In recent years, literature has suggested that executive compensation schemes conform to principal-agent models of incentive pay. Specifically, when analyzing total compensation (including stock options), executive pay seems to be positively related to the market performance of the corporation's...

Traditional models of sovreign debt and default focus on the purely economic costs and benefits of borrowing and default. The model developed in this paper shows that political importance, in the face of possible political instability, is also important when determining the amount of privately...

This paper presents a principal components methodology (based on Ram (1982) and Srinivasan (1994)) for determining the weights for a set of indicators in a composite index of development. The procedure is applied to a 36 variable data set consisting of 1990 data for 19 Latin American countries...

Since the early 1970s, there has been a dramatic change in the way firms handle reference requests. Before 1970, firms would willingly provide detailed information about a former employee's job performance. More recently , firms have become reluctant to provide information due to a perceived...

The measurement of economic and social development is one of the most hotly contested subjects in economics. Since the 1970s, it has become evident that it is necessary to use a composite index to capture various aspects of social and human development and to address related issues of...

It is shown that the component statistics of the HDI are highly correlated with one another. An implication of this correlation is that a wide range of index weights produce indexes that are statistically identical to the HDI. Indexes with only two of the three HDI components are very highly...

This paper presents a framework for thinking abaout the different types of spreadsheet modeling applications available for teaching economics. Spreadsheet applications are categorized by the degree to which students are involved in the spreadsheet's construction, and the degree to which students...

Preliminary tests are conducted on the Cahill and Isely (1998) model. In this model, the level of external debt is partially determined by foreign aid. Specifically, this model suggests that the level of external debt for an LDC is positively related to GDP and aid, but is negatively related to...

This paper has a dual purpose. At the technical level, it updates the work of Gitanjali Joglekar and Andrew Zimbalist (1989) on the use of factor analysis to estimate per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP) for Cuba. At the analytical level, it questions the validity of this approach when the...

The United Nations Development Programme's Human Development Index (HDI) has become a standard international measure of development. However, it has been criticized on several grounds. This paper investigates how robust the HDI is to changing two contentious aspects: the component statistics and...