The cost of being late? The case of credit card penalty fees

This paper is the first in the literature to examine the determinants of US credit card penalty fees. Many critics of credit card fees – including a number of US Senators – have argued that credit card penalty fees reflect banks’ market share. Using a unique data set we find that fees are increasing in customer risk which supports the position of defenders of penalty fees, such as banks. However, our finding that fees are increasing in a bank's market share is consistent with the concerns expressed by politicians and regulators. We also find card penalty fees are direct substitutes for card interest rates.     

Disciplinary sanctions in English Premiership Football: Is there a racial dimension?

This paper assesses the evidence for a racial difference in both the dispensation of formal disciplinary sanctions and in the number of fouls called by referees in professional football. The study uses a unique dataset comprising player match-level information drawn from five recent seasons of the English Premiership. These data were merged with data from other sources to identify, among other things, the racial affiliation of the player across four separate categories (viz., white, black, mixed race, and Asian). No systematic evidence of an unfair treatment of players from the non-white minority groups in respect of either the receipt of disciplinary cards or in the number of penalised fouls called by referees was detected.     

The Challenge of Police Reform in England and Wales

As a recent Home Office White Paper 'Building Communities, Beating Crime' demonstrates, radical change now confronts the police service. Policing responsibilities and police budgets are being devolved to Basic Command Units and there will be radical internal changes in the make up and role of police and civilian staff in the service. The modernization process now contemplated by the Government can be expected to encompass both a number of issues identified within the 1993 Sheehy Report (particularly in relation to local pay bargaining) and further efficiency reforms that will impact significantly on the role and status of the police and the structure of police forces throughout England and Wales.     

Non‐parametric Modelling of Spatial Price Relationships

We apply non‐parametric methods to a consideration of price transmission processes within US egg markets at the turn of the nineteenth century. Gordon (National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 7833, 2000) labelled this as an era of ‘Great Inventions’ which contributed to the subsequent years of significant productivity growth and noted that the development of mechanical refrigeration and transportation technologies played an important role in this growth. Our models present certain advantages relative to parametric models traditionally employed in price transmission analyses. We compare results derived from local polynomial modelling with those obtained using non‐linear threshold models. Both techniques suggest that US egg markets were interrelated at the turn of the nineteenth century. However, non‐parametric techniques often suggest a higher degree of price transmission than that implied by threshold models. Results also suggest that threshold models may have difficulties in adequately capturing price relationship dynamics, especially when these are of a highly nonlinear nature.     

Design — the starting point for CIM

The author reviews the spectrum of computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) aids now available to speed up the development, manufacture and marketing of new products. To help firms to decide which aid is best suited to their needs the author presents a 2-by-2 typology of business environments, the dimensions being uncertainty and complexity. For each cell he derives a factor critical to achievement of competitive advantage, to which is matched a suitable form of CIM.
The paper includes a survey of the characteristics and limitations of commercially available hardware and associated software, advice on the administration of the systems and the storage of information generated. The author concludes by defining the key to the successful use of CIM as ensuring its conscious integration into the business, which means having a clear understanding of what is involved in design and development, management awareness of and commitment to the potential usefulness of CIM, defining clear responsibilities for creating and owning data and planned introduction of a design and engineering information system.     

Regulating Life Assurance: Objectives and Machinery

Misdirected regulation can be not merely ineffective but actually damaging to customers. Recent developments in the regulation of life assurance sales show how this can happen.     

Testing export-led growth in Bangladesh in a multivarate VAR framework

Although the link between trade and growth has long been discussed, systematic empirical investigation of the relationship has been undertaken only relatively recently. A number of time-series studies exist for individual countries in the area of export-led growth, but for Bangladesh there has been little work in this area. This study seeks to bridge an important gap in the literature, and is perhaps the first to use Johansen's multivariate framework taking the terms of trade as an additional variable for Bangladesh. The findings suggest that the direction of both long and short-term causality is from income to exports. This result is hardly surprising as, for most of the period covered, Bangladesh has followed an inward-looking strategy of development that discriminated against exports.     

THE ESTIMATED EFFECT OF CATHOLIC SCHOOLING ON EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES USING PROPENSITY SCORE MATCHING

This paper examines the effect of attending a Catholic high school on educational outcomes. The statistical analysis is based on data obtained from the US National Educational Longitudinal Study. Using propensity score matching methods to control for selection bias, we find that Catholic schooling improves maths test scores, with stronger effects for males than for females, but appears to have little effect (if any) on reading scores. Catholic schooling also raises high school graduation rates and substantially increases the likelihood of enrolment in a 4‐year college. Use of the difference‐in‐difference method suggests that the effect of Catholic schooling on changes in maths scores is more muted, though still statistically significant.