Desigualdad, instituciones e informalidad

(Disponible en idioma inglés únicamente) En este trabajo se presentan la teoría y los elementos de prueba de los factores determinantes del tamaño del sector informal. Proponemos un modelo teórico simple en el que el tamaño del sector informal guarda una relación negativa con la calidad de las instituciones y una relación positiva con la desigualdad del ingreso. A continuación se validan empíricamente esas predicciones empleando diversas variables representativas del tamaño del sector informal, la desigualdad del ingreso y la calidad de las instituciones. Se muestra que los resultados son valederos con respecto a una variedad de especificaciones econométricas.

Sobre los determinantes y efectos de la influencia de politica (On the Determinants and Effects of Political Influence)

En este trabajo se emplea una encuesta de gran alcance entre empresas de varios países para evaluar su influencia en las políticas oficiales. Se halló que la influencia guarda una relación con empresas más grandes propiedad del Estado que tienen un alto grado de concentración de la propiedad. Por el contrario, la tenencia foránea tiene escasa importancia. También se descubrió que la medida en que se considera que las políticas gubernamentales y la legislación entorpecen el crecimiento de las empresas disminuye junto con la influencia política e, independientemente, junto con el nivel de calidad institucional del país. (Disponible en inglés)

Policy Volatility and Growth

A growing body of recent macroeconomic evidence suggests that volatility is detrimental to economic growth. The channels through which volatility affects growth, however, are less clear; substantive evidence based on disaggregate data is almost non-existent. This paper offers a framework in which policy volatility has an adverse effect on firms` entry into productive industries, thereby affecting economic growth. Empirical support for this relationship is based on a detailed dataset of thousands of firms from some 80 countries. Additional evidence is provided on the channels through which volatility affects firm growth, showing that institutional obstacles magnify the effect.

Education and Democratic Preferences

This paper examines the causal link between education and democracy. Motivated by a model whereby educated individuals are in a better position to assess the effects of public policies and hence favor democracy where their opinions matter, the empirical analysis uses World Values Surveys to study the link between education and democratic attitudes. Controlling for a variety of characteristics, the paper finds that higher education levels tend to result in rodemocracy views. These results hold across countries with different levels of democracy, thus rejecting the hypothesis that indoctrination through education is an effective tool in non-democratic countries.Education, democracy

Who's Afraid of Foreign Aid? The Donors' Perspective

Since efforts by industrial countries to increase the amount of foreign aid they provide have been on the rise recently, it is important to understand the determinants involved. This paper examines the factors affecting support for foreign aid among voters in donor countries. The theoretical model, which considers an endogenous determination of official and private aid flows, suggests that government efficiency is an important factor in this regard, and also ties individual income to aid support through the elasticity of substitution. An empirical analysis of individual attitudes, based on the World Values Surveys, reveals that two factors are positively related to an individual`s willingness to support foreign aid: satisfaction with own government performance and individual relative income. Furthermore, when using donor country data, we find that aid is negatively tied to inequality, corruption and taxes. These results are quite consistent with the analytical framework.

Is the World Flat? Or Do Countries Still Matter?

This paper revisits the effects of a countrys institutional framework on individual firms behavior, in particular focusing on their propensity to comply with legal rules. The theoretical model presented here suggests that these effects may be of paramount significancecontrary to the recently popularized paradigm arguing that differences across countries have ceased to matter much. This papers empirical strategy consists of explaining the variation in measures of non-compliance with legal rules and employs a rich dataset based on thousands of firms from dozens of countries. We find that most of the variation emanates from country-wide differences in institutional quality, although some firm characteristics play a role as well. Our conclusion is that countries still matter in providing institutional infrastructure, which determines to a large extent the context within which firms operate.

Redistributional Preferences and Imposed Institutions

To what extent do imposed institutions shape preferences? We consider this issue by comparing the market-versus-state attitudes of respondents from a capitalist country, Finland, and an ex-communist group of Baltic countries, and by arguing that the period of communist rule can be viewed as an experiment in institutional imposition. We find that, consistent with some earlier related work, citizens from ex-communist countries tend to be more supportive of state ownership than respondents from capitalist economies. However, they also favor increasing inequality and competition as the means to enhance incentives. We conclude that, in some important relevant dimensions, institutional imposition (which lasted for about 50 years) had a limited effect on preferences. The lessons for Latin America are straightforward.

Functional factor analysis for periodic remote sensing data

We present a new approach to factor rotation for functional data. This is achieved by rotating the functional principal components toward a predefined space of periodic functions designed to decompose the total variation into components that are nearly-periodic and nearly-aperiodic with a predefined period. We show that the factor rotation can be obtained by calculation of canonical correlations between appropriate spaces which make the methodology computationally efficient. Moreover, we demonstrate that our proposed rotations provide stable and interpretable results in the presence of highly complex covariance. This work is motivated by the goal of finding interpretable sources of variability in gridded time series of vegetation index measurements obtained from remote sensing, and we demonstrate our methodology through an application of factor rotation of this data.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS518 the Annals of Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

Humanistic education for the future 'crime fighters'

Aspiring to a life of crime fighting is a challenging but noble calling, and consequently, the educating of our future police, correctional, probation, parole, child protection, crime prevention, and youth justice officers, to name just a few, is an absolutely critical task if we want to live in a community that is not only safe but also one that allows for its members to flourish and grow. Given this imperative, the process of moulding our next generation of crime fighters in North Queensland must strive not only to impart knowledge and know-how – it should also endeavor to bring to the surface their nobler selves, the best of what it means to be human. It has to go beyond merely educating the mind, and must likewise invigorate their body and inspire their spirit. Employing a humanistic teaching philosophy that is primarily student-centered in nature, and premised on genuinely caring for their well-being and progress, allows for a more effective transmission of not only facts and figures, but also of values, attitudes, and an appropriate ethos necessary for their future careers in the criminal justice system