The Effect of Rebate and Loan Incentives on Residential Heat Pump Adoption: Evidence from North Carolina

Environmental and Resource Economics - Electrification can promote deep decarbonization to tackle climate change with a cleaner power grid. Electric heat pumps provide a feasible and...     

Inequalities in Children's Experiences of Home Learning during the COVID-19 Lockdown in England*

This paper combines novel data on the time use, home-learning practices and economic circumstances of families with children during the COVID-19 lockdown with pre-lockdown data from the UK Time Use Survey to characterise the time use of children and how it changed during lockdown, and to gauge the extent to which changes in time use and learning practices during this period are likely to reinforce the already large gaps in educational attainment between children from poorer and better-off families. We find considerable heterogeneity in children's learning experiences – amount of time spent learning, activities undertaken during this time and availability of resources to support learning. Concerningly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, this heterogeneity is strongly associated with family income and in some instances more so than before lockdown. Furthermore, our analysis suggests that any impacts of inequalities in time spent learning between poorer and richer children are likely to be compounded by inequalities not only in learning resources available at home, but also in those provided by schools.     

Exploring Impacts of Community-Based Legal Aid on Intrahousehold Gender Relations in Tanzania

Community-based legal aid (CBLA) has been promoted as a promising intervention to reach rural marginalized populations who face barriers to accessing formal legal services and is increasingly implemented with the specific goal of protecting women's rights. This study evaluates the impact of a twelve-month CBLA program in northwestern Tanzania on intrahousehold gender relations using a clustered-randomized control trial across 139 villages. Among 1,219 women, the study finds those in treatment villages are more likely to refer others to paralegals for a variety of domestic issues; however, there are no measureable impacts on aggregate knowledge of marital law, intrahousehold decision making, or reported experience of twelve-month intimate partner violence. These overall results are robust to a number of other sensitivity analyses, including accounting for spillovers, attrition bounds, and modeling choices. While these results indicate limited potential for intrahousehold and gender-progressive change, program duration and intensity likely affected measurable positive impacts.     

The price of success: balancing the effects of entrepreneurial commitment,work-family conflict and emotional exhaustion on job satisfaction

This research explores job satisfaction among entrepreneurs to investigate two paths from entrepreneurial commitment to job satisfaction: the direct path and the family path that includes work-family conflict and emotional exhaustion. An empirical study of 232 small and micro firm business owners are used to test the hypotheses seeking to understand which path to job satisfaction has the greatest influence. The results indicate that although being committed to one’s own business increases job satisfaction, emotional exhaustion takes a greater toll. We conclude that negative aspects of entrepreneurship exert an important influence on entrepreneurs’ satisfaction with their job. These findings offer important theoretical and practical implications.

     

Does deposit insurance improve financial intermediation? Evidence from the Russian experiment

This study examines how the introduction of deposit insurance affects depositors and banks, using the deposit-insurance scheme introduced into the Russian banking system as a natural experiment. The fundamental research question is whether the introduction of deposit insurance leads to a more effective banking system as evidenced by increased deposit-taking and decreased reliance upon State-owned banks as custodians of retail deposits. We find that banks entering the new deposit-insurance system increase both their level of retail deposits and their ratios of retail deposits to total assets relative to banks that do not enter the new deposit insurance system. These results hold up in a multivariate panel-data analysis that controls for bank- and time-random effects. The longer a bank has been entered into the deposit insurance system, the greater is its level of deposits and its ratio of deposits to assets. Moreover, this effect is stronger for regional banks and for smaller banks. We also find that implementation of the new deposit-insurance system has the effect of “leveling the playing field” between State-owned banks and privately owned banks. Finally, we find strong evidence of moral hazard following implementation of deposit insurance in the form of increased bank risk-taking. Financial risk and, to a lesser degree, operating risk increase following implementation.     

The economics of conditional heteroskedasticity: Evidence from canadian and U.S. stock and futures markets

This paper provides insight into the sources of time variation and persistence in volatility by presenting new evidence concerning the price behavior of three index futures contracts and associated stock price indexes (the New York Stock Exchange Composite index, Standard and Poor's 500 index, and Toronto 35 index). Although persistence in the second moments of stock returns distribution is widely documented, the economic explanation for generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity is not established. Cross-sectional differences in measured persistence indicate that market characteristics thought to impede information flows may not play a significant role in explaining generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity effects.     

Gift giving: an interdisciplinary review

• The issue of why individuals choose to support charity has been the focus of considerable research in the disciplines of economics, psychology, social psychology, sociology, anthropology and more recently, management and marketing. This paper draws together extant work, developing a content model of giving behavior that fundraisers may use to inform their professional practice. A number of specific propositions are developed from the literature to assist in this goal. The paper provides summary tables of existing empirical studies categorized by the dimensions of the model, explores ambiguity in research findings, and concludes by highlighting opportunities for further research

Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Institutional Investors, Analyst Following, and the January Anomaly

Average stock returns for small, low stock price firms are higher in January than for the rest of the year. Two explanations have received a great deal of attention: tax-loss selling and gamesmanship. This paper documents that seasonality in returns is not a phenomenon observed only for small firms' stock or those with low prices. Strong seasonality in excess returns is reported for a sample of widely followed firms. Sample firms have unusually low excess returns in January and returns adjust upward over the year. These results are consistent with the gamesmanship hypothesis, but not the tax-loss-selling hypothesis.