West African Insurgencies in Agrarian Perspective: Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone Compared

This paper examines agrarian issues in civil wars in Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone. Attention is paid to two different ways in which lineage society evolved during the colonial and post‐colonial periods. The motivations of fighters are related to these different trajectories of agrarian social change. In Côte d’Ivoire youth militia fought to uphold a lineage‐based social order, but in Sierra Leone a comparable group of young fighters sought to overturn it. Large migrant populations on a forest frontier are an important factor in Côte d’Ivoire, while in Sierra Leone significance attaches to an excluded agrarian underclass. Not all African conflicts are ethnic conflicts; autochthony is shown to be a factor in one conflict and class in the other. Approaches to post‐war reconstruction based on undifferentiated notions of community should be resisted.     

Technological Innovation and Employment in Telecommunications

In this paper we examine how the diffusion of technological innovation in the telecommunications industry influences employment levels across occupations and how a firm chooses among alternative personnel mechanisms to reach its target employment levels. We find that technological change has influenced the demand for different types of workers and has centralized office functions. The adjustment patterns to these demand changes differ by the union status, tenure, age, and gender composition of the affected occupations.     

THE EFFECT OF STRESSED ECONOMIC CONDITIONS ON SYSTEMIC RISK WITHIN THE SOUTH AFRICAN BANKING SECTOR

The credit crisis resulted in increases in credit, market and operational risk, but it may also have precipitated a surge in systemic risk. Measuring systemic risk as the price of insurance against distressed losses in the South African banking sector, this article attempts to determine whether the financial crisis has in fact resulted in an increase in systemic risk. Using probabilities of default and asset return correlations as systemic risk indicators, it is found that the financial crisis has indeed increased systemic risk in South Africa. The impact was, however, less severe than that experienced in other large international banks.     

A Note on Factors Influencing the Utilization of Bankcard*

This note is an empirical examination of the nature of factors influencing the utilization of credit cards in Australia. Cross-section data from a 1980 survey are employed in an attempt to determine what individual characteristics increase the probabilities of holding cards and using extended credit facilities. Aggregative time-series analysis seeks to explain the trends in Bankcard financing of various types of expenditure.     

House Price Markups and Mortgage Defaults

The transaction price of identical housing units can vary widely due to heterogeneity in buyer and seller preferences, matching, and search costs, generating what we term “markups” above or below the average market price. We measure markups for 3.4 million purchase-money mortgages and show that they can predict mortgage defaults and credit losses conditional on default even after accounting for collateral coverage (loan-to-value ratio) and a comprehensive set of other covariates. The findings suggest that standard collateral coverage estimation may be inaccurate, with implications for both individual and portfolio-level credit risk assessment.