The Bold and the Bankable: How the Nuestro Barrio Telenovela Reaches Latino Immigrants with Financial Education

This article presents and evaluates Nuestro Barrio, a Spanish‐language telenovela designed to reach Latino immigrants with financial education. Nuestro Barrio’s educational model is discussed in the context of the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change, which defines the stages individuals move through as they make incremental progress toward sustained behavior change. The Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change is also used to inform a limited evaluation of the impact of Nuestro Barrio on viewer behavior. The empirical evidence is consistent with Nuestro Barrio’s intended educational effects, suggesting that Nuestro Barrio is particularly useful as a tool for raising viewer awareness.     

Signaling in Political Budget Cycles: How Far Are You Willing to Go?

A key assumption in the literature on political cycles with rational voters and opportunistic politicians is that opportunism is common knowledge. In this framework, political cycles have been interpreted as a signal of competency. However, if opportunism is not common knowledge, cycles may no longer indicate competency, but rather opportunism. This is because highly opportunistic incumbents are willing to go farther to be reelected. Since political cycles require discretionality to reallocate budget items, a decrease of discretionality curbs cycles. It may also make elections more effective at selecting competent incumbents.     

CAN A RULE‐BASED MONETARY POLICY FRAMEWORK WORK IN A DEVELOPING COUNTRY? THE CASE OF YEMEN

Monetary policy in Yemen is largely rudimentary and ad hoc in nature. The Central Bank of Yemen's (CBY) approach has been based on discretionary targeting of broad money without any clear target to anchor inflation expectations. This paper argues in favor of a new formal monetary policy framework for Yemen emphasizing a proactive and rule‐based approach with a greater direct focus on price stability in the context of a flexible management of the exchange rate. Although, as in many developing countries, institutional capacity is a concern, adopting a more formal framework could impel the kind of changes that are required to strengthen the ability of the CBY in achieving low and stable rates of inflation over the medium term.     

Aversion to Student Debt? Evidence from Low-Wage Workers

We combine state minimum wage changes with individual-level income and credit data to estimate the effect of wage gains on the debt of low-wage workers. In the three years following a $0.88 minimum wage increase, low-wage workers experience a $2,712 income increase and a $856 decrease in debt. The entire decline in debt comes from less student loan borrowing among enrolled college students. Credit constraints, buffer-stock behavior, and other rational channels cannot explain the reduction in student debt. Our results are consistent with students perceiving a utility cost of borrowing student debt arising from mental accounting.     

COST,QUALITY, AND ENVIRONMENTAL TRADEOFFS FOR PRINTED CIRCUIT BOARD ASSEMBLY

After exhausting all “pollution prevention pays” opportunities, further efforts towards environmental protection often engender some type of cost to the manufacturer. Then, designers must weigh tradeoffs between environmental impacts and equally pressing needs to reduce costs, improve product quality, and reduce cycle time: all while meeting customer demands, which are the driving force behind the design process. Although there is a growing market for “green” products as customers' desire to be environmentally responsible increases, it is extremely difficult to accurately assess the customer's actual willingness to pay for environmental protection. This paper first briefly reviews methods for assessing customer preferences. Then, it presents a decision model for use by design engineers to assist in making these tradeoffs between cost, quality, and environmental impact in which customer preferences can be reflected in weighting factors assigned by the design engineer. Qualitative HOQ information is used as a starting point to derive a mathematical programming formulation for multiobjective optimization. Finally, an illustrative example for printed circuit board assembly is provided.     

LATIN AMERICAN EXPORT SPECIALIZATION IN RESOURCE‐BASED PRODUCTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR GROWTH

Given Latin America's general specialization in resource‐based products, this paper focuses on the question of whether or not a country specialized in resource‐based products can have high rates of export and economic growth. To examine this question, an attempt is made to develop and apply a new taxonomy to a sample of resource‐based products exported by Latin American countries to the United States. This taxonomy is based on the role played by prices in the mechanism through which countries compete in specific international product markets. Resource‐based products are then classified as homogeneous, differentiated, or highly differentiated goods. The paper argues that exports of countries specialized in differentiated or highly differentiated goods tend to be much more dynamic than of those specialized in homogeneous goods.