Differences in the Cost of Mortgage Credit Implications for Discrimination

This paper estimates the mortgage interest rate differences paid by Asian, Hispanic, and African–American borrowers to a national home mortgage lender in the years 1988–1989. Controlling for differences in market rates, rate lock protection, and borrower risk factors, conventional loan interest rates are almost perfectly race-neutral. The single deviation from race-neutrality is that when interest rates fall during the borrower's rate-lock period, only African–American borrowers are unable to capture a share of this decline. Government (FHA and VA) credit models show small premia paid by African–American borrowers of about $1.80 per month on average. In government lending, Hispanic borrowers alone are unable to capture rate declines occurring during the borrower's rate-lock period.     

Remarks on Engineering Economy Studies from the Viewpoint of Statistical Decision Theory

Lack of credit during periods of financial stress can reduce sales in an entire supply chain. To reduce the reliance on external credit, we introduce a new financing framework in which key supply chain stakeholders accept delayed payment for a pre-agreed portion of their product or service. By doing so throughout the supply chain, each stakeholder must self-finance only their in-house activities—but not the cost of purchased components and services because those are in turn financed by their suppliers. Intended to account for only a small fraction of sales, this framework is limited to supplying customers who do not qualify for external financing. The payments from these customers are distributed among the value chain stakeholders according to an agreed-upon policy. These additional sales would otherwise be lost for lack of consumer credit. This approach increases sales and profitability for the entire supply chain and is especially advantageous during credit crunches. In addition to describing this new financing framework, this article places it in the context of other financing arrangements, provides an example with cash flow and net present value calculations, and identifies implementation challenges and characteristics of supply chains that are good candidates.     

Internet user behaviour in France and Britain: exploring socio‐spatial disparity among adolescents

The Internet has radically transformed society – although its diffusion has been uneven. Various studies of digital inequality have been undertaken in Anglo‐Saxon communities. Few studies have investigated digital inequality from a socio‐spatial perspective (urban vs. suburban, rather than urban vs. rural) in a French setting. This absence underscores a gap in knowledge and methodology. It highlights the complexities of gathering comparable data on Internet user behaviour beyond national borders. This paper takes a multidisciplinary approach to investigate emerging trends in Internet use across different territories (inner‐city and suburban, as opposed to urban vs. rural) by means of in‐depth interviews with Internet users aged 13–15 years old in France and Britain. The aim is to provide a broad understanding of the way in which teenage Internet users behave online in different territories. The investigation reveals a number of converging trends that are common to both France and Britain and some unexpected disparity.     

Consumer Socialization and the Role of Branding in Hazardous Adolescent Drinking

This study examines the relationship between alcohol marketing and consumer socialization to alcohol brands (assessed here using aided and unaided brand recognition and brand saliency), and the associated relationship between consumer socialization and hazardous alcohol consumption among a cohort of adolescents surveyed in Scotland. The research addresses gaps in the consumer socialization literature, by examining how marketing influences brand consumer socialization, and how brand consumer socialization influences subsequent hazardous consumption behavior over time, using a robust longitudinal design that assesses causal relationships while controlling for a wide range of important confounding variables. The results demonstrate the contribution of marketing to adolescents’ brand socialization to alcohol and the impact of this socialization on subsequent drinking behaviors. Implications for marketing managers, parents, policymakers, and consumer researchers are discussed, together with suggestions for future consumer research.     

Do employment subsidies work? Evidence from regionally targeted subsidies in Turkey

This paper studies the effects on registered employment and number of registered establishments of two employment subsidy schemes in Turkey. We implement a difference-in-differences methodology to construct appropriate counterfactuals for the covered provinces. Our findings suggest that both subsidy programs did lead to significant net increases in registered jobs in eligible provinces (5%–13% for the first program and 11%–15% for the second). However, the cost of the actual job creation was high because of substantial deadweight losses, particularly for the first program (47% and 78%). Because of better design features, the second subsidy program had lower, though still significant, deadweight losses (27%–46%). Although constrained by data availability, the evidence suggests that the dominant effect of subsidies was to increase social security registration of firms and workers rather than boosting total employment and economic activity. This supports the theory that in countries with weak enforcement institutions, high labor taxes on low-wage workers may lead to substantial incentives for firms and workers to operate informally.     

Shared organizational values: Measurement and impact upon strategic marketing implementation

The concept of shared organizational values and its impact upon successful marketing strategy implementation are discussed. The need to measure the degree to which values within the organization are shared is stressed. A method to quantitatively measure the degree of value congruency and the strength of value consistency is proposed. An exploratory, empirical study is presented in which organization values are measured and found to impact upon strategy implementation.     

Solving models with external habit

Habit utility has been the focus of a large and growing body of literature in financial economics. This study investigates ways of accurately and efficiently solving the Campbell and Cochrane [1999. Journal of Political Economy 107, 205–251] external habit model. Solutions for this model based on a grid of values for the state variable are shown to converge as the grid becomes increasingly fine. Convergence is substantially faster if the price–dividend ratio is computed as a series of “zero-coupon equity” claims rather than as the fixed point of the Euler equation. Fitting the model to the term structure as well as to equity moments (as in [Wachter, J.A., 2005. A consumption-based model of the term structure of interest rates. Journal of Financial Economics, in press]) also results in faster convergence.     

Fish as the “bank in the water” – Evidence from chronic-poor communities in Congo

Small-scale fisheries in developing countries are often perceived as being a low-productivity and backward informal sector. As a result they are rarely considered in poverty reduction programmes and rural development planning. In this paper, we investigate the dual role of fish as a food and cash crop through data collected in river fisheries in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Fishing in this very remote rural region of DRC is operated both by men and women, as part of a household multiple activity livelihood strategy. The data shows that poor households rely heavily on fishing for their supply of protein-rich food, in particular through women’s subsistence catches. Fishing also appears to be the main source of cash-income for the majority of households, including local farmers. Based on these findings and a review of the literature, the paper argues that small-scale fisheries can play a fundamental role in local economies, especially in remote rural areas where they strengthen significantly the livelihoods of people through their role in both food security and cash-income generation.