Will the Working Poor Invest in Human Capital? A Laboratory Experiment

This paper presents the results of a laboratory experiment involving some 250 subjects in the Montreal area. The experiment focused on three main questions : (1) Will the working poor invest in various assets? (2) Are these subjects willing to delay consumption for substantial returns? (3) How do these subjects view risky choices? Answering these questions will help answering the key research question : Given the right incentive, will the working poor save to invest in human capital? To view the report, please click here : www.srdc.org/english/publications/workingpoor.pdf Ce rapport présente les résultats d'une expérience en laboratoire impliquant environ 250 sujets résidant dans la région de Montréal. L'expérience tente de répondre à trois questions : 1) Les travailleurs à faible revenu investissent-ils dans des actifs diversifiés?; 2) Les sujets sont-ils prêts à reporter leur consommation dans le futur en échange de rendements financiers substantiels?; 3) Comment ces sujets perçoivent-ils les choix risqués? Les réponses à ces questions vont permettre d'éclairer le sujet principal de cette recherche menée par le SRDC, à savoir : Si on leur procure les bonnes incitations, les travailleurs à faible revenu auront-ils tendance à épargner pour investir dans du capital humain? Pour visionner l'intégralité du rapport cliquez ici : http://www.srdc.org/uploads/workingpoor.pdf

Payment Systems For The Internet – Consumer Requirements

This paper examines the consumer requirements for payment systems on the Internet. According to previous literature, the eight important features of payment systems from a consumer’s point of view are: security, reliability, privacy, acceptability, person-to-person (P2P), flexibility, price, and ease of use. This research focuses on identifying the importance of these features in general and in specific situations. Five hypotheses are formulated.The results of a mail questionnaire indicate that there is indeed a clear preference ranking of the eight features. This ranking shows that security, reliability and privacy are the most important features of a payment system for Internet purchases.This ranking remains stable for unknown Web shops and expensive products. Internet users value price less then non-users. Buyers value security significantly more than non-buyers, although both groups rank security first. In addition, reliability is less important for buyers than for non-buyers.The research shows that current payment systems used on the Internet (mainly credit cards) do not satisfy consumer requirements. This may be a reason for the disappointing e-retailing sales.E-retailling;

The Move toward a Cashless Society: A Closer Look at Payment Instrument Economics

Ever since the first general-purpose charge card debuted in the early 1950s, pundits have been predicting the "cashless society." Over fifty years later, we may finally be getting close to that vision. This study is the first to examine empirically the move toward a cashless society using a cost-benefit framework. We find that when all key parties to a transaction are considered and benefits are added, cash and checks are more costly than many earlier studies suggest. In general, the shift toward a cashless society appears to be a beneficial one.

The Federal Child Nutrition Commodity Program: A Report on Nutritional Quality

Examines the types of food California schools order through the USDA Child Nutrition Commodity Program and how they affect the nutritional value of school meals. Includes policy recommendations for ensuring that meals meet nutritional guidelines

The Campus Credit Card Trap: A Survey of College Students and Credit Card Marketing

Based on in-person surveys at forty colleges and universities, analyzes how students pay for their education, how many use credit cards and in what way, and what their attitudes are toward on-campus credit card marketing and toward efforts to limit it

Sources of business cycles in Korea and the United States

The authors estimate common and nation-specific components of technology shocks, real demand shocks, and combined (common and nation-specific) monetary shocks using quarterly data for Korea and the United States.Business cycles ; Korea

Payment network scale economies, SEPA, and cash replacement

The goal of SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) is to facilitate the emergence of a competitive, intra-European market by making cross-border payments as easy as domestic transactions. With crossborder inter-operability for electronic payments, card transactions will increasingly replace cash and checks for all types of payments. Using different methods, the authors estimate card and other payment network scale economies for Europe. These indicate substantial cost efficiency gains if processing is consolidated across borders rather than "piggybacked" onto existing national operations. Cost reductions likely to induce greater replacement of small value cash transactions are also illustrated.

Information shares in the U.S. treasury market

This paper is the first to characterize the tatonnement of high-frequency returns from U.S. Treasury spot and futures markets. In particular, we highlight the previously neglected role of the futures markets in price discovery. The lower-bound estimate of bivariate information shares for 30-year Treasury futures typically exceeds 50% from 1998 on. Standard liquidity measures, including the proportion of trades and relative bid-ask spreads, explain daily information shares. These conclusions still hold when one controls for days of macroeconomic announcements. Finally, a 5-dimensional cointegrated system explains a high percentage of Treasury returns. In that system, the 30-year futures contract and the 5-year spot market dominate price discovery. ; Earlier title: The microstructure of bond market tatonnement; Price discovery in the U.S. treasury marketBond market

Saving Decisions of the Working Poor: Short-and Long-Term Horizons

We explore the predictive capacity of short-horizon time preference decisions for long-horizon investment decisions. We use experimental evidence from a sample of Canadian working poor. Each subject made a set of decisions trading off present and future amounts of money. Decisions involved both short and long time horizons, with stakes ranging up to six hundred dollars. Short horizon preference decisions do well in predicting the long-horizon investment decisions. These short horizon questions are much less expensive to administer but yield much higher estimated discount rates. We find no evidence that the present-biased preference measures generated from the short-horizon time preference decisions indicate any bias in long-term investment decisions. We also show that individuals are heterogeneous with respect to discount rates generated by short-horizon time preference decisions and long-horizon time preference decisions. Dans cet article, nous évaluons si les préférences exprimées pour le présent peuvent prédire les décisions d’investissement dans le long terme. L’article mobilise l’approche de l’économie expérimentale avec comme participants des travailleurs canadiens à faibles revenus. Chaque participant est invité à choisir entre une somme qu’il peut toucher à très court terme et un montant plus élevé, mais qui ne lui sera versé que plus tard dans le temps. Pour certains choix, les montants ne seront disponibles que dans 7 ans et peuvent atteindre jusqu’à 600 $. Nous trouvons que les décisions entre le présent et un horizon de court terme permettent de prédire les arbitrages réalisés par les participants entre le présent et des décisions à plus long terme. Ce résultat est important dans la mesure où il est plus difficile et coûteux d’étudier les décisions de long terme que celles de court terme. Nous observons également une forte hétérogénéité entre les participants relativement à leurs taux d’escompte de court et de long terme.intertemporal choice, field experiments, risk attitudes, choix intertemporels, économie expérimentale, attitudes vis-à-vis le risque