Theory and evidence on economic freedom and economic growth: A comment

Altman (2007) examines the impact of economic freedom, including its various component parts, on aggregate economic performance across countries. He claims that some of the component parts of economic freedom, measured primarily with the Economic Freedom of the World index, are correlated positively with higher levels of per capita income and growth while others are not. He also attempts to identify "threshold effects" within the data that indicate differential impacts of economic freedom on economic performance at different levels. Although both questions are worthwhile, ultimately his efforts are unconvincing for both theoretical and empirical reasons which we discuss.economic freedom

Testing the Alchian-Allen Theorem: A Study of Consumer Behavior in the Gasoline Market

This paper uses a data set of daily sales at a single gasoline station over a seven year period to determine if consumers respond to relative price changes among the three grades of gasoline. Based on the reasoning of Alchian and Allen (1964) and Barzel (1976), market shares of higher quality gasoline should increase at the expense of regular grade gasoline when overall gasoline prices increase. The empirical results do not conform to this expectation. We find instead that the consumers in this sample responded to higher gasoline prices by switching to mid grade gasoline from premium grade gasoline leaving the market share of regular gasoline unchanged.Alchian-Allen Theorem

Language and Masculinities: History, Development, and Future

In the past two decades, the field of language and masculinities studies has become an established part of language, gender, and sexuality research, growing in response to concerns about the limited criticality directed toward men and masculinities in sociolinguistics. In doing so, the field has added to the conceptual and theoretical tool kit of sociolinguistics, furthering both our understanding of the linguistic strategies used by men in a variety of contexts and the myriad links connecting language and the social performance of gender. This review surveys the historical trajectory of scholarship broadly concerned with men, masculinities, and language and charts its development from more critical work on men and masculinities within sociology to its emergence as an independent field of inquiry. I outline some of the key contributions this body of work has made to sociolinguistic theory, methodology, and knowledge and suggest some future research directions through which the field may engage with contemporary social issues

Sociolinguistic constructions of identity among adolescent males in Glasgow

The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is typically associated with violence, criminality, and aggression, and these negative associations impact on the social meaning of Glaswegian Vernacular as used by working-class adolescent males. There have been, however, no studies which have made a systematic attempt to uncover the role fine-grained phonetic variation plays in indexing these associations. Moreover, there have been no studies of Glaswegian which have examined locally constituted groups of adolescent male speakers, and how such speakers use a range of linguistic and social practices in their construction of particular social identities. This study is an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic account of Glaswegian Vernacular which examines the nexus of language, identity, and violence using data collected from a group of working-class adolescent males from a high school in the south side of the city between 2005 – 2008, and aims to uncover whether adolescent males who identified as ‘neds’ or who engaged in social practices considered ‘neddy’ have quantitative linguistic differences from those adolescent males who do not. Through the fine-grained phonetic analysis of the linguistic variables BIT, CAT and (TH), coupled with ethnographic observations, this thesis shows how an apparently homogenous group of speakers use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another

Estimating the size of the trade sector in the Economic Freedom of the World index

The Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) index measures the extent to which nations allow their citizens economic freedom. The freedom of people to trade internationally is a featured area within the index. One component of this area is the size of the trade sector, or rather the deviation of a country's trade sector from its expected size. This note explains the basic methodology used to estimate the model and create the ratings for the deviation of a country's trade sector from its expected size component of the EFW index.trade sector, economic freedom, distance-adjusted demand