Local governments attempt to influence business location decisions and economic development through use of the property tax. Tax increment financing (TIF) earmarks property tax revenues that result ...from growth in assessed valuation. The TIF revenues are to be used for economic development projects but may also be diverted for other purposes. Using data for the Chicago metropolitan area that includes information on property value growth before and after TIF adoption, we find evidence that cities that adopt TIF grow more slowly than those that do not. We test for and reject sample selection bias as an explanation of this finding.
We document changes in the performance of over 6000 privatized and state-owned manufacturing enterprises in seven Eastern European countries over the initial transition period. We find that ...privatization is associated with significant increases in sales revenues and labor productivity, and, to a lesser extent, with fewer job losses. The positive effect of privatization is stronger in economic magnitude and statistical significance as the time elapsed since privatization increases. Enterprises privatized for less than 2 years have labor productivity growth similar to that of state-owned enterprises. In contrast, enterprises privatized for 3 or more years significantly outperform state-owned enterprises. The results are robust to the use of alternative econometric specifications (fixed effects, cluster effects, and random effects), and survive in six of the seven individual country samples (the exceptions being Hungary for sales growth and Romania for labor productivity growth).
Numerous assistance programs are designed to alleviate homelessness and food insecurity in the US, two of the more severe possible consequences of poverty. While we expect families with a higher ...probability of homelessness to also be at higher risk of food insecurity, after controlling for observed factors the relationship is not immediately apparent. To analyze this relationship, we use a unique data set with food insecurity information on both housed and homeless families. After instrumenting for the probability of homelessness, we find that families more prone to homelessness have higher levels of food insecurity. When we use dichotomous measures of food insecurity, however, the effects of homelessness are smaller.
This paper models a bank with access to two segmented capital markets, the market for insured deposits and the market for uninsured claims. We illustrate how higher costs of accessing either market ...leads to lower firm values and a greater incentive to carry liquid assets. We test our model on a sample of large banking firms, and label banks with relatively lower costs of accessing the two markets as more "financially flexible." Our two key findings are (1) banks with greater financial flexibility have greater value, and (2) banks with greater financial flexibility devote a smaller percentage of assets to cash and marketable securities, consistent with the notion that financial flexibility reduces the sensitivity of firm profits to internal wealth shocks, thus reducing the firm's need to carry financial slack.
Religion has played a role in conflict throughout history, with religious scriptures often being used to justify violence. In Search of Solutions evaluates the role of religion in Northern Ireland, ...Bosnia and Israel-Palestine. The book argues that religion has a tendency towards conflict and that peace is best guaranteed when human individuals commune directly with the divine without the mediation of organized religions. Different approaches to the reading of scriptures are introduced, drawing on post-modern theory. In Search of Solutions will be invaluable for the student seeking a clear overview of both the theory and the practice of religion in conflict resolution.
This article examines some of the major ways in which American history has been written, revised, and reinterpreted from partisan perspectives and for political purposes. It takes note of the ...Revolutionary founders' concerns about the ways in which their pivotal era (1765-1789) was likely to be misunderstood or distorted; how several of the most central events in the national narrative, such as the sectional conflict and Civil War, came to be misremembered for politically self-serving reasons; how presidents have misread or misrepresented American and international history to justify their policies; how the Supreme Court (and lower courts) has used history selectively to achieve outcomes (often desirable) that the justices felt were necessary; and finally, how the so-called culture wars of the early 1990s caused innocent words like "interpretation" and "revisionism" to become fighting phrases and the basis for shrill and often small-minded polemics between progressive and conservative agendas.
When do female occupations pay more? Jurajda, Štěpán; Harmgart, Heike
Journal of Comparative Economics,
03/2007, Letnik:
35, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Highly female occupations typically offer low pay. Although occupational gender segregation is a leading explanation for the gender wage gap, its effects are not fully understood. In this paper, we ...use a 1995 sample of social-security wage records of full-time German workers to show that, in East Germany, predominantly female occupations actually pay more to both men and women and that no relationship exists between occupation-specific concentration of women and wages in West Germany. Relying on workers who change occupations to condition fully on unobservable skills, we find a negligible wage impact of segregation. These findings are consistent with the imposition of high wage levels in East Germany at the outset of reforms and the selection of mainly high-skill women into employment. Linking our results with evidence from the US and post-communist countries suggests an important role for the participation of low-skill women in employment for the observed wage penalty to female occupations.
Journal of Comparative Economics
35 (1) (2007) 170–187.
We didn't know. For half a century, Western politicians and intellectuals have so explained away their inaction in the face of genocide in World War II. In stark contrast, Western observers today ...face a daily barrage of information and images, from CNN, the Internet, and newspapers about the parties and individuals responsible for the current Balkan War and crimes against humanity. The stories, often accompanied by video or pictures of rape, torture, mass graves, and ethnic cleansing, available almost instantaneously, do not allow even the most uninterested viewer to ignore the grim reality of genocide.And yet, while information abounds, so do rationalizations for non-intervention in Balkan affairs - the threshold of real genocide has yet to be reached in Bosnia; all sides are equally guilty; Islamic fundamentalism in Bosnia is a threat to the West; it will only end when they all tire of killing each other - to name but a few.
InThis Time We Knew, Thomas Cushman and Stjepan G. Mestrovic have put together a collection of critical, reflective, essays that offer detailed sociological, political, and historical analyses of western responses to the war. This volume punctures once and for all common excuses for Western inaction.This Time We Knewfurther reveals the reasons why these rationalizations have persisted and led to the West's failure to intercede, in the face of incontrovertible evidence, in the most egregious crimes against humanity to occur in Europe since World War II.Contributors to the volume include Kai Erickson, Jean Baudrillard, Mark Almond, David Riesman, Daniel Kofman, Brendan Simms, Daniele Conversi, Brad Kagan Blitz, James J. Sadkovich, and Sheri Fink.
Purpose - Did the Soviet development strategy of according high priority to firms in heavy industry give these firms an advantage during Russia's transition to a market-oriented economy? This paper ...seeks to answer this question.Design methodology approach - To document industry variation in efficiency between priority and non-priority sectors, the paper uses firm-level data collected in 1992 and 1995 to estimate a stochastic frontier production function for 11 industries. It then aims to investigate which firm characteristics contributed to variation in technical efficiency between 1992 and 1995.Findings - Firms in low-priority sectors exhibited higher efficiency in 1992 than firms in high-priority sectors; by 1995, efficiency differences diminish. Efficiency gains were relatively higher in industries which experienced the largest percentage output declines. Non-state ownership tends to improve efficiency, but the ownership effect varies by industry and over time. The paper rejects the hypothesis that export experience increases efficiency, and this result is especially strong in 1995. Location in Moscow proved to be a positive factor, and the benefit grew over time.Research limitations implications - Panel data were not used because near-hyper-inflationary conditions and changes in capital valuation methods make it impossible to accurately adjust output and capital values between 1992 and 1995; and because firms that divided into multiple units or changed industry classification between 1992 and 1995 would need to be dropped, reducing sample size considerably and making industry-level analysis impossible.Practical implications - The paper provides a baseline for analyzing the impact of the transition on the performance of Russian manufacturing firms. It evaluates the influence of location (capital city effect) on firm performance, and demonstrates that privatization alone is not sufficient to improve efficiency.Originality value - This is the first study to examine the initial impact of transition on the efficiency of Russian firms across 11 industries, with focus on differences between former priority and non-priority sectors. The results underscore the magnitude of structural dislocation caused by planners' preferences in the former Soviet economy.
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