The NBA and the influx of international basketball players

The determinants of salaries for professional athletes in the National Basketball Association (NBA) are examined to investigate how international athletes have fared relative to athletes trained in the United States. It is found that international basketball players were paid a large premium above other players of similar skills and characteristics for the 1996–97 and 1997–98 seasons, after which the premium disappeared. This temporary premium is likely attributable to a?‘winner's curse’?experienced by NBA teams before investing significant resources in scouting and evaluating international players.     

Textbook Treatments of the Financial Market in the IS-LM Model

Intermediate macroeconomics textbooks introduce financial markets into the IS-LM analysis but typically as a beginning-of-period consideration. Here the financial market is introduced in an end-of-period model.     

Community college economics instruction: Results from a National Science Foundation Project

The principal investigator of a National Science Foundation project, “Economics at Community Colleges,” surveyed community college economics faculty and organized workshops, webinars, and regional meetings to address community college faculty isolation from new ideas in economics and economics instruction. Survey results, combined with National Study of Postsecondary Faculty data, help fill a lacuna in information about community college faculty. A key finding is the reliance in community college economic instruction on part-time faculty, including many who do not hold a graduate degree in economics. The project's webinars reached the most community college faculty, while the workshops were most effective in improving economics instruction. Areas for future research are identified.     

Comments on “Consumption Values of Trade Unions”

The credit default swap (CDS) is implicated in the global financial crises because a vast market for securities collateralized by subprime mortgages and consumer debt could not have materialized if hedge funds and other holders of these instruments lacked a means of hedging default "risk." The argument is made that the CDS is an inherently defective concept because it is based on the assumption that future states of the economy are subject to probabilistic risk as opposed to uncertainty in the Keynes-Knight-Shackle-Davidson sense. The CDS also manifests the paradox of derivatives. By enabling individual money managers to safely increase leverage, it causes a system-wide buildup of leverage and financial fragility.     

Information Disclosure as Environmental Regulation: A Theoretical Analysis

Governments around the world are beginning to embrace a new form of environmental regulation – mandatory disclosure of information. While information disclosure programs appear to have an impact on subsequent firm behavior – often resulting in lower levels of pollution – little is known about the costs and benefits of these programs and whether or not they enhance social welfare. This paper presents a simple bargaining model where mandatory information disclosure is used to overcome a lack of information on the part of the public. We characterize the conditions under which information disclosure will lead to a reduction in emissions, and ultimately, the conditions under which it will enhance social welfare. Several extensions of the model are briefly explored, including the effect of two sources of pollution – only one of which is subject to information disclosure. This paper was prepared while V. Santhakumar was a Visiting Scholar at the Vanderbilt Center for Environmental Management Studies, Vanderbilt University.     

农户生产无公害蔬菜的技术效率及其影响因素分析——基于山东寿光无公害黄瓜和西红柿生产的调查

根据2008年对山东寿光样本农户生产无公害黄瓜和西红柿的调研数据,运用数据包络分析法和随机前沿分析法测算了其生产的技术效率,分析了农户生产无公害蔬菜的技术效率的影响因素。结果表明:农户生产无公害蔬菜的平均技术效率低,主要原因是部分要素投入过剩和规模不经济;获取科技信息和建立稳定的销售渠道对提高农户生产无公害蔬菜的技术效率有显著的正效应;利用两种测算方法所得的结果具有一致性。     

奥运科技成果应用及转化分析

对北京科技奥运8大领域项目承担单位的分布情况进行了统计,总结了奥运科技成果的应用状况,分析了奥运科技成果的应用前景,并有针对性地提出在各领域奥运科技成果转化的对策。     

A Permanent Change in the Route to Owner Occupation?

This paper attempts to explain why home ownership rates among young adults fell in the early 1990s when various indicators suggested it had become more affordable. As a potential explanation, we focus on the relatively slower growth in their incomes and argue that this could signal a fundamental change in behaviour, a change in route adopted into owner occupation, induced by structural economic change. In examining the implications for housing tenure, we use a conditional fixed effects multinomial logit model to exploit the information on the tenure choice and the timing of transitions in the British Household Panel Survey. Our results reveal that relatively slower income growth contributed significantly to this decline and that ignoring the intertemporal correlation in micro‐panels generates inconsistent results.     

Occupational Change and Mobility Among Employed and Unemployed Job Seekers

We use data from the Labour Force Survey to show that employed and unemployed job seekers in Great Britain originate from different occupations and find jobs in different occupations. We find substantial differences in occupational mobility between job seekers: employed job seekers are most likely to move to occupations paying higher average wages relative to their previous occupation, while unemployed job seekers are most likely to move to lower paying occupations. Employed and unemployed job seekers exhibit different patterns of occupational mobility and, therefore, do not accept the same types of jobs.