Information Disclosure and Consumer Credit Knowledge: A Longitudinal Analysis

Early evaluations of Truth-in-Lending have observed impressive gains in consumer knowledge about interest rates. Contrary to original goals, consumers with more education, income, and debt experience have benefited far more than low-income and minority consumers. How will these results change over time as consumers gain credit experience with the aid of disclosure? Has disclosure improved consumer understanding about finance charges, and what factors beyond socio-economic status might have enhanced consumer knowledge of credit terms? These questions are addressed in this report of a large sample of California households surveyed at two points in time. The longitudinal analysis shows individual changes in knowledge, the effects of credit experience on learning, and a projection of future levels of credit knowledge.     

Introduction to a Debate on City-Regions: New Geographies of Governance,Democracy and Social Reproduction

In this introduction to a special Debates and Developments forum on city-regions, we argue that the recent revival of interest in city-regions has been constructed around a rather narrow set of empirical and theoretical issues relating to exchange, interspatial competition and globalization. The ‘new’ city-regionalism results in a reification of the city-region as an autonomous political agent of the global space economy. We outline an alternative approach to investigating and understanding geographies of city-regionalism, highlighting: a politics of governance and state re-territorialization around the city-region; the role of democracy and citizenship in city-region politics; and tensions around social reproduction and sustainability across the city-region.     

Prices versus Rationing: Marshallian Surplus and Mandatory Water Restrictions*

An aggregate daily water demand for Sydney is estimated and used to calculate the difference in Marshallian surplus between using the metered price of household water to regulate total consumption versus mandatory water restrictions for the period 2004/2005. The loss in Marshallian surplus from using mandatory water restrictions is calculated to be $235 million. On a per capita basis this equates to approximately $55 per person or about $150 per household – a little less than half the average Sydney household water bill in 2005.     

CEOs' Outside Employment Opportunities and the Lack of Relative Performance Evaluation in Compensation Contracts

Although agency theory suggests that firms should index executive compensation to remove market‐wide effects (i.e., RPE), there is little evidence to support this theory. Oyer (2004, Journal of Finance 59, 1619–1649) posits that an absence of RPE is optimal if the CEO's reservation wages from outside employment opportunities vary with the economy's fortunes. We directly test and find support for Oyer's (2004) theory. We argue that the CEO's outside opportunities depend on his talent, as proxied by the CEO's financial press visibility and his firm's industry‐adjusted ROA. Our results are robust to alternate explanations such as managerial skimming, oligopoly, and asymmetric benchmarking.     

Household Production and Capitalist Development in Contemporary Russia

This essay reviews four recent books based on research on the development of capitalism and the position of household‐based farming in post‐Soviet Russia. Each of the books represents a different set of conceptual assumptions and is based on different methods of enquiry. It is argued that a problematic feature of much of the literature on this topic is that it begins from the assumption that successful capitalist development in Russian agriculture should be based on the development of small‐scale family farming. This tends to obscure the variety of forms of production that have emerged so far and the range of different relationships between them.     

TOWARD BEHAVIORAL MODELING OF ALASKA GROUNDFISH FISHERIES: A DISCRETE CHOICE APPROACH TO BERING SEA/ALEUTIAN ISLANDS TRAWL FISHERIES

This article implements a discrete choice model of fishery participation in the multispecies trawl fisheries of the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands Region off Alaska. Nonparametric estimates of the operation-specific moments of quasirent by fishery and week are used to explain probabilities of choosing different target fisheries. There are pronounced risk aversion, seasonal, and relative performance effects. Notably, the model runs with regularly collected data, so this type of discrete choice modeling can be used routinely in the management and policy evaluation process. Improvements are needed, though, in both the quality and the extent of economic data on fisheries in Alaska and elsewhere in the United States. (JEL Q22, C25, Q28)