Origination Channel,Prepayment Penalties and Default

This article presents evidence that nonbank‐originated subprime mortgages have a higher probability of default than bank‐originated subprime mortgages, but only for loans with prepayment penalties. Evidence also indicates that nonbanks price prepayment penalties less favorably to borrowers than banks do, and nonbanks originate disproportionately more loans with prepayment penalties in locales with less financially sophisticated borrowers. State antipredatory lending law provisions restricting the use of prepayment penalties eliminate the elevated default risk of nonbank originations relative to bank originations. These findings are consistent with incentives generated by nonbank compensation via yield spread premiums on loans with prepayment penalties.     

The effects of air quality regulations on the location decisions of pollution-intensive manufacturing plants

This research examines the effects of the 1977 Clean Air Act Amendments (CAAA) on the location decisions of pollution-intensive manufacturing plants. We develop a panel data set to analyze plant births of polluting manufacturers over time as a function county-level attainment status of the federal standard for ozone pollution. We find that more stringent county-level environmental regulations impact pollution-intensive capital flows through deterring new plant births. We also find that the impact of stricter regulations varies by pollution-intensity of manufacturers, with results suggesting that federal guidelines have a greater impact on high pollution intensive manufacturers than more moderate polluters.      

An internet marketing framework for the World Wide Web (WWW)

It is likely that the World Wide Web (WWW) will come to play a significant role in the marketing strategies of many organisations, even when it fails to become the dominant marketing communications channel. A framework is required whereby an organisation can assess the potential of, develop a role for, create and manage a WWW site within its marketing strategy. The WWW is an interactive channel offering a potential for many‐to‐many communications to all players in a market. Existing frameworks either fail to recognise the implications of this or else they ignore it. This paper attempts to develop a framework which invites organisations to fundamentally rethink their marketing strategies through consideration of the opportunities presented by the WWW.     

Genetic Algorithms and Public Economics

To address common limitations of traditional economic models while maintaining a convenient mathematical framework, some economists have begun to employ genetic algorithms (GAs). GA optimization occurs in a way that may resemble the dynamics of actual decision making. It also alleviates any need for a closed form to the policy problem and can 'decide' between alternative optima. This paper provides a tutorial on the use of GAs in economics and constructs an example application in the area of tax policy formation. It also critically surveys the landscape of current uses, focusing on both the advantages and disadvantages of GAs in public economics contexts.     

How do trust and property security influence household contributions to public goods?: The case of the sloping land conversion program in China

Trust and property rights are generally considered to influence farmers' behavior regarding resource use and environmental management. Previous studies show that higher trust levels may enhance contributions to public goods. This paper investigates how trust and (land) property rights security influence the provision of one concrete public good: land protection through the Sloping Land Conservation Program in China. The analysis is based on household survey data from Ningxia Autonomous Region in China. From our questionnaire two trust factors are derived and distinguished, using factor analysis: general trust and kinship trust. Farm households are less likely to contribute to public goods when they perceive more secure land rights, but trust has mixed effects on public goods. The results show that general trust and kinship trust may rely on two opposite effects for influencing public goods provision. On the one hand, high levels of general trust may directly enhance people's willingness to provide contributions to public goods (by reduced likelihood to reconvert forest land) when farmers are aware of the positive environmental effects of the program, that's the public goods effect. On the other hand, general trust may also make it more likely that people invest more in their own private goods to pursue their own welfare (a more likely reconversion of forest land to arable land), that's the private goods effect. The final outcome depends on the size and direction of both effects. Compared to general trust, kinship trust is more inward-looking and self- or group-interested compared to more reciprocal general trust. Thus, unlike general trust, kinship trust may have no significant public goods effect on the provisioning of public goods.     

Internet odysseys: linking web roles to career and community investments

This paper examines a new kind of career odyssey, namely that into the relatively uncharted territory of the world wide web. It extends recent ideas about personal and communal career investments by exploring people's web-enabled career behaviour, based on Tapscott et al.'s (2000) typology of web roles. MBA students completed a preliminary career exploration instrument and then met in different focus groups according to the web role with which each student most identified. The reported career investments varied depending on the web role involved. An attempt was made to corroborate these findings through practitioner interviews, but there were problems in reconciling the two kinds of data. The implications of these findings are discussed, and a series of observations is offered concerning the further study of the increasingly virtual journeys anticipated for careers of the future.     

Imagined Peasants – Production and Markets in Rural Asia

Books reviewed in this article:
R.E.(Robert Edward) Elson, The end of the peasantry in Southeast Asia: a social and economic history of peasant livelihood, 1800–1900s
Yiping Huang, Agricultural Reform in China: Getting Institutions Right. Trade and Development Series     

Amenities and Fringe Benefits: Omitted Variable Bias

ABSTRACT If labor is fairly mobile, as it is in the United States, one would expect that households would move from less desirable areas toward more desirable areas until all areas are equally desirable. The way that areas become equally desirable is through the impact of movers on wages and rents (and possibly "endogenous" disamenities, such as congestion or pollution). That is, as people move to desirable areas, they will increase the demand for land (raising rents) and increase the supply of labor (lowering wages); in equilibrium, the wage and rent "compensation" for the niceness of an area reveals, in dollar terms, just how nice the area is. Blomquist, Berger, and Hoehn 1988 demonstrated the empirical importance of such amenity compensation in estimates of the "quality-of-life" in urban areas. However, those authors were unable to include fringe benefits, which are about 40 percent of explicit wage payments, in their wage compensation. This matters greatly as amenities are seen here to be even more important than previously thought and the regional implications are pronounced, with the West and Southeast looking "better" when fringe benefits are included and the East North Central and Northeast looking substantially "worse."