the impacts of tourism energy consumption and political instability on economic growth in the mena countries using panel data of 24 countries in the middle east and north african mena region from 2001 to 2009 the purpose of this study is to examine the impacts of tourism energy consumption and political instability on economic growth within the neoclassical growth framework to address the objective of this study we utilise both the static panel data approach as well as the dynamic generalised method of moments gmm estimator to examine the impact of candidate variables our results show that energy consumption and tourism significantly contribute to the economic growth of countries in the mena region hence our study lends some support to the existence of the tourism led growth and energy led growth hypotheses in the region in line with our expectation our estimation results also reveal that political instability impedes the process of economic growth and development in the mena region therefore macroeconomic policies to promote expansion in tourism and energy consumption will directly stimulate economic growth additionally efforts to help the region overcome its history of political instability would attract more international tourist arrivals and further invigorate economic growth

political business cycles and inflation stabilization abstract this article analyzes the effects of the timing of elections on the timing and character of adopted inflation stabilization plans multinomial logit estimations show that before elections exchange rate based stabilizations are more likely to be implemented than money based stabilizations while the opposite is more likely after elections

lying opportunities and incentives to lie reference dependence versus reputation abstract recent experiments on lying behavior show that the lying frequency in case of low outcomes increases in the ex ante probability of high outcomes this finding is in line with models consisting of internal lying costs and external reputation costs and rejects certain other models but does not allow for a clean test of models with reference dependent loss aversion to compare the explanatory power of reputation models and loss aversion models we manipulate the ex ante probability that lying is possible at all we show that the reputation model predicts that the lying frequency decreases in the probability that lying is possible while the loss aversion model predicts the opposite our experimental results strongly support the reputation model from an applied perspective our results suggest that reducing the probability that lying is possible may be counterproductive

political business cycles 40 years after nordhaus the aim of this article is to survey the huge literature that has emerged in the last four decades following nordhaus s rev econ stud 42 2 169 190 1975 publication on political business cycles pbcs i first propose some developments in history of thought to examine the context in which this ground breaking contribution saw the light of the day i also present a simplified version of nordhaus s model to highlight his key results i detail some early critiques of this model and the fields of investigations to which they gave birth i then focus on the institutional context and examine its influence on pbcs the actual research agenda finally i derive some paths for future research

why do diners tip rule of thumb or valuation of service when diners decide how much to tip is the decision based on social convention or on conscientious appraisal of server productivity previous researchers in economics and social psychology are generally inconclusive on this question a common finding in the literature is that tip size and service quality are unrelated a result usually obtained from ols regressions ols is only appropriate if service quality is exogenous it is argued that service quality is very likely endogenous in any regression of tip size good quality encourages good tips but server expectations of good tips encourage good quality this simultaneity is accounted for by jointly estimating percentage tips and customer rankings of service quality on a sample of 247 diners in a central minnesota restaurant included are explanatory variables consistent with both the social psychology and economic views of tipping in contrast to previous studies it is found that service quality significantly affects tip size and when servers expect hi

a positive theory of discretionary policy the cost of democratic government and the benefits of a constitution we offer an explanation of government s preference for discretionary policy action the main elements are asymmetric information and the ability and desire of governments to maximize reelection prospects discretionary policy imposes a social cost we show that the cost is eliminated if all voters have the same information as the government an optimal state contingent policy rule that precommits government through a constitution eliminates the cost by removing government s opportunities to exploit its informational advantage rules of this kind and constitutional restrictions are difficult to enforce in the presence of uncertainty and different information available to government and the public

incentives and service quality in the restaurant industry the tipping service puzzle tipping is a significant economic activity tips in the us food industry alone amount to about 42 billion annually that was claimed to improve service quality and increase economic efficiency because it gives incentives to provide excellent service and therefore allows to avoid costly monitoring of workers the article suggests that this common wisdom might be wrong a simple model shows formally that tips can improve service only if they are sensitive enough to service quality empirical evidence suggests that tips are hardly affected by service quality nevertheless rankings of service quality by customers are very high the co existence of these two findings is denoted the tipping service puzzle and several possible explanations for it are offered

expectations as endowments evidence on reference dependent preferences from exchange and valuation experiments while evidence suggests that people evaluate outcomes with respect to reference points little is known about what determines them we conduct two experiments that show that reference points are determined at least in part by expectations in an exchange experiment we endow subjects with an item and randomize the probability they will be allowed to trade subjects that are less likely to be able to trade are more likely to choose to keep their item in a valuation experiment we randomly assign subjects a high or low probability of obtaining an item and elicit their willingness to accept for it the high probability treatment increases valuation of the item by 20 30 copyright 2011 oxford university press

reference dependent subjective expected utility abstract a reference dependent generalisation of subjective expected utility theory is presented in this theory preferences between acts depend both on final outcomes and on reference points which may be uncertain acts it is characterised by a set of axioms in a savage style framework a restricted form of the theory separates attitudes to end states encoded in a satisfaction function from attitudes to gains and losses of satisfaction given weak additional assumptions the restricted theory excludes cycles of choice explains observed disparities between willingness to pay and willingness to accept valuations of lotteries and predicts preference reversal

equilibrium political budget cycles political business cycle theories generally rely on nominal rigidities and voter myopia this paper offers an equilibrium theory that preserves some basic insights from earlier models though with significant refinements the political budget cycle emphasized here is in fiscal policy rather than output and inflation it arises via a multidimensional signal process one can consider the welfare implications of proposals to mitigate the cycle and the effects of altering the electoral structure copyright 1990 by american economic association

political cycles and exchange rate based stabilization fixed exchange rates implemented to increase credibility and attract foreign investment or as an alternative approach to stabilization in high inflation economies have been shown to be successful in expanding economic activity and correcting inflation in the short term but often lead to undesirable outcomes in the medium to long term although there is a wealth of literature documenting the boom bust cycles associated with the adoption of a nominal anchor no adequate explanation has been proffered as to governments repeatedly choosing policies that are self defeating the authors address this question with a political economy explanation based on the notion of a self interested government for which short term stabilization is attractive in the face of incentives posed by the electoral cycle if the election coincides with the boom phase of an exchange rate based stabilization incumbent governments increase the likelihood of gaining reelection and the bust phase will develop if at all only after the contest the authors thus suggest a modified version of the traditional political business cycle from the standpoint of a self interested office seeking government exchange rate based stabilizations can make good political sense empirical results based on an analysis of eighteen latin american countries from 1970 to 1999 support the insights of the argument movements towards a more fixed exchange rate are greater than three times more likely in a preelection period than in other stages of the electoral cycle

ladies first a field study of discrimination in coffee shops despite anecdotal and survey evidence suggesting the presence of discrimination against customers in stores restaurants and other small transaction consumer markets few studies exist that identify or quantify the nature of any unequal treatment we provide evidence from a field study of wait times in boston area coffee shops that suggests that female customers wait an average of 20 seconds longer for their orders than do male customers even when controlling for gender differences in orders we find that this differential in wait times is inverse to the proportion of employees who are female and directly related to how busy the coffee shop is at the time of the order this supports the conclusion that the observed differential is driven at least in part by employee animus and or statistical discrimination rather than unobserved heterogeneity in the purchasing behaviour of female customers

verifying exchange rate regimes credibility and transparency are at the core of the current debate on exchange rate regimes among the reasons why intermediate regimes have fallen out of favor a possibly important one is that they are not transparent it is difficult to verify them this paper investigates how difficult it is for investors to verify from observable data if the authorities are in fact following the exchange rate regime that they claim to be following of the various intermediate regimes the authors focus on the case of basket pegs with bands statistically it can take a surprisingly long span of data for an econometrician or an investor to verify whether such a regime is actually in operation the authors find that verification becomes more difficult as the regime s bands widen and or more currencies enter in the basket peg the authors analyze regimes announced as free floating and find that in some cases the observed exchange rate data validate the announced regime

political business cycles democratization and economic reform the case of africa abstract this paper presents cross country evidence that political business cycles are alive and well in the nascent democracies of the developing world africa provides fertile ground for the study of political business cycles this paper uncovers systematic electorally timed interventions in five monetary and four fiscal policy variables in a panel of african countries these findings are consistent with the predictions of rational opportunistic political business cycle theory if africa s increasingly frequent elections are associated with reversals of fiscal and monetary policy reform there is a potential conflict between political and economic reform

hroot hamburg registration and organization online tool abstract hroot hamburg registration and organization online tool is a web based software designed for managing participants of economic experiments this package provides important features to assure a randomized invitation process based on a filtered pre specified subject pool and a complete documentation of the selection procedure for potential participants of an experiment

political stabilization cycles in high inflation economies abstract high inflation economies often exhibit stop go cycles of inflation rather than smooth inflationary processes this paper relates these stop go episodes of inflation to a political cycle the government can try to repress inflation until after the elections in order to increase the chances of being reelected this is modeled as a two period game of incomplete information where voters try to pick the most competent government and inflation which signals lack of competency can be lowered by the government in the short run through foreign debt accumulation several stabilization episodes such as the primavera plan in argentina and the cruzado plan in brazil are used to motivate the model

do people tip because of psychological or strategic motivations an empirical analysis of restaurant tipping one of the most interesting and central questions about tipping is why people tip the two major potential reasons are strategic behaviour aimed to ensure good future service and social psychological motivations data on tipping behaviour suggests that there is no positive effect of patronage frequency on the sensitivity of tips to service quality this implies that people tip only because of social and psychological motivations and not because of strategic reasons and future service considerations

elections exchange rates and reform in latin america abstract in this paper we study the link between real exchange rate rer depreciation and elections in latin america our contribution is threefold first we employ a statistical model that takes into account the pervasive conditional heteroskedasticity found in financial data and includes a wide range of macroeconomic variables as regressors second we test whether the wave of central bank reform that swept the region has had any effect on the existence or strength of the electoral cycle in exchange rates third we test an additional hypothesis namely that financial liberalization may also be an important variable explaining changes in electoral effects on the real exchange rate in a panel of 9 latin american countries with available macroeconomic data and a history of exogenous election dates we confirm the previous findings that real depreciation intensifies after elections even when modeling the significant conditional heteroskedasticity in these data we also show for the first time in the literature that post election exchange rates are significantly less predictable we go on to test whether central bank reform has influenced the way in which elections affect the rer in latin america if reform has been effective at reducing political manipulation of the exchange rate then any relationship we see between elections and the rer before central bank reform should be mitigated in the post reform era we find that the relationship disappears after reform and that post reform real exchange rates are also significantly less volatile finally we show that financial liberalization seems to have a stronger effect on the conditional variance of the rer than does central bank reform but reform has a stronger impact on the conditional mean

strategic communication with lying costs i study a model of strategic communication between an uninformed receiver and an informed but upwardly biased sender the sender bears a cost of lying or more broadly of misrepresenting his private information the main results show that inflated language naturally arises in this environment where the sender almost always claims to be of a higher type than he would with complete information regardless of the intensity of lying cost there is incomplete separation with some pooling on the highest messages the degree of language inflation and how much information is revealed depend upon the intensity of lying cost the analysis delivers a framework to span a class of cheap talk and verifiable disclosure games unifying the polar predictions they make under large conflicts of interest i use the model to discuss how the degree of manipulability of information can affect the trade off between delegation and communication copyright 2009 wiley blackwell

cleaning house the impact of information technology monitoring on employee theft and productivity this paper examines how firm investments in technology based employee monitoring impact both misconduct and productivity we use unique and detailed theft and sales data from 392 restaurant locations from five firms that adopt a theft monitoring information technology it product we use difference in differences models with staggered adoption dates to estimate the treatment effect of it monitoring on theft and productivity we find significant treatment effects in reduced theft and improved productivity that appear to be primarily driven by changed worker behavior rather than worker turnover we examine four mechanisms that may drive this productivity result economic and cognitive multitasking fairness based motivation and perceived increases of general oversight the observed productivity results represent substantial financial benefits to both firms and the legitimate tip based earnings of workers our results suggest that employee misconduct is not solely a function of individual differences in ethics or morality but can also be influenced by managerial policies that can benefit both firms and employees this paper was accepted by serguei netessine operations management