Pre‐Colonial Ethnic Institutions and Contemporary African Development

We investigate the role of deeply rooted pre‐colonial ethnic institutions in shaping comparative regional development within African countries. We combine information on the spatial distribution of ethnicities before colonization with regional variation in contemporary economic performance, as proxied by satellite images of light density at night. We document a strong association between pre‐colonial ethnic political centralization and regional development. This pattern is not driven by differences in local geographic features or by other observable ethnic‐specific cultural and economic variables. The strong positive association between pre‐colonial political complexity and contemporary development also holds within pairs of adjacent ethnic homelands with different legacies of pre‐colonial political institutions.     

More Flexible Yet Less Developed? Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Labor Flexibilization and Gross Domestic Product in Crisis-Hit European Union Regions

Social Indicators Research - This study conducts a spatio-temporal analysis of labor flexibilization and GDP per capita change (gross domestic product) with focus on their interrelation in European...     

INEQUALITY AND GROWTH IN THE UNITED STATES: WHY PHYSICAL AND HUMAN CAPITAL MATTER

We investigate the relationship between economic growth and top income inequality under the influence of human and physical capital accumulation, using an annual panel of U.S. state‐level data. Our analysis is based upon the “unified” framework offered by Galor and Moav (2004) while the empirics account for cross‐section dependence, parameter heterogeneity, and endogeneity, in nonstationary series. We conclude that changes in inequality do not influence growth, neither in the short run nor in the long run in the United States as a whole in the 1929–2013 period. Our findings are robust to the inclusion of overall income inequality measures. These findings provide support for the theoretical prediction of the unified theory of inequality and growth, according to which the growth effect of inequality becomes insignificant in the latest stages of economic development that the United States experiences during our period of investigation. Therefore, future policies aiming at moderating the concentration at the upper end of income distribution are not likely to have adverse growth consequences in developed countries such as the United States. (JEL I21, O47, C23)     

Orthogonal Latin hypercube designs from generalized orthogonal designs

Latin hypercube designs is a class of experimental designs that is important when computer simulations are needed to study a physical process. In this paper, we proposed some general criteria for evaluating Latin hypercube designs through their alias matrices. Moreover, a general method is proposed for constructing orthogonal Latin hypercube designs. In particular, links between orthogonal designs (ODs), generalized orthogonal designs (GODs) and orthogonal Latin hypercube designs are established. The generated Latin hypercube designs have some favorable properties such as uniformity, orthogonality of the first and some second order terms, and optimality under the defined criteria.     

Control Attitudes and Perceptions of Drug use: An Exploratory Study

Control attitudes represent opinions about the formal or informal control of a behavior by society. This study investigates control attitudes toward drug use based on data from semistructured in-depth interviews. The analysis shows that control attitudes toward drug use consist of a normative component (philosophical principles) and a perceptive component (perceptions of harm and perceptions of immorality). In particular, control attitudes are shaped by combinations of (1) libertarian principles and perceptions of harm to others, (2) paternalistic principles and perceptions of self-harm, and (3) moralistic principles and perceptions of immorality. The implications of the results in the study of normative culture are discussed.     

Multicriteria Preference Disaggregation for Classification Problems with an Application to Global Investing Risk*

Mathematical programming and multicriteria approaches to classification and discrimination are reviewed, with an emphasis on preference disaggregation. The latter include the UTADIS family and a new method, Multigroup Hierarchical DIScrimination (MHDIS). They are used to assess investing risk in 51 countries that have stock exchanges, according to 27 criteria. These criteria include quantitative and qualitative measures of market risk (volatility and currency fluctuations); range of investment opportunities; quantity and quality on market information; investor protection (security regulations treatment of minority shareholders); and administrative “headaches” (custody, settlement, and taxes). The model parameters are determined so that the results best match the risk level assigned to those countries by experienced international investment managers commissioned by The Wall Street Journal. Among the six evaluation models developed, one (MHDIS) classifies correctly all countries into the appropriate groups. Thus, this model is able to reproduce consistently the evaluation of the expert investment analysts. The most significant criteria and their weights for assessing global risk investing are also presented, along with their marginal utilities, leading to identifiers of risk groups and global utilities portraying the strength of each country's risk classification. The same method, MHDIS, outperformed the other five methods in a 10‐fold validation experiment. These results are promising for the study of emerging new markets in fast‐growing regions, which present fertile areas for investment growth but also     

Notes and Communications APPLICATIONS OF MANAGEMENT SCIENCE IN BANKING

This paper identifies and classifies 164 journal articles on management science in banking according to technique and application area. An analysis provides some interesting insights into historical trends and future prospects for research.     

A categorized bibliographic survey of goal programming

A total of 240 goal programming articles that have so far appeared in over 60 English journal publications are compiled and classified according to technique and application areas. Analysis of these data provides interesting insights regarding goal programming article characteristics, literature trends and future needs.