in deciding how much capital to provide for new investment. This feedback effect from the financial market to the investment decision gives rise to trading frenzies, in which speculators all wish to trade like others, generating large pressure on prices. Coordination among speculators is sometimes desirable for price informativeness and investment efficiency, but speculators' incentives push in the opposite direction, so that they coordinate exactly when it is undesirable. We analyze the effect of various market parameters on the likelihood of trading frenzies to arise.     

The JEC Revisited: Did Debt Undermine Stability?

The Joint Executive Committee (JEC), one of the most studied cartels in all of economics, was at best partially successful at maintaining collusion. The railroad cartel faced frequent breakdowns and re-contracting efforts. This paper considers the effects that large capital debt may have had on the members of the JEC. The JEC is compared to the express cartel of the period in which all firms were creditors. The latter had no breakdowns during the same period. It is shown through a small modification in an oligopolistic supergame that debt-burdened firms are less likely to maintain a stable cartel agreement than a cartel of creditors, a result that is consistent with the experience of these two cartels.

Disney in Spain (1930–1935)

Abstract

This article looks at the ways in which the global brand par excellence – Mickey Mouse – spread throughout Spain in the early 1930s. In tracing the creative and commercial interplay with the Mickey character we show how the Disney Company failed to obtain any significant intellectual property rights in its own name or obtain a sympathetic hearing by Spanish patent and trademark officials. Yet this was undoubtedly a period of significant global development of the Disney brand. With the attempt to explain such an apparent contradictory situation, this article highlights the importance of the management of particular struggles in the flux of desires, appropriation and investments that contributed to the emergence of the elusive ‘merchandising right’.     

The existence of gender‐specific promotion standards in the U.S.

This paper is motivated by the claim that promotion probabilities are lower for women than men. Using data from the 1984 and 1989 National Longitudinal Youth Surveys, this paper tests this claim and two related hypotheses concerning training and ability. It is found that females are less likely to be promoted than males, and females receive less training than males. The relationship between promotion and gender varies across occupations, however, suggesting that the alleged glass ceiling faced by women and other minorities in the workplace is not uniform across all labor markets. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

LABOUR FORCE PARTICIPATION, RACE AND HUMAN CAPITAL: INFLUENCE ON EARNINGS DISTRIBUTIONS ACROSS STATES

In this paper we analyze the level of income inequality across states in 1970 and 1980 for several demographic groups. Furthermore, we examine the impact of labor force participation (LFP), education and other variables on inequality. We find that for tshe whole population, states with high LFP by females are states with low income inequality. The same holds true for states with high LFP for men. When we disaggregate by race, the results are quite consistent for whites, but not for blacks. States with relatively high education levels are associated with high inequality levels for the white cohort and the whole population, but there appears to be no similar association between education and inequality across states for blacks.     

Models of Personnel Management: A Means of Understanding the Diversity of Personnel Practices?

Kathy Monks, who is a Lecturer in Human Resource Management at Dublin City University Business School, discusses the results of a survey of the roles and responsibilities of personnel managers in Eire. She describes four main models of personnel practice which she found and compares them with those developed by Tyson and Fell in 1986 drawing on research in the UK. She goes on to consider why organisations adopt simple or complex personnel management pratices.