The conventional wisdom views high levels of education as a prerequisite for democracy. This paper shows that existing evidence for this view is based on cross-sectional correlations, which disappear once we look at within-country variation. In other words, there is no evidence that countries that increase their education are more likely to become democratic.
We present a model of nonprofit governance built on two assumptions: (1) organizations wish to hold precautionary savings in order to smooth expenditures; and (2) it is relatively easy for managers to divert these funds for personal use. Hence, donors face a trade off between expenditure smoothing and donation dissipation.We examine the model's predictions using panel data on U.S. nonprofits.
We study a model of imperfect competition and limited production capacity, in which a choice of low product quality enables firms to increase total production. We find that in the presence of limited capacity, such reduced quality often results in increased social welfare. We also explore the relation between the extent of competition and the choice of quality. We find that, in some cases, reduced competition leads to increased production, decreased average quality, increases total welfare, and makes consumers better off.
Since the beginning of the 1990s, we have seen a revolution in the way central banks communicate with the markets and the public. In the old days, central banks were generally very secretive institutions. Not only did they not clarify what their objectives and strategies were, but they even kept the markets guessing about what were the actual setting of policy instruments.
This paper explores issues in emerging market countries to make inflation targeting work for them. It starts by outlining why emerging market economies are so different from advanced economies and then discuss why developing strong fiscal, financial and monetary institutions is so critical to the success of inflation targeting in emerging market countries. Then it discusses two emerging market countries which illustrate what it takes to make inflation targeting work well, Chile and Brazil.
The compromise effect denotes the finding that brands gain share when they become the intermediate rather than extreme option in a choice set. Despite the robustness and importance of this phenomenon, choice modelers have neglected to incorporate the compromise effect in formal choice models and to test whether such models outperform the standard value maximization model. In this article, the authors suggest four context-dependent choice models that can conceptually capture the compromise effect.
We analyze the Pareto optimal contracts between lenders and borrowers in a model with asymmetric information. The model generalizes the Rothschild-Stiglitz pure adverse selection problem by including moral hazard. Entrepreneurs with unequal "abilities" borrow to finance alternative investment projects which differ in degree of risk and productivity. We determine the endogenous distribution of projects as functions of the amount of loanable funds, when lenders have no information about borrowers' ability and technological choices.
Teacher quality is widely believed to be important for education, depsite substantial but inconsistent evidence that teachers' credentials matter for student achievement. To accurately measure variation in achievement due to teachers' characteristics—both observable and unobservable—it is essential to identify teacher fixed effects while controlling for fixed student characteristics and classroom specific variables.
The question of whether higherlifetime income households save a larger fraction of their income was the subject of much debate in the 1950s and 1960s, and while not resolved, it remains central to the evaluation of tax and macroeconomic policies. We resolve this long-standing question using new empirical methods applied to the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the Survey of Consumer Finances, and the Consumer Expenditure Survey.