157 research outputs found
Stop the Century--We’re Not Ready!
No full textThe distinguished Nobel Laureate and contributing author of the newly released Science Literacy for the Twenty-first Century and author of The God Particle will explore how science and technology serve as the drivers for 21st Century changes in our social, political and economic lives. Profits and conveniences made by deployment of new knowledge force the issue of whether such deployment is in society’s best long-term interest. The need grows exponentially for the voting public in our democratic society to play a significant role in making decisions. Lederman discusses whether we can devise a feasible educational system that will produce high school graduates with a sense of how science works, as well as whether voter-citizens can employ a “science way of thinking” in order to participate in issues affecting their lives and those of their children.
The lecture will be followed by a proclamation from Mike McCoy, Chairman of the Kane County Board: The Kane County “Dr. Leon Lederman Day” and a book launch, refreshments and signing of Science Literacy for the Twenty-first Century
Quality Disclosure Programs and Internal Organizational Practices: Evidence from Airline Flight Delays
No full textDisclosure programs exist in many industries in which consumers are poorly informed about product quality. We study a disclosure program for airline on-time performance, which ranks airlines based on the fraction of their flights that arrive less than 15 minutes late. The program creates incentives for airlines to focus their efforts on flights close to this threshold. We find that firms in this industry are heterogeneous in how they respond to these incentives. Moreover, this heterogeneity correlates with internal firm characteristics. Our findings highlight the importance of interactions between incentives created by a disclosure program and firms' internal organizational practices. (JEL D22, L15, L25, L93)Forbes gratefully acknowledges financial support from National Science Foundation (NSF) grant SES-1124154. Lederman gratefully acknowledges financial support from the Social Science and Humanities research Council of Canada. Tombe gratefully acknowledges financial support from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant IDG 430-2012-421
An Assessment of How Urban Crime and Victimization Affects Life Satisfaction
No full textWe assess the effect of the homicide rate, individual´s perception of security in their neighborhood of residence, and of the effect of their having been victimized, on life satisfaction. We find a negative effect of the homicide rate on life satisfaction for the subsample of individuals living in their current houses for at least 10 years or more, who had moved to that place at some point in the past. We also find a positive and robust effect of the perception of security in the households´neighborhood for the whole sample, and for different subsamples considered. Having been victim of an offense is also robustly negatively related to life satisfaction, in particular in the cases where the offense was robbery.Quality of Life, Life Satisfaction, Crime. Classification JEL: I32, K40, K42.
Airline strategies in the 1990s : frequent flyer programs, domestic and international partnerships, and entry by low-cost carriers
No full textThesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Economics, 2003.Includes bibliographical references.This thesis investigates forms of non-price competition in the U.S. airline industry. The first two chapters focus on airlines' use of frequent flyer programs (FFPs) while the final chapter considers the entry strategies of "low-cost carriers". FFPs may alter the intensity of competition between firms. Increasing marginal benefits built into the reward schedules of FFPs give consumers an incentive to concentrate their flying with a single carrier. When selecting the airline with which to accumulate points, consumers will prefer the dominant carrier at an airport because it offers the best opportunities for earning and redeeming points. Prior research, however, has not disentangled the impact of FFPs from the other advantages possessed by dominant airlines. Chapter One develops an empirical approach that allows for the identification of the marginal effects of FFPs. In the mid 1990s, domestic airlines increasingly formed FFP partnerships with international carriers. While theseagreements had no direct impact on the quality of domestic flights, they did significantly change consumers' earning and redemption opportunities. Using earning and redemption opportunities as a measure of the value of an airline's FFP points, this chapter exploits time-series variation in the extent and scope of international partnerships to evaluate the economic impact of enhancements to FFPs. The results indicate that enhancements to an airline's FFP are associated with increases in an airline's market share, with the impact being larger on routes that depart from airports at which the airline is more dominant. Chapter Two examines the FFP partnerships formed between the major domestic carriers at the end of 1998. Unlike international partnerships, which involve airlines whose networks are largely non-overlapping, domestic partners both primarily operate within the U.S. While these partnerships may still expand earning and redemption opportunities, on routes on which the partners overlap,they may also increase substitutability between the airlines' flights. This chapter documents that the domestic partnerships did, in fact, expand the airlines' FFPs and that this expansion was associated with increases in an airline's market share. Chapter Three examines the entry strategies of low-cost carriers. One hypothesis for the recent success that LCCs have achieved is that they offer consumers a combination of quality and price not offered by the major network carriers. As a first step to investigating this hypothesis, this chapter examines the characteristics of routes entered by LCCs.by Mara Lederman.Ph.D
The business of product innovation : international empirical evidence
No full textIt is so widely recognized that innovation is a key driver of economic growth that it is cliché to say so. This article studies product innovation by firms with data from 68 countries, covering more than 25,000 firms in eight manufacturing sectors. The author assesses the predictions of inter-disciplinary research on innovation by firms. The econometric evidence suggests that globalization and local knowledge increase the likelihood that firms will introduce new products. By contrast, domestic regulatory impediments to competition are not robustly correlated with product innovation.E-Business,Innovation,Microfinance,Education for Development (superceded),Statistical&Mathematical Sciences
Do enhancements to loyalty programs affect demand? The impact of international frequent flyer partnerships on domestic airline demand
No full textDo Enhancements to Loyalty Programs Affect Demand? The Impact of International Frequent Flyer Program Partnerships on Domestic Airline Demand
No full text
Do Enhancements to Loyalty Programs Affect Demand? The Impact of International Frequent Flyer Program Partnerships on Domestic Airline Demand
No full textAssessing the Link between Adolescent Fertility and Urban Crime
No full textWe use data of neighborhoods of Bogotá to assess the causal relation between their adolescent fertility and their homicide rates. We find that neighborhoods with high adolescent fertility rates, and that have low secondary enrollment and high crime rates at the moment the children of their teen mothers become teenagers, are more likely to have higher homicide rates in the future, when those children reach their peak crime ages, estimated to be between 18 to 26 years old in violent cities of Colombia. The result is robust to various specifications, and to modeling the spatial autocorrelation of homicides.Crime, Illegal Behavior, Law Enforcement, Adolescent Fertility, Spatial Econometrics. Classification JEL: K40, K42, R21, J13, C21
- …
