The paper discusses report of The Spellings Commission for Future of Higher Education that was set up to look into the issues facing the higher education system in the U.S., outline the challenges and offer recommendations to tackle the problems. Most importantly, The Spellings Commission Report...

The Mindanao conflict in Southern Philippines is a long-standing controversy that has eluded comprehensive solutions. Despite efforts of the Government of the Philippines (GRP) and the representatives from the peoples of Mindanao in undertaking peace initiatives, “the war:” continues. The...

This paper asks whether trust in political institutions depends on individual’s political leaning and the political ideology of the national government. We employ information on 140'000 individuals in 30 democratic OECD countries from the World Values Survey, 1981 – 2007, and estimate...

This paper uses prefecture-level panel data from Japan, spanning the period 1989–2003, to examine the influence of social norms and fractionalization on voting behavior. The key findings obtained from analysis via the fixed effects estimation, which controls for unobserved prefecture-specific...

This paper presents an index of institutionalized social technologies covering its two main dimensions namely Risk reducing technologies and Anti Rent seeking technologies and in turn covers several social, institutional, political and economic aspects. Specifically it attempted to classify and...

This paper presents an index of institutionalized social technologies for Pakistan, covering its two main dimensions namely Risk reducing technologies and Anti Rent seeking technologies and in turn covers several social, institutional, political and economic aspects. It is also analyzed...

The role of institutions in promoting economic growth and development has generated considerable interest among researchers and practitioners in recent years. This paper explores the role of state institutions in promoting growth using a GMM econometric model. Specifically it attempted to test...

Social interaction combined with social conformity spreads attitudes and behaviors through a society. This paper examines such a process geographically for compliance with the norm that good citizens should vote. The diffusion of conformist behavior affects the local degree of conformity with...

This paper contributes to the literature by carrying out the first econometric investigation into the role of television in the formation of political consensus in Italy. Based on probit and instrumental variables estimates, we find trust in television to be the most significant predictor of...