Foreign Management,International Capital,and Income Redistribution

This paper examines the impact of foreign management as a separate input in a competitive economy open to both international trade and international movement of productive capital. Three inputs (capital, labor, management) are used to produce two final goods in a model characterized by competition, homogeneous products, and full employment. This model provides a simple starting point for the study of multinational firm activity, building on the fundamental competitive factor proportions model of production and trade. A clear distinction arises between international movements of capital and management, and international movements of the two inputs are linked. [F 11, F 23]     

The Productivity Impact of IT Deployment: An Empirical Evaluation of ATM Introduction

The term 'IT paradox' has been widely used to describe the apparent failure of much economic research to discover significant productivity gains associated with IT investment. In part this has been ascribed to measurement problems associated with both IT inputs and with outputs in IT-intensive industries. The current paper seeks to circumvent these difficulties by taking the ATM as a clearly defined embodied IT application and then using anaugmented production function approach to isolate its productivity effectsacross a sample of UK building societies, over the period of the ATM'sdiffusion. The paper finds no support for the 'IT paradox' and reports large robust and statistically significant productivity gains associated with ATM introduction.     

Monte Carlo theoretical trials of methods for assessing statistical significance for differences between adjusted odds ratios

Odds are generally defined as the number of successes divided by the number of failures in a given number of trials. An odds ratio is the ratio of one odds divided by another. Odds ratios can be adjusted to reflect associations with the outcome independently of the influence of associations with other variables. These are adjusted odds ratios. There are several well known methods for comparing odds ratios and testing for statistically significant differences between them. Analogous methods for adjusted odds ratios are not well known or well documented. One method for comparing adjusted odds ratios is explained by Hosmer and Lemeshow (Applied logistic regression, 2000). This method is used for the odds ratios for two variables from the same data set. The purpose of this analysis was to apply this method to a different situation: comparing odds ratios for the same variable from two different data sets. Monte Carlo trials were used to assess the performance of the method and these indicated the method performed well.     

Estimating worldwide life satisfaction

Whilst studies of life satisfaction are becoming more common-place, their global coverage is far from complete. This paper develops a new database of life satisfaction scores for 178 countries, bringing together subjective well-being data from four surveys and using stepwise regression to estimate scores for nations where no subjective data are available. In doing so, we explore various factors that predict between-nation variation in subjective life satisfaction, building on Vemuri and Costanza's (Vemuri, A.W., & Costanza, R., 2006. The role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country level: toward a National Well-Being Index (NWI). Ecological Economics, 58:119-133.) four capitals model. The main regression model explains 76% of variation in existing subjective scores; importantly, this includes poorer nations that had proven problematic in Vemuri and Costanza's (Vemuri, A.W., & Costanza, R., 2006. The role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country level: toward a National Well-Being Index (NWI). Ecological Economics, 58:119-133.) study. Natural, human and socio-political capitals are all found to be strong predictors of life satisfaction. Built capital, operationalised as GDP, did not enter our regression model, being overshadowed by the human capital and socio-political capital factors that it inter-correlates with. The final database presents a stop-gap resource that, until robust surveys are carried out worldwide, allows comparisons of subjective life satisfaction between nations to be made with reasonable confidence.     

Casinos,casino size,and crime: A panel data analysis of Michigan counties

Growth in legal gaming in the United States over the past quarter century or so is well-documented. One important factor fueling this growth was the passage of the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988, which permitted Native American tribes to establish, under agreements or “compacts” with the states in which they are located, casinos offering what is known as Class III gaming: slot machines, blackjack, roulette, and other games. Since the passage of the Act, there have been 21 Native American casinos established in Michigan. Also, three non-Native American casinos opened in Detroit in 1999 and 2000. This growth in the number of casinos has sparked a wide-ranging debate over the social and economic impacts of casino development.The purpose of this research is to focus on the crime issue in the broader casino debate. We investigate the impact of these Michigan casinos on the rates of burglary, robbery, larceny and motor vehicle theft (property crimes) in casino host counties as well as in nearby counties. We employ a panel data set with annual observations on all 83 Michigan counties for the period 1994–2010. The dataset includes crime rates taken from the FBI crime data series, variables for the presence of a casino in a county or in a nearby county, the scale of a casino's operations as measured by revenues, and a variety of control variables suggested by the broader literature investigating the factors that determine crime rates generally.Our results suggest that in most cases the property crime rates studied are not affected by the presence or size of a casino in a county or in a nearby county. The largest such impact, which is negative, is for motor vehicle theft. The size of a casino does have a small positive effect on the motor vehicle theft rate.     

Political opinion polls and the stock market

It is a part of the received wisdom of the American and British stock exchanges that the market prefers a Conservative administration. However, attempts to test this proposition by examining market returns about the time of elections have produced contrasting and sometimes indecisive results. The present paper assumes that election outcomes will be largely anticipated by the market on the basis of published opinion forecasts. The paper examines the impact of opinion poll information on share prices over the period 1960–79—one largely characterized by two-party competition. It is found that opinion movements towards the Conservative Party do exert a significant positive impact on the market, but only where the two main parties are relatively evenly balanced.