During the NCAA basketball tournaments from 2002 to 2005, men's games produced 27% more upsets than women's games. To test whether these unpredictable results were due to gender differences, we conduct logit analysis to explain upsets by gender and other potentially significant variables,...

When there are two groups of officials in a public organization, we show that depending on the groups' behavior - collusive or competitive - increasing the level of monitoring and punishment may have different impacts on corruption. If the two groups of public officials had been demonstrating...

To perform well, public officials must be confident enough about the future, to be able to see a relationship between their efforts, and an eventual outcome. Their expectations are shaped by their institutional environment. If the rules are not credible, or are unlikely to be enforced, of if...

Via partnership agreements like the Cotonou Partnership Agreement, the EU provides African countries with access to its markets and asks for compliance with a given set of good governance norms and procedures. While the EU markets are significant for African countries, African markets are not...

In addition to legal constraints and social-psychological barriers, in a post-conflict setting mutually beneficial economic transactions might not occur due to the widening gap between the health, quality, and environmental standards of the parties. A lack of incentives during the years of...

With students in the policy and business schools with no formal economics background in mind, we propose an intuitively appealing and simple step-by-step graphical approach to explain the Heckscher-Ohlin (HO) model. Our approach is simple because it needs only two pieces of information,...

For the steel import quota bill of 1999, our answer to the question posed in the title is that each word in the Congressional Record costs $39 in campaign contributions from the steel industry. Consequently, our answer is "Yes."

In an overlapping generations model, capital and labor produce two tradable goods. A kleptocratic government spends the tariff revenue. Trade liberalization benefits the retired generation if and only if the relative price of the capital-intensive good rises. Starting from autarky, a small...

Given the lack of a bill or amendment specific to cotton, we introduce a Cotton Influence Index to capture legislators' influence in championing the cause of the cotton growers during the hearings of the Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002. Regression analyses reveal a relationship...