Black–White gap in self-employment. Does intra-race heterogeneity exist?

Past research on the determinants of self-employment in the United States has emphasized the importance of ethnicity. In particular, self-employment rates for Blacks lag far behind those of other racial groups for comparable individuals. This research examines two related issues: Does the dummy variable coefficient associated with the Black–White self-employment gap exhibit intra-race heterogeneity? Second, does this variable have diminished or increased impact across generations? We decompose the sample into subgroups and find that the size of the Black–White self-employment gap varies within subgroups of African-Americans.     

Globalization,labour market deregulation and trade unions in Singapore

This contribution examines recent trends in globalization and their effects on the labour market in Singapore. It discusses the responses of the government and the trade union movement to the challenges of globalization, and concludes by looking at the changing role of the trade union movement in Singapore. Citing government policies in dealing with the recent economic crisis, the article highlights the ‘managed flexibility’ approach of the government. We find that the trade union movement has gained considerably in stature and influence in providing training for the workers and helping them cope with retrenchment and the recession.     

An empirical note on the impact of federal deposit insurance on bank failures in the U.S.

This study empirically examines the impact of federal deposit insurance coverage on the failure rate of commercial banks in the U.S. over the 1963–91 period. The analysis allows for the potential bank failure rate impact of the growth rate of real GDP, the real prime lending rate, the real cost of funds, and the commercial bank tangible capital-to-asset ratio, while measuring federal deposit insurance coverage as the percentage of deposits at federally insured banks that was covered by federal deposit insurance. The instrumental variables' estimates indicate that the greater the extent of federal deposit insurance coverage, the higher the bank failure rate.     

The Effect of Increased Regulation on Capital Costs and Manual Labor Requirements of Nuclear Power Plants

The purpose of this study is to expand previously published work in examining the attitudes of financial managers towards the investment tax credit. This article specifically investigates and analyzes the perceptions that financial managers have with respect to the impact of the ITC in the input allocation decisions of the firm. This research indicates that financial managers do not believe that the ITC is an important inducement to investment behavior. More importantly, the ITC does not often result in employing capital that requires hiring additional employees. However, this research indicates that there might be an important exception to this. There appears to be a marked relationship with respect to those who stated that the ITC resulted in purchasing new technology and respondents who staled that the ITC resulted in increasing employment. In limited cases, therefore, the ITC appears to lead to an expansion o1 the work lorce through capital formation.     

Inflation regimes,core inflation measures and the relationship between producer and consumer price inflation

The main purposes are to develop a method for measuring the economies of scope, which involves the use of non-parametric production frontiers and does not require information on input prices; and to apply this method to individual hospital data drawn from a sample of Spanish hospitals. The results confirm the presence of technical inefficiencies and also of potential and non-exploited economies of scope. The combination that produces most economies of scope is that of gynaecology and paediatrics.     

Islamic banking: Interest-free or interest-based?

A unique feature of Islamic banking, in theory, is its profit-and-loss sharing (PLS) paradigm. In practice, however, we find that Islamic banking is not very different from conventional banking. Our study on Malaysia shows that only a negligible portion of Islamic bank financing is strictly PLS based and that Islamic deposits are not interest-free, but are closely pegged to conventional deposits. Our findings suggest that the rapid growth in Islamic banking is largely driven by the Islamic resurgence worldwide rather than by the advantages of the PLS paradigm and that Islamic banks should be subject to regulations similar to those of their western counterparts.