We examine the impact of ethno-linguistic fractionalization (ELF) on existing cultural measures employed in various social sciences. Not only do high levels of fractionalization affect the use of statistical means to account for cultural distance, we show that it is not constant and therefore...

The study attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of social media on cognitive development among undergraduate economics students at a South African university. The study collects data on student postings to discussion topics posted on Facebook and Twitter. The use of 3 well-known rubrics for...

This paper assesses the extent of trade linkages and shock transmission between African economies and its main trading partners, namely China, Europe and the United States (US). Using the global vector autoregressive (GVAR) model, the paper investigates how shock transmission between Africa and...

This paper presents an application of the conditional logit model to a small, Nelson Mandela Bay neighbourhood housing data set, with the objective of determining the impact of proximity to a low-cost housing development on nearby property prices. The results of this pilot study show that the...

As a result of population aging, governments of many OECD countries have begun to implement policies to increase average retirement ages in an attempt to alleviate some of the Â…nancial strain in supporting retirees. This paper explores the effect that later retirement ages have on aggregate...

This paper analyzes the production process of scientific outputs and its implications on the U.S. economy using variants of a disaggregated Marshallian Macroeconomic Model (MMM). Federal spending on scientific activities produces innovation which we measure using the number of patents awarded....

This study examines the potential for anomalous response behaviour effects within the context of double-bounded contingent valuation applied to community forestry programs in rural Ethiopia. Anomalous responses considered include shift effects, framing effects, anchoring effects, and others...

This paper analyzes substitution between access to fixed-line and mobile telephony in the European Union. We estimate a structural model of household's demand for: (i) fixed-line only; (ii) mobile only; (iii) and both fixed-line and mobile access. We find that decreasing prices for mobile...

The stylized view of the Dutch Cape Colony (1652-1795) is of a poor, subsistence economy, with little progress in the first 143 years of Dutch rule. New evidence from probate inventory and auction roll records show that previous estimates about wealth at the Cape are inaccurate. In contrast to...

This paper uses seven waves of data from the US Health and Retirement Study to investigate the impact of expectations regarding the timing of retirement on pre-retirement wealth accumulation. More specifically, we analyze the effect of the individual's subjective belief that he will work full...