education poverty and terrorism is there a causal connection the paper investigates whether there is a connection between poverty or low education and terrorism we review evidence on hate crimes which are closely related to terrorism the occurrence of hate crimes is largely independent of economic conditions we analyze data on support for attacks against israeli targets from public opinion polls conducted in the west bank and gaza strip support for violent attacks does not decrease among those with higher education and higher living standards the core contribution of the paper is a statistical analysis of the determinants of participation in hezbollah militant activities having a living standard above the poverty line or a secondary or higher education is positively associated with participation in hezbollah we also find that israeli jewish settlers who attacked palestinians in the west bank in the early 1980s were overwhelmingly from high paying occupations although our results are tentative and exploratory they suggest that neither poverty nor education has a direct causal impact on terrorism

an empirical application of the information structures model the postal authority case abstract the information structures model is one of the fundamental models of information economics and the theory of information systems it provides a theoretical framework for assessing the normative value of information this paper applies the information structures model to quality control attribute sampling by analyzing a real life situation in the postal authority the paper demonstrates how decision makers can assess the value of information of surveys their cost effectiveness and the value of information of a second survey

analysis of evolutionary game in structural formation of market power in remanufacturing supply chains it is normal for enterprises to engage in remanufacturing nowadays nevertheless the concern of enterprises and researchers is whether remanufacturers should compete for leadership in supply chain

analysing remanufacturing decisions of supply chain members in uncertainty of consumer preferences abstractthis article formulates a gaming model of the closed loop supply chain with manufacturers as the leader sellers and consumers where consumers may or may not be willing to pay remunerative price for remanufactured products vis a vis new products in the model manufacturers produce new as well as remanufactured products whereas sellers distribute them in stable circumstances this article presents the functional formula of the optimal manufacturing pricing decisions the results show that when the cost of new products is significantly lower than that of remanufactured ones manufacturers choose to produce new products only when the difference between cost of new and remanufactured products is moderate manufacturers tend to produce both new and remanufactured products and in some regions production of new and remanufactured products is proportional to each other when the difference between cost of new and remanufactured products is enormous their production and sale tend to stop also th

reverse channel design the case of competing retailers the economical and environmental benefits of product remanufacturing have been widely recognized in the literature and in practice in this paper we focus on the interaction between a manufacturers reverse channel choice to collect postconsumer goods and the strategic product pricing decisions in the forward channel when retailing is competitive to this end we model a direct product collection system in which the manufacturer collects used products directly from the consumers e g print and copy cartridges and an indirect product collection system in which the retailers act as product return points e g single use cameras cellular phones we first examine how the allocation of product collection to retailers impacts their strategic behavior in the product market and we discuss the economic trade offs the manufacturer faces while choosing an optimal reverse channel structure when a direct collection system is used channel profits are driven by the impact of scale of returns on collection effort whereas in the indirect reverse channel supply chain profits are driven by the competitive interaction between the retailers subsequently we show that the buy back payments transfered to the retailers for postconsumer goods provide a wholesale pricing flexibility that can be used to price discriminate between retailers of different profitability

remanufacturing as a marketing strategy the profitability of remanufacturing systems for different cost technology and logistics structures has been extensively investigated in the literature we provide an alternative and somewhat complementary approach that considers demand related issues such as the existence of green segments original equipment manufacturer competition and product life cycle effects the profitability of a remanufacturing system strongly depends on these issues as well as on their interactions for a monopolist we show that there exist thresholds on the remanufacturing cost savings the green segment size market growth rate and consumer valuations for the remanufactured products above which remanufacturing is profitable more important we show that under competition remanufacturing can become an effective marketing strategy which allows the manufacturer to defend its market share via price discrimination

failure of blackwell s theorem under machina s generalization of expected utility analysis without the independence axiom abstract considerable evidence suggests that the independence axiom of expected utility theory is not empirically supported in response machina has generalized expected utility theory in such a way that the independence axiom is not required most of the basic concepts and results of expected utility theory still hold under machina s generalization however blackwell s theorem a fundamental result in information economics fails to hold under machina s generalization of expected utility theory without the independence axiom

pricing used products for remanufacturing remanufacturing is one of recovery options for used products as remanufacturing requires a continuous supply of used products the economic incentive is required to attract customers to return their used products called cores and the problem of pricing a core becomes an important issue such a pricing problem is analogous to pricing an option which can be used to sell the remanufactured cores called core products as sales price of core products follows a geometric brownian motion we propose a model here to evaluate the acquisition price of cores this model links core acquisition price with the sale price of core product but assumes other costs such as logistics and remanufacturing to be deterministic we have presented a numerical example to show its applicability since the model proposed here is generic it is believed that the proposed model can be used in setting the core prices in many situations

ethnic diversity and economic development abstract this paper analyzes the role that different indices and dimensions of ethnicity play in the process of economic development firstly we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of alternative data sources for the construction of indices of religious and ethnic heterogeneity secondly we compare the index of fractionalization and the index of polarization we argue that an index of the family of discrete polarization measures is the adequate indicator to measure potential conflict we find that ethnic religious polarization has a large and negative effect on economic development through the reduction of investment and the increase of government consumption and the probability of a civil conflict

poverty political freedom and the roots of terrorism this article provides an empirical investigation of the determinants of terrorism at the country level in contrast with the previous literature on this subject which focuses on transnational terrorism only i use a new measure of terrorism that encompasses both domestic and transnational terrorism in line with the results of some recent studies this article shows that terrorist risk is not significantly higher for poorer countries once the effects of other country specific characteristics such as the level of political freedom are taken into account political freedom is shown to explain terrorism but it does so in a non monotonic way countries in some intermediate range of political freedom are shown to be more prone to terrorism than countries with high levels of political freedom or countries with highly authoritarian regimes this result suggests that as experienced recently in iraq and previously in spain and russia transitions from an authoritarian regime to a democracy may be accompanied by temporary increases in terrorism finally the results suggest that geographic factors are important to sustain terrorist activities this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

intrafirm trade arm s length transfer pricing rule and coordination failure abstract this paper demonstrates that uniform imposition of the arm s length principle on transfer pricing leads to coordination failure among countries in terms of economic welfare if the countries trade products in the form of intrafirm transactions by multinational firms mnfs to highlight this implication we first show that imposition of the arm s length principle on an mnf induces it to transfer a product among subordinate divisions at marginal cost i e the competitive price which is consistent with the purpose of the principle nonetheless if regulators in each country impose the principle on mnfs all of the following economic welfare measures decrease compared with the situation where the principle is not imposed 1 consumer welfare in each of the trading countries 2 profit of each mnf and thus 3 total world economic welfare this result indicates that it is possible that enforcement of the principle has no positive effect at all in the world because economic welfare of all economic agents deteriorates when the principle is imposed a numerical analysis demonstrates that this possibility arises in a broad range of circumstances even including the situation where a giant economic world power and a small underdeveloped country mutually trade products in these circumstances an agreement among trading countries that no country imposes the arm s length principle may encourage pareto improvement of the world economy

poverty and civil war revisiting the evidence abstract previous research has interpreted the correlation between per capita income and civil war as evidence that poverty is a main determinant of conflict in this paper we find that the relationship between poverty and civil war is spurious and is accounted for by historical phenomena that jointly determine income evolution and conflict in particular the statistical association between poverty and civil wars disappears once we include country fixed effects also using cross section data for 1960 to 2000 we find that once historical variables like european settler mortality rates and the population density in 1500 are included in civil war regressions poverty does not have an effect on civil wars these results are confirmed using longer time series from 1825 to 2000

managing new and differentiated remanufactured products we study a firm that makes new products in the first period and uses returned cores to make remanufactured products along with new products in future periods the remanufactured product is differentiated from the new product so the firm needs to choose differentiated prices we analyze the monopoly environment in two period multi period three four and five and infinite planning horizons and characterize the optimal remanufacturing and pricing strategy for the firm in the process we identify remanufacturing savings thresholds that determine the production and pricing strategy for the firm among other results we find counter to intuition that in a finite horizon multi period setting the optimal policy is not necessarily monotone in remanufacturing savings

does food security matter for transition in arab countries abstract expectations are high that transition in tunisia egypt libya and yemen will bring about more freedom justice and economic opportunities however experiences from other world regions show that countries in transition are at high risk of entering conflicts which often come at large economic social and political costs in order to identify options on how conflict may be prevented in arab transition countries this paper assesses the key global drivers of conflicts based on a dataset from 1960 to 2010 and improved cross country regression techniques results show that unlike in other studies where per capita incomes inequality and poor governance among other factors emerge as the major determinants of conflict food security at macro and household levels emerges as the main cause of conflicts in the arab world the high exposure of arab countries to global food price variations proves to be an important source of vulnerability for a peaceful arab transition if history is also a guide to the future improving food security is not only important for improving the lives of rural and urban people it is also likely to be the key for a peaceful transition the paper concludes with a set of policy options on how to improve food security at macro and household levels including safeguard mechanisms against excessive price volatility export led and pro poor growth the creation expansion of social safety nets and targeted nutrition programs

risk aversion in the theory of expected utility with rank dependent probabilities expected utility with rank dependent probability theory is a model of decision making under risk where the preference relations on the set of probability distributions is represented by the mathematical expectation of a utility function with respect to a transformation of the probability distributions on the set of outcomes this paper defines based on g teaux differentiability measures of risk aversion for such preferences which characterize the relation more risk averse and applies these measures to the analysis of unconditional and conditional portfolio choice problems

choice under uncertainty problems solved and unsolved ffifteen years ago the theory of choice under uncertainty could be considered one of the success stories of economic analysis it rested on solid axiomatic foundations it had seen important breakthroughs in the analytics of risk risk aversion and their applications to economic issues and it stood ready to provide the theoretical underpinnings for the newly emerging information revolution in economics 1 today choice under uncertainty is a field in flux the standard theory is being challenged on several grounds from both within and outside economics the nature of these challenges and of our profession s responses to them is the topic of this paper

competitive advantage through take back of used products abstract motivated by a recent antitrust ruling against hill rom one of the two dominant american suppliers of hospital beds we develop a stylized model to investigate the consequences of used product take back on firms industry and customers our findings suggest that by taking back and reselling refurbished products a manufacturer can increase both profit margins and sales to the detriment of a non interfering competitor in our model customers are always better off under product take back but it depends on the degree of competition whether firms use the benefits of take back primarily to increase their margins or to pass them on to the customers by lowering their prices the first firm to offer take back in some cases can deter its competitors from following this profitable strategy especially if it has an existing advantage in terms of lower production cost or higher market share contrary to the claim of hill rom s competitor we find a legitimate business justification for hill rom s reduction of new product prices

managing new and remanufactured products we study a firm that makes new products in the first period and uses returned cores to offer remanufactured products along with new products in future periods we introduce the monopoly environment in two period and multiperiod scenarios to identify thresholds in remanufacturing operations next we focus our attention on the duopoly environment where an independent operator io may intercept cores of products made by the original equipment manufacturer oem to sell remanufactured products in future periods we characterize the production quantities associated with self selection and explore the effect of various parameters in the nash equilibrium among other results we find that if remanufacturing is very profitable the original equipment manufacturer may forgo some of the first period margin by lowering the price and selling additional units to increase the number of cores available for remanufacturing in future periods further as the threat of competition increases the oem is more likely to completely utilize all available cores offering the remanufactured products at a lower price

income and democracy existing studies establish a strong cross country correlation between income and democracy but do not control for factors that simultaneously affect both variables we show that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per capita and vari ous measures of democracy we present instrumental variables estimates that also show no causal effect of income on democracy the cross country corre lation between income and democracy reflects a positive correlation between changes in income and democracy over the past 500 years this pattern is con sistent with the idea that societies embarked on divergent political economic development paths at certain critical junctures jel d7 e 1