Region? Why Region? Security,Hermeneutics, and the Making of the Black Sea Region

In the context of post–Cold War European integration, ‘making’ regions has become commonplace. Far from reducing the significance of regional initiatives, inflationary regional labelling draws attention to the significant role played by ‘regions’ as legitimating political vectors. Why are political projects formulated in regional terms? Critically examining the Black Sea region project, this article suggests that region-making transcends the boundary between theoretical and political praxis. Regional entrepreneurs frequently use different conceptual categories in the formulation and justification of their initiatives. In order to understand why regional forms are preferred politically, it is necessary to scrutinise closely this contextual interaction between political praxis and conceptual logic. The article maps the various concepts of region which coexist in the Black Sea region project, and discusses their relationship with four political and hermeneutical strategies that link the regional project with its context, profoundly marked by the logic of European security integration. The ‘double hermeneutics’ of the Black Sea region highlights the contradictory security logics that structure European security in general and this regional project in particular. In the conclusion, the article draws attention to the significant epistemological and normative consequences of the double hermeneutics of the Black Sea region.     

Estimating a Parsimonious Model of Inequality Aversion in Stackelberg Duopoly Experiments*

In the Stackelberg duopoly experiments in Huck et al. (2001) , nearly half of the followers’ behaviours are inconsistent with conventional prediction. We use a test in which the conventional self‐interested model is nested as a special case of an inequality aversion model. Maximum likelihood methods applied to the Huck et al. (2001) data set reject the self‐interested model. We find that almost 40% of the players have disadvantageous inequality aversion that is statistically different from zero and economically significant, but advantageous inequality aversion is relatively unimportant. These estimates provide support for a more parsimonious model with no advantageous inequality aversion.     

Solving the multi-country real business cycle model using a Smolyak-collocation method

We describe a sparse-grid collocation method to compute recursive solutions of dynamic economies with a sizable number of state variables. We show how powerful this method can be in applications by computing the non-linear recursive solution of an international real business cycle model with a substantial number of countries, complete insurance markets and frictions that impede frictionless international capital flows. In this economy, the aggregate state vector includes the distribution of world capital across different countries as well as the exogenous country-specific technology shocks. We use the algorithm to efficiently solve models with up to 10 countries (i.e., up to 20 continuous-valued state variables).     

Stationary Markov equilibria for overlapping generations

Summary.  At a stationary Markov equilibrium of a Markovian economy of overlapping generations, prices at a date-event are determined by the realization of the shock, the distribution of wealth and, with production, the stock of capital. Stationary Markov equilibria may not exist; this is the case with intra-generational heterogeneity and multiple commodities or long life spans. Generalized Markov equilibria exist if prices are allowed to vary also with the realization of the shock, prices and the allocation of consumption and production at the predecessor date-event. (Stationary) Markov -equilibria always exist; as allocations and prices converge to equilibrium prices and allocations that, however, need not be stationary.Received: 2 March 2004, Revised: 2 April 2004, JEL Classification Numbers:   D50, D52, D60, D80, D90.Correspondence to: Felix KublerWe thank participants in seminars in Athens and Lund, at Penn, at IMPA and at Stanford, the 2002 CEME (NBER) General Equilibrium Conference and the 2002 SED meetings, and especially Martin Hellwig, George Mailath and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments.     

A colonial legacy of African gender inequality? Evidence from Christian Kampala, 1895–2011

The colonial legacy of African underdevelopment is widely debated but hard to document. In this article, occupational statistics from Protestant marriage registers of historical Kampala are used to investigate the hypothesis that African gender inequality and female disempowerment are rooted in colonial times. We find that the arrival of Europeans in Uganda ignited a century‐long transformation of Kampala involving a gender Kuznets curve. Men rapidly acquired literacy and quickly found their way into white‐collar (high‐status) employment in the wage economy built by the Europeans. Women took somewhat longer to obtain literacy and considerably longer to enter into white‐collar and waged work. This led to increased gender inequality during the first half of the colonial period. However, gender inequality gradually declined during the latter half of the colonial era, and after Uganda's independence in 1962 its level was not significantly different from that of pre‐colonial times. The data presented here also support Boserup's view that gender inequality was rooted in indigenous social norms: daughters of African men who worked in the traditional, informal economy were less well‐educated, less frequently employed in formal work, and more often subjected to marital gender inequality than daughters of men employed in the modernized, formal economy created by the Europeans.     

Voting for direct democratic participation: evidence from an initiative election

We study a constitutional change in the German State of Bavaria where citizens, not politicians, granted themselves more say in politics at the local level through a state initiative election in 1995. This institutional setting allows us to observe revealed preferences for direct democracy and to identify factors which explain these preferences. Empirical evidence suggests that support for direct democracy is related to dissatisfaction with representative democracy in general rather than with an elected governing party.     

Bank stock performance and bank regulation around the globe

We analyze the effect of bank capital, regulation, and supervision on the annual stock performance of global banks during the period of 1999–2012. We study a large comprehensive panel of international banks and find that higher Tier 1 capital decreases a bank's stock performance over the whole sample period. However, during turbulent times stocks of more highly capitalized banks perform significantly better. Additionally, we find strong evidence that banks that are more likely to receive government bailout during financial distress realize smaller stock performance. In contrast, we find no convincing evidence that banks that generate higher non-interest income have a higher performance.     

The moderating role of construal level on the evaluation of emotional appeal vs. cognitive appeal advertisements

This article proposes that construal level moderates consumer evaluation of different appeals (emotional vs. cognitive appeals) in advertisements. Low-level construal is associated with close psychological distance; this condition implies that people with low-level construal can feel an emotion more intensely than those with high-level construal. Consequently, consumers with low-level construal could positively relate with the emotional appeal ad, and they would evaluate an ad with emotional appeal more favorably than an ad with cognitive appeal. However, this effect does not occur among consumers who construe information at high-level, due to the fact that they are able to focus on the central and positive features of different appeals.