Recently added articles from Southern Economic Journal:
Institutions, economic freedom, and cross-country differences in performance.(2008 Presidential Address)(Column)
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction I have spent most of my research time during the past two decades working on the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) project. The purpose of this project was straightforward: the development of a comprehensive measure that would reflect the consistency of the ...
Trust in private and common property experiments.
Apr 01, 2009; ... I. Introduction Numerous experimental studies involving private property endowments have demonstrated that individuals' decisions, in a variety of situations, reflect complex and diverse motivations beyond simple own-income maximization (see, for example, Ostrom 1998; Camerer ...
Privatization, deregulation, and capital accumulation.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction Since the early 1980s, many countries have privatized and deregulated intermediate goods industries, such as gas, electricity, or telecommunications, that had traditionally been run by public monopolies. The European Union (EU), for example, has adopted ...
Youth gangs as pseudo-governments: implications for violent crime.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction In the early 1970s, fewer than 300 cities cited having problems with youth gangs. (1) Since then, gangs have been identified in all 50 states, with over 2500 cities reporting problems by the late 1990s. (2) Anecdotal evidence, along with casual empiricism, has ...
The effects of exchange-rate volatility on commodity trade between the United States and Mexico.(Statistical table)
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction With the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in 1973, real exchange rates began to fluctuate greatly. As volatility increased, exporters and importers could no longer be as certain of the real prices of their goods. This increased risk would affect their ...
The neglect of correlation in allocation decisions.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction The observation that nonperfect correlation in asset returns may increase diversification possibilities is an essential component of efficient portfolio theory (Markowitz 1952). Finance textbooks commonly demonstrate the expansion of efficient frontier as the ...
When less is more: optimal patent breadth under the threat of patent validity challenges.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction Firms that choose patent protection as a means of protecting their intellectual property know that their effort to safeguard their technological territory through patent protection does not always conclude with the granting of the patent. Patents may be ...
Public school reform, expectations, and capitalization: what signals quality to homebuyers?
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction Education is one of the most important services provided by local governments. Low test scores, high dropout rates, high teacher turnover rates, and other problems indicate that large urban school districts in the United States serve their students inadequately ....
Monetary policy surprises and interest rates: choosing between the inflation-revelation and excess sensitivity hypotheses.
Apr 01, 2009; ... Romer and Romer (2000) reported that federal funds rate increases may raise expected inflation by revealing the Federal Reserve's private information about inflation. Gurkaynak, Sack, and Swanson (2005a) presented evidence that funds rate increases lowered long-term expected inflation. To ...
Regional external economies and economic growth under asymmetry.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction Much research in macroeconomics has studied the various factors responsible for promoting economic development. As has been emphasized by a number of economists, one of the most important sources of economic growth is the continued accumulation of knowledge. In ...
Heterogeneous workers and occupations: inequality, unemployment, and crowding out.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction This article attempts to determine the factors behind the cyclical behavior of the skill premium. Previous studies attempted to explain the observation that the skill premium is uncorrelated with contemporaneous output and lags the business cycle. However, these ...
Opportunity wages, classroom characteristics, and teacher mobility.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction Recent evidence suggests that teachers are the most important factor in promoting student achievement (Rivkin, Hanushek, and Kain 2005), yet public schools face two major problems in the retention of qualified teachers. First, there are systemic losses as ...
Demand changes and real exchange rate dynamics in a finite-horizon model with sectoral adjustment costs.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction Although the traditional macroeconomic models tend to explain economic fluctuations by focusing solely on supply shocks, given that equilibrium is determined by both demand and supply it would seem obvious that changes in demand may also have important effects in ...
External macroeconomic factors and the link between short- and long-run European interest rates: a note.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction The most recent literature on the term structure of interest rates suggests that the seminal model of Campbell and Shiller (1987), consisting of the spread and the change in the short-term rate in a vector autoregressive (VAR) specification, could be too ...
Stuck in the slow lane: undoing traffic composition biases in the measurement of trucking productivity.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction Deregulation and the logistics revolution have transformed the American economic landscape over the last 30 years. At the heart of these changes has been an apparently dynamic trucking industry, rapidly adapting to the freedoms of deregulation and adopting the ...
Tariff jumping and joint ventures.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction A major incentive for foreign direct investment (FDI) in countries that restrict trade is to jump tariff and non-tariff barriers. Local production helps in reducing costs due to protection, and therefore "tariff jumping" stands out as a strong motivation behind ...
Comment on "the diffusion of a medical innovation: is success in the stars?".
Apr 01, 2009; ... JEL Classification: UO, UI, O33 1. Introduction Burke, Fournier, and Prasad (2007), henceforth BFP, recently presented in these pages an important and path-breaking exploration of social learning models, noting potential welfare consequences of heterogeneous ...
The diffusion of a medical innovation: is success in the stars? Further evidence.
Apr 01, 2009; ... 1. Introduction In Burke, Fournier, and Prasad (2007) we examined the role that local interaction among physicians played in the adoption and utilization of stents following their introduction in the mid-1990s. Our interest was in the mechanics of social learning in medical ...