Economic Inquiry articles from April 2007

Economic Inquiry archives from April 2007

Theories of commitment, altruism and reciprocity: evidence from linear public goods games.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION Individuals in the United States made over $185 billion in philanthropic contributions in 2004, given in Giving USA (1996). (1) This behavior is inconsistent with traditional utility theory in which individuals care only...

Cultural diversity, discrimination, and economic outcomes: an experimental analysis.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION Economic disparities have long existed across nations and between racial and ethnic groups within nations. Recently, economists have taken a closer look at the role of "culture" in explaining global variability in economic...

Single mothers working at night: standard work and child care subsidies.
April 1, 2007... A Single parent is constantly scrambling for someone to care for her two preschool daughters while she processes paperwork and inmates at a county jail in Winston-Salem, N.C. Hers is an unpredictable, ever-shifting schedule. Some days, she...

Hours flexibility and retirement.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION Standard models of labor supply depict workers as choosing to work any positive amount of hours they wish at the competitive wage paid to persons of their type. Implicit in these models is the assumption that employers...

Pay, technology, and the cost of worker absence.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION The complexity of patterns of worker absence is well known but is yielding reluctantly to studies that use highly detailed information about individual workers and their work environments. To date, these studies have...

How does health insurance affect workers' compensation filing?
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION Workers' compensation serves as a near-universal health insurance system for workers who become sick or injured because of their job. Almost every private sector worker in the United States is covered by workers'...

Abortion and crime: unwanted children and out-of-wedlock births.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION With violent crime rates dropping by 31% from their peak in 1991 to 1999 and murder rates declining by 42%, many explanations have been offered. This drop is all the more interesting because it occurred while some academics...

Births, deaths, and marriages in the U.S. commercial banking industry.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION The twentieth century witnessed two periods of dramatic regulatory and structural change in the U.S. banking industry--the Great Depression and the events of the 1980s and 1990s. While many important regulations were...

Convex costs and the merger paradox revisited.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION A simple canonical model published in the early 1980s suggests that mergers are rarely profitable for potential participants. Salant, Switzer, and Reynolds (1983) examined a model of n-identical firms, of which m merged....

Multinationals' productivity advantage: scale or technology?
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION There is now a substantial body of empirical work that documents a robust and positive correlation between foreign ownership and firm or plant productivity growth across a number of countries. The productivity advantage of...

A closer look at long-run U.S. money demand: linear or nonlinear error-correction with M0, M1, or M2?
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION The stability of money demand has been a long-standing issue. (1) Lucas (1988) informally analyzes the stability of a log-linear M1 money demand function and concludes that real money demand is a stable function, and he...

Information and the provision of quality Differentiated products.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION In the past 20 years, consumers have become increasingly conscious of the undesirable health and safety attributes of the products they consume, and surveys suggest that a growing percentage of consumers are willing to pay...

The procyclical leverage effect of collateral value on bank loans--evidence from the transaction data of Taiwan.
April 1, 2007... I. INTRODUCTION In the financial contract literature, collateral has been identified as serving as a screening device and sorting mechanism, as in Berger and Udell (1990) and Bester (1985). The practical significance of collateral is...

Erratum statement.(Correction notice)
April 1, 2007... Erratum to "Offsetting Behavior and the Benefits of Safety Regulation," by John C. Hause in Economic Inquiry, Volume 44, Issue 4, October 2006 On page 690, column 2, in the indented expression for y', add On page 690, column 2, in the...