Knowledge that Transforms

Jene K. Kwon, Hoon Paik, Factor Price Distortions, Resource Allocation, and Growth: A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Nov., 1995), pp. 664-676

Seung-Rok Park, Jene K. Kwon, Rapid Economic Growth with Increasing Returns to Scale and Little or no Productivity Growth, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 2 (May, 1995), pp. 332-351

Theoretical and empirical studies do not address whether campaign contributions from more than one election cycle are important for congressional voting behavior. Further, they do not address whether campaign contributions from different periods have different effects on legislative voting behavior. This paper analyzes the cumulative effect of campaign contributions over two time periods. Moreover, this paper studies the importance of the timing of contributions for legislative voting behavior. Ten roll call votes on price supports and quotas for various farm commodities in 1981 and 1985 are analyzed. Most of the estimated contribution coefficients are statistically significant. The results show that without campaign contributions farm interest would have lost in five of the seven votes that were won. Moreover, contributions that were given at approximately the same time as the vote have a larger impact on voting behavior than contributions that the legislator received one or two years prior to the vote.

This paper is an empirical study of the value of four file compatibility standards for transferring data in the personal computer software market. The results are that only the LOTUS file compatibility standard is significant in explaining price variations and it is significant in both the spreadsheet and database management system markets. This supports the hypothesis that the personal computer software market exhibits complementary network externalities.

This paper uses micro-level historical data to examine the causes of bank failure.For statecharactered Kansas banks during 19 10-28, time-to-failure is explicitly modeled using a proportional hazards framework.In addition to standard financial ratios, this study includes membership in the voluntary state deposit insurance system and measures of technical efficiency to explain bank failure.The results indicate that deposit insurance system membership increased theprobability of failure and banks which were technically inefficient were more likely to fail than technically efficient banks.

There has been no systematic study of the characteristics of the universities and academic researchers that seem to have contributed most to industrial innovation. Nor do we know how such academic research has been funded. This paper, based on data obtained from sixty-six firms in seven major manufacturing industries and from over two hundred academic researchers, sheds new light on the sources, characteristics, and financing of academic research underlying industrial innovation. The findings should be of interest to economists concerned with technological change and to policymakers attempting to increase the economic payoff from the nation's academic research.

I use household data from El Salvador and Nicaragua to examine the determinants of remittances from international migration. Nearly twice as many households in San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, receive remittances from relatives abroad than do households in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua, and of those who receive remittances, the average remittance received in San Salvador is over double that in Managua-$119/month to $45/month. I find that the role of observable characteristics in explaining differences in the level of remittances, accounting for the self-selection in the decision to remit, is not large. The difference is explained by differences in the behavioral coefficients and by differences in the self-selection bias of those who remit out of the pool of emigrants between the two countries.

The paper searches for links between school quaity and subsequent earnings of students. Using data for white males from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, the paper rejects the hypothesis that workers' earnings are independent of which high school they attended. However, traditional measures of school 'quality' such as class size, teachers' salaries and teachers' level of education fail to capture these differences. This result is robust to changes in specification and subsample. The paper contrasts the results with those of D. Card and A. B. Krueger (1992) and speculates that structural changes may have weakened the link between traditional measures of school quality and student outcomes.

Paul Glewwe, Hanan G. Jacoby, An Economic Analysis of Delayed Primary School Enrollment in a Low Income Country: The Role of Early Childhood Nutrition, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 156-169

Jeffrey Englin, J. S. Shonkwiler, Estimating Social Welfare Using Count Data Models: An Application to Long-Run Recreation Demand Under Conditions of Endogenous Stratification and Truncation, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Vol. 77, No. 1 (Feb., 1995), pp. 104-112