Transnational Corporations and Urban Development

Transnational corporations (TNCs) in Africa play significant roles in controlling utilities, privately appropriating common resources, and planning urban space. On the one hand, the extralegal powers of TNCs are legitimized with patronizing discourses about the incompetence of African nations in managing their own affairs and with the specter of a “resource curse” that supposedly immobilizes the self‐governing capacities of Africans. On the other hand, TNCs arrogate to themselves statutory municipal power, ignore or manipulate various channels of accountability, and privately appropriate sociallycreated rents. Some critics of TNCs propose a withdrawal from globalization or greater regulation to limit the power of TNCs. But protectionist or isolationist approaches are entirely mistaken and further undermine the social management of the commons in Africa. Instead, Africans should seek directly to break the chains of monopoly and oligopoly, especially over natural resources. They should also strive to use land for the common good and to systematically build social states in Africa to overcome subservience to TNCs. While previous attempts at autonomous development in Africa have sometimes led to military action by former colonizers and current neo‐colonial imperialists, recent evidence from Africa suggests that such a strategy might succeed now. This article proposes to extend the politics of urban reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era in the United States to contemporary Africa. In doing so, it shows how African cities today are working to create local capacity by municipalizing services that have been privatized, such as distribution of water. Despite many obstacles posed by TNCs and their home governments, Africans are making great strides to overcome the enduring legacies of colonialism.     

School Expenditures and Educational Discrimination under the Fourteenth Amendment

This paper examines the decline in use of the Knight-Keynes uncertainty concept in mainstream economics. Using electronic archives, it shows that the frequency of its appearance in leading journals of economics has fallen rapidly from the 1950s. As well as to the declining popularity of Keynesian ideas since about 1970, the decrease in this use of the uncertainty concept is additionally related to the increasing mathematical formalization of economics and to the prevalence of a positivist emphasis on prediction. Some possible causes of this formalization are examined. Finally the essay discusses the prospects for a broadening of economics within universities, beyond a relatively narrow preoccupation with predictive formalism and including a reinvigorated Keynesianism.     

The control of politicians within a constitutional framework: the case of state-level recall provisions

As previously recognized, the structure of representative democracy is endogenous and the choice of constitutional provisions selected by such organizations is important. The present paper focuses on constitutional choices that work to control the behaviour of elected officials by examining the constitutional ease of recalling elected officials across the 50 states. After developing a numerical measure of the ‘ease’ with which registered voters can recall officials, ordinary logistic, ordered logistic and tobit models are employed to examine the factors of such an endogenous choice across states. The results are quite consistent with the theoretical models developed previously by public choice and constitutional scholars.     

Cartels and the Incentive to Cheat: Evidence from the Classroom

Several points about cartel behavior are illustrated, using the curve on an exam.     

Technical Change,Effective Demand and Employment

Ricardo and Marx saw technological change as a possible cause of long-period unemployment. Neoclassical and Schumpeterian economists regard technological unem ployment as a transitory phenomenon. This paper argues that the capital critique (i) demolishes the neoclassical claim that market mechanisms will restore full employment whenever workers are displaced by technical change, and (ii) rehabilitates the old Ricardian argument that automatic compensation factors are generally absent. The neo-Schumpeterian notion of autonomous investment is also rejected, in favour of the view that, in the long period, all investment is induced. By extending Keynes's theory of effective demand to the long period through a model based on the supermultiplier, this paper suggests that the ultimate engines of growth are located in the autonomous components of effective demand--exports, government spending and autonomous con sumption. Technical change plays a role in the accumulation process through its effects on consumption patterns and the material input requirements. However, the impact of technical change is now seen to depend upon circumstances such as income distribution, the availability of bank liquidity and exchange rate policy.     

General‐interest versus specialty journals: Using intellectual influence of econometrics research to rank economics journals and articles

This paper demonstrates the potential problem in using existing economics journal rankings to evaluate the research productivity of scholars by constructing a new ranking of economics journals and articles. Based on 2142 econometrics sample articles published from 2000 to 2005, our ranking results show that the intellectual influence of an econometrics article published in several econometrics/statistics journals is much higher than if it were published in the most prestigious general‐interest journal. Given that a study's potential influence is integrated into the submission decision, this suggests a substantial downward bias toward econometricians when existing rankings are used to evaluate their research productivity. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Roles of Economic Freedom and Regulatory Quality in Creating a Favorable Environment for Investment in Energy R&D,Infrastructure, and Capacity

Sustainable investment in energy requires a favorable economic and regulatory environment. A random effects model (PLS estimations), using a four‐year panel, reveals the growth rate in real per capita GDP for OECD nations as an increasing function of both economic freedom and regulatory quality. These results underscore the critical roles that economic freedom and regulatory quality play, directly and indirectly, in creating an environment conducive to sustainable investment in energy R&D and infrastructure.     

Public Choice and the EPA, 20 Years Later: An Exploratory Study

Nearly 20 years ago, Mixon (1995) found that urban warming is positively related to the probability of an EPA citation for a violation of carbon emissions standards, whereas lobbying effort reduces the probability of such a citation. This study revisits the Mixon (1995) framework by using data on ozone violations. The results indicate that EPA citations for ozone violations are not significantly related to lobbying effort.     

AFDC Payments and Illegitimacy Ratios: A Reappraisal of Endogeneity Using Panel Data

This paper develops a rational choice model of the fertility of single women in the presence of government transfers. Evidence is presented which suggests that real AFDC (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) bene~ts leads to higher rates of illegitimacy. In fact, the unbiased parameter estimate which we present is six times larger than those estimates using OLS (Caudill and Mixon 1993). Also, the point elasticity estimate of real public benefit levels with respect to changes in the illegitimacy rate produced in this study is very robust, approximately +1.4. Our result, which encompasses all fertility of single women in the U.S., is quite encouraging because it falls within an elasticity range of +1.3 to +2.1 produced by a recent study (Clarke and Strauss 1998) for black and white teen fertility (for single women), respectively.     

Investment behavior of mutual fund shareholders: The evidence from aggregate fund flows

The relationship of stock market returns with components of aggregate equity mutual fund flows (new sales, redemptions, exchanges-in, and exchanges-out) is examined. Vector autoregressions and tests of linear feedback show that the flow-return relationship exists solely between returns and exchanges-in and -out. Further, only exchanges-out are responsible for the contrarian flow behavior noted by Warther (1995). The evidence suggests that the various components reflect different investor objectives and information.