Suchergebnisse

In town centres and local neighbourhoods, public spaces provide social arenas for all kinds of people residents, workers, shoppers, visitors, and children at play. This study draws on research by Caroline Holland, Andrew Clark, Jeanne Katz and Sheila Peace at The Open University, with the involvement of community researchers. They observed interactions between people of different ages across one year in Aylesbury, a town in a growth region of South East England

"This paper uses household survey data form several developing countries to investigate whether the poor (defined as those living under $1 or $2 dollars a day at PPP) and the non poor have different mortality rates in old age. We construct a proxy measure of longevity, which is the probability that an adult's mother and father are alive. The non-poor's mothers are more likely to be alive than the poor's mothers. Using panel data set for Indonesia and Vietnam, we also find that older adults are significantly more likely to have died five years later if they are poor. The direction of causality is unclear: the poor may be poor because they are sick (and thus more likely to die), or they could die because they are poor"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"Urban proximity can reduce the costs of shipping goods and speed the flow of ideas. Improvements in communication technology might erode these advantages and allow people and firms to decentralize. However, improvements in transportation and communication technology can also increase the returns to new ideas, by allowing those ideas to be used throughout the world. This paper presents a model that illustrates these two rival effects that technological progress can have on cities. We then present some evidence suggesting that the model can help us to understand why the past thirty-five years have been kind to idea-producing places, like New York and Boston, and devastating to goods-producing cities, like Cleveland and Detroit"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"To explain the extremely long-term persistence (more than 500 years) of positive historical experiences of cooperation (Putnam 1993), we model the intergenerational transmission of priors about the trustworthiness of others. We show that this transmission tends to be biased toward excessively conservative priors. As a result, societies can be trapped in a low-trust equilibrium. In this context, a temporary shock to the return to trusting can have a permanent effect on the level of trust. We validate the model by testing its predictions on the World Values Survey data and the German Socio Economic Panel. We also present some anecdotal evidence that differences in priors across regions are reflected in the spirit of the novels that originate from those regions"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"We study the impact of information and communication technology on growth through its impact on organization and innovation. Agents accumulate knowledge through two activities: innovation (discovering new technologies) and exploitation (learning how to use the current technology). Exploitation requires the development of organizations to coordinate the work of experts, which takes time. The costs and benefits of such organizations depend on the cost of communicating and acquiring information. We find that while advances in information technology that lower information acquisition costs always increase growth, improvements in communication technology may lead to lower growth and even to stagnation, as the payoff to exploiting innovations through organizations increases relative to the payoff of new radical innovations"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"This paper is the first to study the effect of financial restatement on bank loan contracting. Compared with loans initiated before restatement, loans initiated after restatement have significantly higher spreads, shorter maturities, higher likelihood of being secured, and more covenant restrictions. The increase in loan spread is significantly larger for fraudulent restating firms than other restating firms. We also find that after restatement, the number of lenders per loan declines and firms pay higher upfront and annual fees. These results are consistent with the view that banks use tighter loan contract terms to overcome risk and information problems arising from financial restatements"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site