The Land of My Consciousness

Latin American Studie

A model of riots dynamics: shocks, diffusion and thresholds

We introduce and analyze several variants of a system of differential equations which model the dynamics of social outbursts, such as riots. The systems involve the coupling of an explicit variable representing the intensity of rioting activity and an underlying (implicit) field of social tension. Our models include the effects of exogenous and endogenous factors as well as various propagation mechanisms. From numerical and mathematical analysis of these models we show that the assumptions made on how different locations influence one another and how the tension in the system disperses play a major role on the qualitative behavior of bursts of social unrest. Furthermore, we analyze here various properties of these systems, such as the existence of traveling wave solutions, and formulate some new open mathematical problems which arise from our work

IPOSS, Executive Compensation, and Firm Performance

IPOs, Executive Compensation, and Firm Performance Nancy Lopez-Rodriguez, Dr. Ansley Chua Department of Finance College of Business Administration Most businesses in the United States have had the chance to become public through initial public offerings, or IPOs. IPOs allow for some of the stock of a private company to be sold to the public. These IPOs generally bring in more capital to a business so the question of whether there is a specific determinant in executive compensation between males and females during these IPOs and if this has an impact on firm performance arises. The purpose of this research is to find if gender inequality pay exists in executive compensation during IPOs and if there is an impact on the performance of a firm. The age, gender, and ethnicities of over 1,240 executives of about 230 firms was hand collected mainly from EDGAR’s (SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system) IPO prospectus filings. The sample of IPO’s is from 2005 and 2010. With the data collected, the comparison of male and female executives’ earnings is analyzed, and the performance of the businesses is seen through stock prices and failure or success of the company. The number of females serving as executives for each company was also taken into consideration. The results show that women executives make significantly less than their male counterparts when compared with similar executive positions. We can conclude that factors such as gender can affect executive compensation and that the number of female executives serves as a determinant in firm performance overall

Collective Action for Watershed Management: Field Experiments in Colombia and Kenya

The dilemma of collective action around water use and management involves solving both the problems of provision and appropriation. Cooperation in the provision can be affected by the rival nature of the appropriation and the asymmetries in the access. We report two field experiments conducted in Colombia and Kenya. The Irrigation Game was used to explore the provision and appropriation decisions under asymmetric or sequential appropriation, complemented with a Voluntary Contribution Mechanism experiment which looks at provision decisions under symmetric appropriation. The overall results were consistent with the patterns of previous studies: the zero contribution hypotheses is rejected whereas the most effective institution to increase cooperation was face-to-face communication, and above external regulations, although we find that communication works much more effectively in Colombia. We also find that the asymmetric appropriation did reduce cooperation, though the magnitude of the social loss and the effectiveness of alternative institutional options varied across sites.Collective Action, Watersheds, Field Experiments, Colombia, Kenya, Community/Rural/Urban Development, Environmental Economics and Policy, Institutional and Behavioral Economics, Q0, Q2, C9, H3, H4,