Koza Dabasa explores Okinawa's island culture and its ghosts of war through the lens of Nenes, a four-woman pop group that draws on the distinctiveness and exoticism of Okinawan musical tradition. ...Both a tropical island paradise and the site of some of the bloodiest battles of World War II, Okinawa has a unique culture and a contentious history. Its musical traditions are distinct from other parts of Japan, varying in instrumentation, poetic forms, and musical scales. Nenes marks its cultural difference as Okinawan by emphasizing its own exoticism, expressed through its music, fashion, imagery, and performance style. Henry Johnson listens to Koza Dabasa as a representation of Okinawa's relationship with the Japanese music industry and with the broader themes of international warfare and local tourism. 33 1/3 Global, a series related to but independent from 33 1/3, takes the format of the original series of short, music-based books and brings the focus to music throughout the world. With initial volumes focusing on Japanese and Brazilian music, the series will also include volumes on the popular music of Australia/Oceania, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and more.
Economic Shocks and Crime Dix-Carneiro, Rafael; Soares, Rodrigo R.; Ulyssea, Gabriel
American economic journal. Applied economics,
10/2018, Volume:
10, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper studies the effect of changes in economic conditions on crime. We exploit the 1990s trade liberalization in Brazil as a natural experiment generating exogenous shocks to local economies. ...We document that regions exposed to larger tariff reductions experienced a temporary increase in crime following liberalization. Next, we investigate through what channels the trade-induced economic shocks may have affected crime. We show that the shocks had significant effects on potential determinants of crime, such as labor market conditions, public goods provision, and income inequality. We propose a novel framework exploiting the distinct dynamic responses of these variables to obtain bounds on the effect of labor market conditions on crime. Our results indicate that this channel accounts for 75 to 93 percent of the effect of the trade-induced shocks on crime.
A growing body of research examines the regional effects of trade liberalization using a weighted average of trade policy changes across industries. This paper develops a specific-factors model of ...regional economies that provides a theoretical foundation for this intuitively appealing empirical approach and also provides guidance on treatment of the nontraded sector. In the context of Brazil's early 1990s trade liberalization, I find that regions facing a 10 percentage point larger liberalization-induced price decline experienced a 4 percentage point larger wage decline. The results also confirm the empirical relevance of appropriately dealing with the nontraded sector. (JEL F13, F16, O19, O24) PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
This article extends signaling theory to research on acquisition premiums and investigates the value that newly public targets capture in post-IPO acquisitions. We complement previous research on ...acquisition premiums by suggesting that signals about targets can enhance sellers' gains by reducing acquirers' offer price discounting that is due to information asymmetries. Specifically, we argue that target firms can engage in interorganizational relationships (e.g., associations with prominent investment banks, venture capitalists, and alliance partners) that function as signals and enhance sellers' gains. Empirical evidence shows that the benefits of such signals apply to domestic and cross-border deals alike and that these benefits are even greater for IPO targets selling their companies to acquirers based in different industries.
A gravity model of immigration Lewer, Joshua J.; Van den Berg, Hendrik
Economics letters,
04/2008, Volume:
99, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
This paper develops a gravity model of immigration. Tests of the model using panel data for 16 OECD countries for 1991–2000 confirm the model's high explanatory power, and examples illustrate its ...usefulness for testing other hypothesized determinants of immigration.
China's rapid industrialization has led to a severe deterioration in water quality in the country's lakes and rivers. By exploiting variation in pollution across China's river basins, I estimate that ...a deterioration of water quality by a single grade (on a six-grade scale) increases the digestive cancer death rate by 9.7%. The analysis rules out other potential explanations such as smoking rates, dietary patterns, and air pollution. I estimate that doubling China's levy rates for wastewater dumping would save roughly 17,000 lives per year but require an additional $500 million in annual spending on wastewater treatment.
This paper studies the link between volatility, labor market flexibility, and international trade.International differences in labor market regulations affect how firms can adjust to idiosyncratic ...shocks. These institutional differences interact with sector specific differences in volatility (the variance of the firm-specific shocks in a sector) to generate a new source of comparative advantage.Other things equal, countries with more flexible labor markets specialize in sectors with higher volatility. Empirical evidence for a large sample of countries strongly supports this theory: the exports of countries with more flexible labor markets are biased towards high-volatility sectors. We show how differences in labor market institutions can be parsimoniously integrated into the workhorse model of Ricardian comparative advantage of Dornbusch, Fischer, and Samuelson (1977, American Economic Review, 67,823-839). We also show how our model can be extended to multiple factors of production.
Why has democracy failed to take root in Russia? After shedding the shackles of Soviet rule, some countries in the postcommunist region undertook lasting democratization. Yet Russia did not. Russia ...experienced dramatic political breakthroughs in the late 1980s and early 1990s, but it subsequently failed to maintain progress toward democracy. In this 2005 book, M. Steven Fish offers an explanation for the direction of regime change in post-Soviet Russia. Relying on cross-national comparative analysis as well as on in-depth field research in Russia, Fish shows that Russia's failure to democratize has three causes: too much economic reliance on oil, too little economic liberalization, and too weak a national legislature. Fish's explanation challenges others that have attributed Russia's political travails to history, political culture, or to 'shock therapy' in economic policy. The book offers a theoretically original and empirically rigorous explanation for one of the most pressing political problems of our time.
Help or hindrance? Martorell, Paco; McFarlin, Isaac, Jr
The review of economics and statistics,
05/2011, Volume:
93, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Providing remedial (also known as developmental) education is the primary way colleges cope with students who do not have the academic preparation needed to succeed in college-level courses. ...Remediation is widespread, with nearly one-third of entering freshmen taking remedial courses at an annual cost of at least $1 billion. Despite its prevalence, there is uncertainty surrounding its short- and longer-run effects. This paper presents new evidence on this question using longitudinal administrative data from Texas and a regression discontinuity research design. We find little indication that remediation improves academic or labor market outcomes.
A number of papers have suggested that pro-social behaviour in the workplace may be sensitive to the institutional environment, but there is little empirical research that attempts to test this ...directly using data on worker behaviour. This is the aim of this paper. We show that individuals in the non-profit sector are significantly more likely to do unpaid overtime than those in the for-profit sector. However, we find no evidence of adjustment along either the extensive or intensive margins when individuals change sectors. The results of our analysis therefore point to selection and we find supporting evidence that individuals do self-select on the basis of their propensity to donate labour.
► We compare unpaid overtime among workers in the non-profit and for-profit sectors. ► Workers in the non-profit sector are 12 ppts more likely to do unpaid overtime than comparable workers in the for-profit sector. ► There is no evidence that workers change their unpaid overtime when they switch sectors. ► We present evidence to support a selection story.
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