“Step into the Real Texas”: Associating and claiming state narrative in advertising and tourism brochures

Texas is one of the most popular states for tourists. Using quantitative and primarily qualitative methods, we analyzed how marketers of small cities and towns associate their place to four central components of the Texas state narrative – the flag, official and unofficial symbols, territory, and social–historical mythology – in advertising and tourism brochures in the years 2008–2010. We discovered that in parallel to the overuse of the “associating to well-known brand/narrative” strategy, marketers also invest efforts toward claiming the narrative. Thus our second goal was to discover which techniques were used in order to claim the state narrative. Using the state of Texas as an example may provide a test case for typology, associating and claiming state narratives in promotional materials.     

Buchbesprechung

Buchbesprechung

Buchbesprechung     

Is There Persistence in the Impact of Emergency Food Aid? Evidence on Consumption, Food Security, and Assets in Rural Ethiopia

We identify the impact of emergency food aid programs after the 2002 drought in rural Ethiopia on future welfare. Based on a difference-in-differences matching estimator, participation in food-for-work increases growth in total consumption and food consumption eighteen months after the drought. Separately, receiving free food raises growth in food consumption, but, surprisingly, negatively impacts food security. Food-for-work benefited households in the middle and upper tail of the consumption distribution, while the better-targeted free food program benefited the poorest. Evidence suggests these impacts demonstrate accumulated and persistent effects of food aid received in the first twelve months after the drought.     

Are “Nearly Exogenous Instruments” reliable?

We show that when instruments are nearly exogenous, the two stage least squares t-statistic unpredictably over-rejects or under-rejects the null hypothesis that the endogenous regressor is insignificant and Anderson–Rubin test over-rejects the null. We prove that in the limit these tests are no longer nuisance parameter free.     

Gas Utility Prices in a Restructured Industry

The natural gas industry has witnessed significant policy changes since 1978. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has undertaken a number of policy initiatives designed to promote competition in the natural gas industry. These initiatives have affected both natural gas pipeline and local gas distribution companies. This study provides an empirical examination of the impact of restructuring on local gas distribution utilities' residential, commercial, and industrial prices.     

The Endurance and Eclipse of the Controlled Vote: A Formal Model of Vote Brokerage Under the Secret Ballot

Throughout much of mankind's experience with elections, vote brokers – local elites who direct the voting decisions of a subset of the electorate – have been able to make or break political careers. In various polities, brokers have thrived in spite of the secret ballot, a surprising outcome given that vote secrecy would ostensibly allow citizens to pocket the inducements offered by such individuals and vote their consciences anyway. To address this puzzle, we develop a framework for understanding the persistence and demise of vote brokerage under the secret ballot. In our model, a broker contracts with voters using an outcome contingent contract: some fixed benefit is promised to all voters sharing one of several observable profiles should the broker's candidate win the election. Using this framework, we demonstrate that the existence of brokerage depends on the size of the electorate contained within the jurisdiction controlled by the broker, with large jurisdiction sizes tending to drive brokerage out of existence. Moreover, we detail the manner in which the strategies employed by brokers depend on their economic power, the size of social groups, and ideological polarization. Empirical evidence from Minas Gerais, Brazil is used to evaluate the performance of the model.     

Microeconomic consequences and macroeconomic causes of foreign direct investment in southern African economies

The authors use a new data set on firms in 13 countries of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and comparators from other regions to identify the benefits and determinants of FDI in this region. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has facilitated local development in the SADC. Foreign-owned firms perform better than domestic firms, are larger, and locate in richer and better-governed countries and in countries with more competitive financial intermediaries. They are also more likely to export than domestic firms and evidence suggests that they might have positive spillover effects on domestic firms. Based on a standard empirical model, the SADC is attracting the inward FDI per capita that the region's level of income would predict. But this means that there are less capital inflows per capita to the region than there are to wealthier parts of the developing world. Moreover, the SADC is attracting less FDI than comparators for reasons that are possibly more fundamental than current income, namely, countries’ past growth record, demographic structure and the quality of physical infrastructure. Interestingly, inward FDI is less sensitive to variation in income within the SADC than in other parts of the world, but is more responsive to changes in country's openness to trade.     

Reassessing the Social Foundations of Welfare (State) Regimes

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was formed in 1964 to ‘create a forum in which the more prosperous member countries [of the United Nations] would come under pressure to agree to measures benefiting the less-developed countries’. More specifically, its formation was ‘a deliberate effort to use international bureaucracy and conference diplomacy to alter current norms affecting trade and development’. UNCTAD's founding reflected the growth in membership of the United Nations of newly independent states. A large number of the e´lites of these new entities keenly felt the iniquity of the world order which had ushered in their formal statehood. UNCTAD and the later call for a ‘New International Economic Order’ (NIEO) therefore were rejoinders to problems encountered by developing countries as a result of the creation and operation of the Bretton Woods system.