Pitfalls of Self-management in the Kibbutz

This article traces and analyzes the changes that have occurred in the self-managed Kibbutz communities and in their industrial organization. It primarily examines changes concerned with self-management and democracy in the community and the Kibbutz economy, and analyzes their direction. The article raises the question whether a self-managed democratic community is able to remain as such at a time when the national economy, public support and the collective ideology are all weakened. Even though the Kibbutz community is not self-managed now as it was in the past, it still retains representative democracy, as well as some direct democracy, and presents a unique way of managing its industrial, agricultural and social organizations, which enables the Kibbutz community to adhere to some, if not all, of its basic values.     

The Demand for Bank Reserves and Other Monetary Aggregates

The article starts with Haslag's (1998) model of the bank's demand for reserves and reformulates it with a cash-in-advance approach for both financial intermediary and consumer. This gives a demand for a base of cash plus reserves that is not sensitive to who gets the inflation tax transfer. It extends the model to formulate a demand for demand deposits, yielding an M 1-type demand, and then includes exchange credit, yielding an M 2-type demand. Based on the comparative statics of the model, it provides an interpretation of the evidence on monetary aggregates. This explanation relies on the nominal interest as well as technology factors of the banking sector.     

Parental transfer of financial knowledge and later credit outcomes among low- and moderate-income homeowners

It is well established that acquiring financial skills during childhood is linked with better savings in adulthood. Little is known, however, about the relationship between parental teaching of money management early in life and children's financial outcomes in adulthood. This is particularly true for low- and moderate-income (LMI) households. Using data from Community Advantage Program survey data for 2,389 LMI homeowners, we find that adults who report receiving high levels of money-management teaching in childhood from their parents are associated with higher credit scores and lower credit card debt in adulthood. We also find that the level of parental financial teaching influences the relationship between children's later educational attainment and credit scores. These findings suggest implications for initiatives promoting financial capability for parents and children.     

Identification and Inference With Many Invalid Instruments

We study estimation and inference in settings where the interest is in the effect of a potentially endogenous regressor on some outcome. To address the endogeneity, we exploit the presence of additional variables. Like conventional instrumental variables, these variables are correlated with the endogenous regressor. However, unlike conventional instrumental variables, they also have direct effects on the outcome, and thus are “invalid” instruments. Our novel identifying assumption is that the direct effects of these invalid instruments are uncorrelated with the effects of the instruments on the endogenous regressor. We show that in this case the limited-information-maximum-likelihood (liml) estimator is no longer consistent, but that a modification of the bias-corrected two-stage-least-square (tsls) estimator is consistent. We also show that conventional tests for over-identifying restrictions, adapted to the many instruments setting, can be used to test for the presence of these direct effects. We recommend that empirical researchers carry out such tests and compare estimates based on liml and the modified version of bias-corrected tsls. We illustrate in the context of two applications that such practice can be illuminating, and that our novel identifying assumption has substantive empirical content.     

The Working Families’ Tax Credit and Some European Tax Reforms in A Collective Setting

A framework for simplified implementation of the collective model of labor supply decisions is presented in the context of fiscal reforms in the UK. Through its collective form the model accounts for the well known problem of distribution between wallet and purse, a broadly debated issue which has so far been impossible to model due to the limitations of the unitary model of household behavior. A calibrated data set is used to model the effects of introducing two forms of the Working Families’ Tax Credit. We also summarize results of estimations and calibrations obtained using the same methodology on data from five other European countries. The results underline the importance of taking account of the intrahousehold decision process and suggest that who receives government transfers does matter from the point of view of labor supply and welfare of household members. They also highlight the need for more research into models of household behavior.

Collective Models of Labor Supply with Nonconvex Budget Sets and Nonparticipation: A Calibration Approach

We suggest a methodology to calibrate a collective model with household-specific bargaining rules and marriage-specific preferences that incorporate leisure externalities. The empirical identification relies on the assumption that some aspects of individual preferences remain the same after marriage, so that estimation on single individuals can be used. The procedure maps the complete Pareto frontier of each household in the dataset and we define alternative measures of a power index. The latter is then regressed on relevant bargaining factors, including a set of variables retracing the potential relative contributions of the spouses to household disposable income. In its capacity to handle complex budget sets and labor force participation decisions of both spouses, this framework allows the comparison of unitary and collective predictions of labor supply reactions and welfare changes entailed by fiscal reforms in a realistic setting (see Michal Myck et al., 2006; Denis Beninger et al., 2006).

Social remittances and intra-EU mobility: non-financial transfers between U.K. and Poland

The massive rise in intra-European Union (EU) mobility in recent decades has spawned several important social and cultural phenomena that are still not covered by academic research. Social remittances – the transfer of ideas, practices, codes of behaviours, values and norms between the place of origin and destination are an important aspect of social change and modernity and they are still to be explored and documented. However, not all migrants acquire, transfer and implement them in the same way. Ongoing acts of resistance, imitation and innovation are involved, so that some migrants become ‘ordinary agents of change’ in their local microcosms, while others may contest that change. Tracing these processes in a transnational perspective through a three-year transnational multi-sited qualitative longitudinal research, this article offers an in-depth look at the consequences of human mobility within the enlarged EU.     

Connected in Seattle? An exploratory study of student perceptions of discipline and attachments to teachers

How do students' perceptions about their treatment in school differ along racial and gender lines?     

Putting experts in their place: Achieving policy impact as an outsider-academic in civil service reforms in Slovakia

This paper studies two processes of civil service reform in Slovakia during the period of 2014–2015 in order to reflect on the involvement of an ‘outsider-academic’ and her strategies to achieve policy impact. The context of such involvement are multi-level processes permeated by political interests and poor on evidence, which favour strategic interests, bargaining and political pressure and contestation (the mode of ‘powering’) and a mode of legal-based ‘puzzling’ as opposed to a conceptual, intellectual search for solutions friendly towards outside academics—and achieving only incremental results. We theorise on the success of these strategies (including helping serendipity, throwing ideas to see what sticks, mobilising allies, anchoring a non-binding concept, and finding and developing long-term connections) and sketch analogies and differences between the position of an outsider-academic and a policy entrepreneur. We rely on auto-ethnographic data and documentation of the work of the committees involved and their outputs.