An economic analysis of the Cattlemen’s Beef Promotion and Research Board demand-enhancing programmes

The research reported here addressed two objectives. The first objective was to measure the overall impact of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board as well as eight-specific advertising, promotion and research activities on US beef demand. The second objective was to compute marginal benefit–cost ratios (BCRs) for the eight individual checkoff activities and for the overall programme. The results indicated that Cattlemen’s Beef Board’s Promotion activities increased total domestic beef demand by 15.7 billion pounds in total, or 2.1 billion pounds per year between 2006 and 2014. Collectively, the overall marginal BCR for all Cattlemen’s Beef Board activities was $11.20.     

Identification and estimation in sequential,asymmetric, English auctions

Within the independent private-values paradigm, we derive the data-generating process of the winning bid for the last unit sold at multi-unit, sequential, asymmetric, English auctions. When the identity of the winner and the number of units won by each bidder in previous stages of the auction are observed, we demonstrate nonparametric identification and propose a semi-nonparametric estimation strategy based on orthogonal polynomials. We apply our estimator to daily data from fish auctions in Denmark. For single-unit supply, we use our estimates to compare the revenues a seller could expect to earn were a Dutch auction employed instead.     

Repatriation taxes, repatriation strategies and multinational financial policy

Several investment-repatriation strategies are added to the standard model of a multinational in which an affiliate is located in a low-tax country and is limited to two alternatives: repatriating taxable dividends to the parent or investing in its own real operations. In our model, affiliates can invest in passive assets, which the parent can borrow against, or in related affiliates which can be used as vehicles for tax-favored repatriations. We show analytically how the availability of alternative strategies can effect real investment throughout the worldwide corporation. We use firm level data for US multinationals to test for the importance of alternative strategies. The evidence is generally consistent with the theory, particularly the strategies using related affiliates.     

Early Birds versus Just-in-Timers: The effect of procrastination on academic performance of accounting students

This study investigates the effect of procrastination on academic performance. Prior research has often relied upon self-reported measures of procrastination, which are only weakly correlated with actual procrastination. We use the start and submission of a set of online homework problems as two objective, direct measures of student procrastination and the grade on the assignments as a measure of performance. In our study, there were a number of potential benefits to submitting online assignments ‘just-in-time’. Thus, there was a direct benefit to procrastination, which students had to weigh against potential drawbacks. With a sample size larger than those previously reported in the literature, we find that for both procrastination measures, task procrastination is associated with lower task performance. To ensure that our results are not just an association between performance and student quality, we test for the association between task procrastination and task performance, while controlling for student quality. We find that even after controlling for student quality, task procrastination is associated with lower task performance.     

Some Economics of Safe Injecting Rooms

Provision of safe injecting rooms (SIRs), needle exchanges and other harm minimisation schemes reduce mortality and other health risks that illicit drug users experience. However, SIRs diminish incentives to refrain from the use of drugs by reducing the risk of a key harmful consequence of use, namely the user's death. Moreover, such harm minimisation efforts are socially costly. Economic approaches to drug management balance benefits from harm minimisation against policy costs and the costs associated with a failure of community drug abstinence. This article shows that the economic case for SIRs disappears with conservative assumptions about adverse incentive effects of reduced mortality risks even when only modest weight is placed on drug abstinence objectives.     

Schumpeter and Steindl on the dynamics of competition

This paper compares and contrasts the contributions of Joseph Alois Schumpeter and Josef Steindl to the competitive paradigm. Both reject the static nature of traditional profit maximizing analysis and the analytical device of a representative firm. Instead they both opt for a dynamic framework in which there is a key role for innovation. Differences emerge in terms of the characteristics of individual firms that nurture the competitive struggle and are responsible for technical change. The maturation process of a capitalist economy, whereby a natural progression will involve an increase in concentration, as prescribed by Schumpeter and Steindl is also explored, as is criticism of their analyses. Finally the holistic approach to competitive modelling, a legacy of these two economists, is expounded and challenges for the future identified.     

Labor Market Developments in Albania: An Analytical Overview

Rising unemployment and falling living standards are two of the main problems facing policymakers in economies in transition. The case of Albania is distinctive, because high unemployment has been associated with a very large private sector and by far the greatest scale of temporary emigration compared with other transition countries in Europe. The authors develop a model that characterizes the path of unemployment in the presence of temporary emigration. They analyze the emigration decision and the factors that affect registered unemployment emigration, and highlight how changes in flow probabilities between sectors affect the time paths of registered unemployment and emigration.     

Bank activity and funding strategies: The impact on risk and returns

This paper examines the implications of bank activity and short-term funding strategies for bank risk and return using an international sample of 1,334 banks in 101 countries leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. Expansion into noninterest income-generating activities such as trading increases the rate of return on assets, and it could offer some risk diversification benefits at very low levels. Nondeposit, wholesale funding in contrast lowers the rate of return on assets, while it can offer some risk reduction at commonly observed low levels of nondeposit funding. A sizable proportion of banks, however, attract most of their short-term funding in the form of nondeposits at a cost of enhanced bank fragility. Overall, banking strategies that rely prominently on generating noninterest income or attracting nondeposit funding are very risky, consistent with the demise of the US investment banking sector.