The American Economist

Concern over the loss of genetic diversity in the world's field crops has increased due to the commercial introduction of genetically modified crops. Mexico is particularly sensitive to this issue, as it is the center of genetic diversity for maize and home to a large number of indigenous farmers who propagate this diversity. This paper analyzes to what extent the biodiversity of maize may be endangered as subsistence farmers face decreasing market prices of maize. Off-farm migration is suggested as a potential rational response of farmers to the large and rapidly growing imports of maize from the U.S., a large share of which consists of genetically modified maize. The maize imports from the U.S. are seen not only as worsening the terms of trade of subsistence farmers but also as raising the risk of lower yields as indigenous varieties of maize may lose their resilience to environmental stress through contamination with genetically modified maize.

This paper examines empirically the association between Foreign Direct Investment inward and Foreign Direct Investment outward. Using a panel data set for 35 economies over the period 1981–2004 as well as the methodology of panel cointegration and panel causality tests, the empirical findings show that FDI inward does exhibit a significant relationship with FDI outward. Moreover, bi-directional panel causality is present when the sample is split into developed and developing economies. When the sample is split between open and closed economies the causality remains only for the open economies.

This paper presents an endogenous growth model with monopolistic competition in the intermediate-goods sector. Maintenance spending on public capital not only increases the durability of public and private capital, but also raises the efficiency of infrastructure, as in Agenor (2005). We show that the growth-maximizing tax rate and the share of public maintenance spending may be both affected by the mark-up. However, when private depreciation is exogenous, the result is consistent with Agenor's basic model (2005), that is, the growth-maximizing tax rate and the share of maintenance spending are irrelevant to the degree of monopoly power.

Three different assessment methods are used to determine the effectiveness of the curriculum package Open and Operating: The Federal Reserve Responds to September 11 in improving the economic knowledge of 1291 California high school students. Student performance is found to vary by race and gender depending on the assessment method used: multiple choice questions, an essay question, or a group creative poster activity. Consistent with prior studies, white male students perform better on the multiple choice questions. However, these gender and racial differences disappear for the essay instrument, and females and Asians outperform others on the group creative activity. Economists who work training high school teachers are encouraged to recommend that teachers use different assessment methods to encourage the success of different types of students.

When agricultural or industrial products are grown or produced such that a variety of quality levels or product characteristics come bundled together, the seller must decide whether or not to undertake the time and expense required to debundle or sort them by component and sell them separately. We analyze this issue both from the perspective of a monopolistic seller and a social planner desiring to maximize social welfare, and show the conditions under which segmentation would be preferred by both the monopolist and the social planner.

This paper investigates the role played by religious pluralism in generating the increased civic engagement observed among US faith-based organizations. The hypothesis of the paper is that increased competition among faith-based groups increases the amount of social services provided to the community which in turn increases the civic engagement of its members. Using expansive data at the county level that examines competition both within and among denominations, the paper shows that more competition generally does lead to more social service provision on the part of faith-based groups as measured by Presbyterian Church charitable spending.

This paper is an extension of the Baland and Robinson theory of child labor efficiency which studies the problem of child labor using a two period model with a general equilibrium approach. To the original theory, we seek to incorporate a non-negative cost of education and an indicator for school quality. Our findings suggest that an increase in costs of education invariably raises the level of child labor. Furthermore, when school quality is poor, improvement in it can decrease the equilibrium level of child labor. In the welfare analysis we find that the conditions for education subsidies to be welfare-increasing suffice for a ban on child labor to be Pareto improving.

The recent influx of European hockey players in the North American professional hockey league raises questions of wage discrimination. For decades the National Hockey League has seen wage discrimination against French Canadians on English Canadian teams, and the European players face a similar labor environment as the French Canadians. In this study we examine this issue by estimating pay for performance salary equations for NHL players, interacting country of birth with location of team. This enables us to determine the extent of wage discrimination that Europeans face in the NHL.

We endeavor in this paper to ascertain, for the field of macromonetary economics, the most influential economists, articles, textbooks, and journals. The syllabi of all faculty of the top twenty-five economics departments teaching graduate macromonetary courses were obtained. The syllabi were culled to produce 1527 articles and a number of other publications, including textbooks. The ensuing macromonetary rankings are the first, for this category alone, in more than two decades. Although article rankings by syllabi count and citation count are uncorrelated, the names of top economists by decades produced by syllabi count are generally well known for their accomplishments in research.

The authors demonstrate that most textbooks are ambiguous at best in their treatment of cross price and income elasticity of demand. There is also no discussion of what initiates a price increase in discussions of substitutes and complements in the textbooks examined. The authors offer a remedy for these deficiencies.

The increasing prevalence of obesity yields numerous social costs in the form of lower productivity, higher Medicare and Medicaid costs, and higher insurance premiums. These negative externalities create a public interest for societal investment to reduce the shared costs of obesity related healthcare and efficiency losses. Understanding that health preferences and skills developed in childhood greatly impact adult outcomes, this paper provides a framework for evaluating the optimal timing of investment in childhood health for the prevention of obesity. The two period model provides a means to evaluate how economical early preventative investments are compared to later reparative health investments. It is likely that preventative health investments in childhood would prove cost effective compared to the high costs of adulthood obesity and its resulting comorbidities.

Thorsten Beck, Asli Demirguc-Kunt & Ross Levine (2004) argue that financial sector development in a country disproportionately benefits its poor. When controls for improvement in the security of property rights and the fairness of the legal system, freedom to trade internationally and levels of trust are added to their research, the benefits from financial sector development disappear. Financial sector development seems to proxy for these institutions or be a mechanism through which they work.