American Journal of Economics and Sociology最新文献

This study presents evidence on the relative accommodation of credit requests made by minority start-up entrepreneurs in the U.S. farm sector. Loan packaging terms (amount, interest rate, and maturity) prescribed by lending officers of the Farm Service Agency, the government's lending arm to the farm sector, are analyzed and compared across racial/ethnic and gender groups of borrowers. The intention is to discern whether prescribed loan terms are favorable and supportive of the new farms' business growth and survival goals and uncover any trends of preferential treatment for certain groups of borrowers. Econometric results did not uncover any significant deviations in the lenders' decisions for beginning African American and White farmers for all three components of the loan package. While most packaging term decisions were similar among borrowers of different racial/ethnic attributes, the only exceptional terms were significantly larger loan amounts for American Indians and higher interest rates for Hispanic Americans. Compared to farmers in the South, loan term decisions seem to align with regional concentrations of farm typologies, such as the prevalence of livestock operations in the Plains and Midwest that require longer loan repayment periods and larger crop farms in the West with higher loan amount approvals.

We utilize data from the 2010–2019 Consumer Expenditure Surveys to examine middle-class achievement of English-speaking and non-English-speaking Hispanic households compared to non-Hispanic white households in the United States. Using an innovative expenditure-based middle-class measure, our findings show that non-English-speaking Hispanics lag English-speaking Hispanics, and English-speaking Hispanics lag whites, in middle-class attainment. We also identify significant structural differences among the three groups, particularly in how education, marriage, and employment affect middle-class achievement. Non-English-speaking Hispanics have a lower rate of return on education compared to both whites and English-speaking Hispanics. Non-English-speaking Hispanics experience lower marriage and employment premiums compared to their English-speaking Hispanic counterparts, and English-speaking Hispanics experience lower marriage and employment premiums compared to whites. This study contributes to the literature by introducing the innovative expenditure-based middle-class measure and emphasizing the importance of considering within-group differences among Hispanics to reduce the Hispanic-white economic disparity.

An aspect of economic freedom that varies across U.S. states is K-12 educational freedom. Some states allow a degree of choice for families in selecting schools outside public schools for their children. However, the enabling laws for such programs are often quite restrictive and limited to few children. Can this limited degree of competition and choice have a noticeable effect on an entire state's overall K-12 performance? I find strikingly large test score gains for states that have adopted voucher programs and/or Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), swamping the effect of per pupil K-12 spending on test scores. Moreover, vouchers and ESAs are associated with less per pupil spending. These effects are robust to a host of specification checks. A key factor is the amount of a program's funding that “follows the student,” even if a small number of students are eligible. Overall, it seems that even a small measure of educational freedom has a large effect.

The concept of the “clinical professor” – sometimes referred to as a “professor of practice,” or something similar – is in widespread use in academe. Economics and business disciplines all now entertain the prospect of teaching specialists. This study extends prior research on economics scholarship at liberal arts colleges by examining whether clinical economics faculty are invested in a program of research. After discussing conceptual arguments for why one should expect to see clinical economics faculty engaging in research, we examine citations data for clinical faculty in economics who are affiliated with what U.S. News & World Report classifies as national colleges and universities. That examination reveals that the 206 clinical faculty employed across the 90 institutions have produced academic scholarship that has garnered about 125,000 citations. Moreover, a deeper exploration suggests that the research ethos pervading the clinical economics faculties employed by America's large research universities appears to be quite similar to that characterizing the economics departments at liberal arts colleges.

Global price increases have reached their highest levels in recent times. Finding the reasons for the price increase is very important for economic stabilization. In this paper, it has been estimated that exorbitant price increases may be related to a free market economy. For this purpose, unlike other studies, a comparative analysis of the impact of the free market economy on prices was conducted. The study covers the period 1990–2020, and using the U.S. economy, which is a free market economy, the relationship between property rights, the size of government in the economy, and prices were examined using the autoregressive distributed lag model. The results show that the free market model has a positive effect on the price increase, while the size of the government's economy does not affect the price increase in the same direction. This study aims to provide a different perspective to policymakers in the fight against price instability, which is one of the most important problems facing the economy.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to extensive new government regulations and lockdown policies that significantly reduced economic freedom across US states. Many of these new pandemic-related regulatory restrictions on economic freedom varied significantly from state to state but are largely missed by the existing Economic Freedom of North America Report (EFNA). This paper adjusts the Our World in Data COVID-19 Stringency Index into a state-level measure of lockdown regulatory freedom and then merges it into the EFNA index to better measure relative economic freedom across US states in 2020. We find significant differences in the relative ranking of economic freedom between states once we adjust for lockdown regulatory restrictions.

Understanding couple instability is a topic of social and economic relevance. This paper investigates how the risk of dissolution relates to efforts to solve disagreements. We study whether marital locus of control (a noncognitive trait that captures individual's perception of control over problems within the couple) is associated with the prevalence of relationship instability in the past. We implement a list experiment using the count-item technique to a sample of current real-life couples to elicit truthful answers about couple break-up intentions in the past at the individual level. We find that around 44% of our sample has considered to end their relationship with their current partner at least once in the past. The intention to break-up is more prevalent among those who score low in marital locus of control, males, low-income earners, individuals with university studies, and couples without children.

Most prior studies of just-below pricing have primarily focused on low-stakes inconsequential consumer purchases, such as everyday household items. Using data from the Multiple Listing Service for the city of Savannah, Georgia, from 2006 through 2021, this study extends the more limited research on just-below pricing for more consequential purchases, specifically housing. Beyond an examination into the general effectiveness of just-below pricing in real estate, this study also explores the heterogeneous effects of its usage on sale price during different market conditions and in different market segments. The study shows that just-below pricing is common in the real estate market, and it does have an impact on final sale price, working most effectively within cold real estate markets. Furthermore, it is found that just-below pricing works best (though it is utilized least often) within low-end price segments, while just-below pricing can work against the seller in high-end home price segments (though it is used most often in these segments).

This study tests for convergence of the three main sub-components of economic freedom (government spending, taxation, and labor market freedom) for the 50 US states from 1981 to 2019. In particular, we test for stochastic convergence using unit root tests that account for structural breaks and bounded processes. By controlling for these sources of parameter instability, we find limited evidence in favor of stochastic convergence across the three sub-components of economic freedom. However, we find more evidence of stochastic convergence with respect to the sub-components than in the case of the overall economic freedom at the US state level. Our results highlight the distinct nature of the institutional quality across states as represented by government spending, taxation, and labor market freedom.

This study examines the one-way truck rental prices for 378 cities. There are large price differentials in one-way rental prices between city pairs. The pull of people toward higher economic freedom locales and push away from lower economic freedom locales is found to be an important determinant of the city-pair price differentials.