This study shows how social capital affects the outreach and operational self-sufficiency of microfinance institutions (MFIs) around the world. Defining social capital as social networks, social norms, and trustworthiness, this research merges quantitative data from the Microfinance Information...

Colorado College uses an economic system to allocate scarce course seats: annually during a sealed-bid auction, each student receives nontransferrable, nonbankable currency with which to bid on courses. We estimate an instrumental variables probit model to determine whether particular student...

This paper evaluates the contribution of patent-related events to changes in stock prices, proposing that economics has traditionally failed to find much effect for two reasons which we identify and correct. First, patents vary widely in quality so we use quantile analysis and alternative...

This paper analyzes a database of over 18,000 women micro-finance clients of the Negros Women for Tomorrow Foundation (NWTF), a database using the Progress Out of Poverty (PPI) Scorecard as a measure of poverty. Analysis using both OLS and quantile regression models shows how observable...

Recent Wal-Mart openings have been accompanied by public demonstrations against the company's presence in the community, asserting (among other things) that their presence is deleterious to residential property values. This study empirically evaluates that claim, analyzing the spatial...

On the popular game show quot;Who Wants To Be A Millionairequot;, men appear to average higher winnings than women. This paper investigates potential reasons, including different uses of information sources (lifelines) and different perceptions of risk. We include gender-based tests of Kahneman...

The purpose of this study is to evaluate how different founder and firm characteristics affect new venture performance. This research uses survival proportional hazard functions and limited-information maximum likelihood instrumental regressions to quantify the marginal effects of capitalization...

This paper examines whether Netflix user ratings can be explained by a combination of the movies' characteristics and the influence of popular opinion. Using a data set of almost 8 million user ratings for 300 movies, we use a 2SLS framework to find that time, movie characteristics, and measures...

Induced innovation theory suggests that a change in relative input prices will result in a substitution effect not only toward cheaper alternatives, but toward innovative activity that will lead to new alternatives. Here we test whether the same holds true for output prices: does innovation in...