The impact of strengthening agricultural extension services on women farmers: Evidence from Ethiopia

This paper evaluates the effect of the Rural Capacity Building Project (RCBP), which aimed at promoting growth by strengthening the agricultural service systems in Ethiopia, and by making them more responsive to smallholders’ needs, in particular women farmers. We examine the gender‐differentiated impact of the RCBP using panel data on 1,485 geographically dispersed households in project and control kebeles. We find that women farmers’ access and satisfaction with extension services increased significantly immediately after the start of the project, but that effect did not last into the medium term. The project led to an increase in the adoption of high‐value crop farming, area of land cultivated, and economic participation of household members, benefiting male‐ and female‐headed households equally. Results point to the positive impact of incorporating women's needs and constraints in the design of the agricultural extension system. However, the project was not able to reduce the preexisting gender gap in agricultural outcomes.     

Mutual fund flows and fluctuations in credit and business cycles

Several measures of credit-market booms are known to precede downturns in real economic activity. We offer an early indicator for all known measures of credit booms. Our measure is based on intra-family flow shifts towards high-yield bond mutual funds. It predicts indicators such as growth in financial intermediary balance sheets, increase in shares of high-yield bond issuers, and downturns of various measures of credit spreads. It also directly predicts the business cycle by positively predicting GDP growth and negatively predicting unemployment. Our results provide support for the investor demand-based narrative of credit cycles and can be useful for policymakers.     

Trading frenzies and their impact on real investment

We study a model in which a capital provider learns from the price of a firm's security in deciding how much capital to provide for new investment. This feedback effect from the financial market to the investment decision gives rise to trading frenzies, in which speculators all wish to trade like others, generating large pressure on prices. Coordination among speculators is sometimes desirable for price informativeness and investment efficiency, but speculators' incentives push in the opposite direction, so that they coordinate exactly when it is undesirable. We analyze the effect of various market parameters on the likelihood of trading frenzies to arise.     

Understanding Factors Leading to Participation in Supplemental Instruction Programs in Introductory Accounting Courses

Abstract

Although studies have shown that supplemental instruction (SI) programs can have positive effects in introductory accounting courses, these programs experience low participation rates. Thus, our study is the first to examine the factors leading to student participation in SI programs. We do this through a survey instrument based on the Theory of Planned Behavior. Our study shows that students' attitudes toward the sessions affect their intent to participate in them. This attitude is influenced by students' perceptions that the sessions can help them in various ways. Results also show that influential others can influence student intent to participate in SI sessions. We also note that students' perceptions of the amount of personal control that they have over going to SI sessions have no effect on their participation in the sessions. We discuss how these findings can be leveraged to increase SI participation rates.     

City-Pairs Versus Airport-Pairs: A Market-Definition Methodology for the Airline Industry

This paper provides a methodology for deciding which airports warrant grouping in multi-airport metropolitan areas. The methodology is based on the comparability of incremental competition effects from nearby airports on average fares at a metropolitan area’s primary airport. Results from a quarterly panel data set for the period 2003–2009 provide strong evidence that city-pairs, rather than airport-pairs, are the appropriate market definition for analyses of passenger air transportation involving many (but not all) large metropolitan areas. Based on the proposed method, we offer a recommended list of airports that should be grouped when creating city-pairs for the analysis of competition in the US domestic airline industry.     

Trust and outsourcing: Do perceptions of trust influence the retention of outsourcing providers in the hospitality industry?

The global trend toward outsourcing necessitates unprecedented symbiosis between client-based organizations—purchasers of these services—and their multiple suppliers. Building on existing empirical work that suggests that the level of trust that exists between a purchaser and a supplier is fundamental in determining the strength of such a dyadic relationship, we examine how an organization's outsourcing efforts can be influenced by trust, and how perceptions of trust influence buyer retention of outsourcing providers. The resulting causal model suggests that communication, benevolence, and trust are vital to developing and maintaining productive, enduring relationships between purchasers and suppliers.     

The new wave of hospital consolidation

Reimbursement challenges, spiraling healthcare costs, and a slow economic recovery are driving the latest wave of hospital consolidation. Health insurance companies and provider systems are forming partnerships in the consolidation field with the goal of reducing healthcare costs and improving quality. The "cost" of the acquisition may include debt and other obligations of the acquired hospital, such as pension liabilities, along with a multiyear capital commitment.     

SIMULATION OF PORTFOLIO RETURNS: VARYING NUMBERS OF SECURITIES AND HOLDING PERIODS

Variability may be measured around the long-run market return by combining the well-developed area of security diversification with the notion of time diversification. This non-traditional concept of diversifiable risk is illustrated with results of a very large scale simulation. The results are very general since the data used in the simulation consist of all firms on the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) monthly return file from January 1926 through December 1977.