Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Political Science, General. Economics, Finance'

In this world of globalized business, corporate training programs are based on the common belief that better-trained employees will enhance business performance. Early research was focused on the impact of training on company performance in the business- to-business (B2B) environment. All of the early studies included employee opinions to measure what is called internal market orientation (IMO) as well as identification of the key constructs of trust, commitment, and relationship satisfaction, which affect performance. Later, survey-based research on external (customer) market orientation (EMO) in an international business also expanded the cultural complexity of the supplier- buyer relationships. Targeted coaching, rather than generic training programs, became appropriate. No empirical evidence in the literature provided quantitative measurement of the results of coaching programs on either EMO or company financial results. This research served to analyze the impact of an ongoing salesperson coaching program on both customer perceptions (EMO) and the financial results of the company. Two surveys of two different customer populations, with a 6-month time span between surveys, provided data to quantify any shifts in EMO. No significant shifts were found in either the domestic or the international customer populations. However, the company financial data confirmed a positive impact on profitability and a strong return on investment (ROI). Further research is needed which takes into consideration different parameters, including longer time spans between customer surveys, deeper interview-based analysis of customer perceptions and buying habits, and the different coaching strategies employed during the study.

The thesis takes as its point of departure the "long-run monetary union" between France and fifteen French-speaking African countries to provide insights into how the rules, mechanisms and practices underlying the monetary dependence of these African states operate. The main objective of the study is to contribute towards a better understanding of the institutions and principles governing the CFA franc zone with the intention of helping policy-makers to take optimal decisions.

A well-designed monetary policy could generate employment and pro-poor growth. But designing and administering a good policy will depend on the objective of policy designers. In principle, monetary authorities could choose between a fixed exchange regime and a flexible exchange regime. Of this, the above African countries adopted a managed regime with France since 1945. In this study, I examine the relationship between monetary autonomy and poverty reduction in the Franc Zone. The discussion focused on the impact of monetary independence on poverty incidence and poverty gap in the fifteen African nations.

I utilized two OLS model equations. The functions were estimated using data from a panel of 14 countries (the exception being Equatorial Guinea because insufficient data were available) in the CFA franc zone and covering the 1984-2011 period. Seven predictor variables were forced into the models. With regard to the findings, only four of them such as inflation and, more importantly, credit to private sector, centralization rate, exchange rate and gross national savings are important to headcount index and the depth of poverty reduction in the CFA franc zone.The results therefore suggest that monetary sovereignty measured by the specified variables is a driving force for poverty reduction in the CFA franc zone.

This paper explores the relationship between a state's use of voter-approved debt and its credit ratings. The variation in credit ratings from 1973 - 2008 across the 50 US states is explained as a function of states' use of voter-approved debt while controlling for confounding variables. The analysis attempts to estimate the effect of issuing voter-approved debt on credit ratings relative to the effect of issuing legislature-approved debt using a panel dataset constructed from three data sources: the National Conference of State Legislature's Ballot Measure Database, the US Census Bureau's Survey of Government Finances and Standard & Poor's credit ratings. While prior literature has focused on the effect of voter approval requirements on measures of state credit health, this paper investigates the use of voter-approved debt by relying on a variable that measures the share of voter-approved debt issued by a state, in a given year and over time. Ordered probit models controlling for state and year fixed effects, as well as state demographics, finances, economic performance and financial institutions are used to explore the relationship between the use of voter-approved debt and a state's credit rating. The paper finds a statistically significant negative relationship between a state's use of voter-approved debt and its credit ratings. The results show that issuing 60% of state debt using voter-approval (the average for states that issue voter-approved debt in a given year) is related to a 0.71 lower state credit rating on a scale from 1-7 (BBB=1, AAA=7).

My thesis study examines the economic and sociological factors associated with political revolutions in order to create a predictive model. I do this by using statistical methods with nation level panel data collected from public domain sources. I anticipate being able to create a predictive model that provides a probability forecast of a country undergoing political revolution within a two year time-frame.

This dissertation contains three essays that study monetary transfers.

The first chapter studies the effect of a politician's vote in the legislature on monetary contributions that the politician receives from interest groups after the vote. I first develop models to show that interest groups have an incentive to make monetary contributions to politicians not only before politicians vote but also after they vote. Then I find evidence that voting in favor of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act (EESA) of 2008 has increased the amount of monetary contributions that the members of the U.S. House of Representatives receive from the interest groups in the financial sector after the passage of the EESA.

The second chapter studies the effect of a politician's ideological strength on monetary contributions that the politician receives from interest groups. If interest groups care mainly about current policy outcomes, they will make monetary contributions to ideologically neutral politicians who are often pivotal voters in the legislature. However, if interest groups care more about future policy outcomes, they have an incentive to make monetary contributions to politicians who share similar policy preferences, i.e. liberal (conservative) interest groups will make contributions to liberal (conservative, respectively) politicians, to help those politicians win the election and continue to serve in the legislature. I first develop a model incorporating these two opposing effects. Then I find evidence that ideologically neutral politicians receive more monetary contributions from interest groups. This result suggests that interest groups are primarily motivated by the short-run incentive.

The third chapter studies monetary transfers from parents to children. Unlike most other taxes, the estate tax is levied only on a very small number of very large estates. There is an exemption level of the tax below which there is no tax liability. This threshold divides taxpayers sharply into two groups: those who paid the estate tax when their parent passed away and those who did not. Using a regression discontinuity design, I find evidence that those who have experience of paying the estate tax at their parent's death are more actively engaged in estate tax avoidance behavior for their children.

This dissertation consists of three essays on information aggregation in committees and its application.

The first essay analyzes how the distribution of votes affects the accuracy of group decisions. In a weighted voting system, votes are typically assigned based on the criteria that are unrelated to the voters' ability to make a correct judgment. I introduce an information aggregation model in which voters are identical except for voting shares. If the information is free, the optimal weight distribution is equal weighting. When acquiring information is costly, by contrast, I show that the accuracy of group decisions may be higher under some weighted majority rules than under unweighted majority rule. I characterize the equilibrium and find the optimal weight distribution to maximize the accuracy of group decisions. Asymmetric weight distributions may be optimal when the cost of improving signal is moderately high.

The second essay analyzes how intergenerational family transfers can be sustained. Why are generous transfers from the younger to the older generations made in some families and not in others? My paper argues that differences in intergenerational dependence are due to variation in community networks. My analysis of the sustainability of intergenerational transfers posits game theoretical models of overlapping generations in which breadwinners make transfers to their parents and children. A novel feature of my models is that there is a local community that may supply information about its members' past behaviors. I demonstrate that an efficient level of intergenerational transfers can be sustained if neighbors "gossip" about each other.

The third essay, co-authored with Fuhito Kojima, investigates a jury decision when hung juries and retrials are possible. When jurors in subsequent trials know that previous trials resulted in hung juries, informative voting can be an equilibrium if and only if the accuracy of signals for innocence and guilt are exactly identical. Moreover, if jurors are informed of numerical split of votes in previous trials, informative voting is not an equilibrium regardless of signal accuracy.

Ghana has experienced solid economic and social development during the years before the finding of oil. Now that oil has been found, one should not forget that there are many countries in Africa which are rather cursed than blessed with natural resources. This phenomenon is known as the resource curse or more specifically the oil curse. This paper attempts to uncover the most challenging areas for Ghana, when its government wants to lift the resource curse. It further shows that Ghana is well prepared to tackle the negative effects of being oil abundant, by using the well-established models and concepts, which build on empirical analysis. Literature provides a lot to describe the oil curse, including the so called Dutch disease as well as conflicts, corruption, violence and bad governance, to mention a few. This paper will - in a case study approach- apply the concepts on Ghana and -with a qualitative comparative research design- expose the best practices from which Ghana can learn most. It will also show that Ghana's relatively good institutions will be able to implement most of the suggested policies which oppose the resource curse.

The outcome will be that Ghana's political environment, although far from perfect, is well prepared to deal with windfall oil revenues. Furthermore Ghana due its good structure of institutions and its stabilizing macroeconomic policies in the last decades, Ghana will be able to engage in best practice policies.

According to a report by the World Health Organization, 65 million people worldwide need wheelchairs to regain mobility. Many of these people are unable to afford the devices they need and current makeshift solutions are unsuitable for a variety of reasons. I am a volunteer for Intelligent Mobility International (IMI), a non-profit that seeks to address this situation by producing and distributing durable, inexpensive wheelchairs in the developing world. This thesis designs a study to gauge the impacts receiving an IMI wheelchair has on the lives of people with disabilities and their families. This measure can then be used in the future when Intelligent Mobility evaluates different program options and demonstrates to funders the positive impacts of their donations. The study involves a randomized field trial in Tamil Nadu, India. Candidates for the trial will be identified by a local grass roots organization and verified by IMI to be appropriate candidates for the wheelchair. A total of six hundred candidates will be chosen to represent a good mixture of gender, education, household size and age of the target population, and then randomly assigned to either the treatment or control group. Participants in the treatment group will receive a wheelchair at the start of the year and those in the control at the end of the year. The two groups will then be surveyed on many dimensions of their lives using both open-ended ethnographic interviews and a numerical categorical survey both at the start of the year and the end of the year to estimate the impacts of the wheelchair. The ethnographic interviews will help ensure that the participants' views are captured accurately and will permit a more realistic interpretation of the study's qualitative results. The study design also reviews current literature on disability in India, the plan for implementation of the study, the methodological concerns in the design, and the ethical considerations involved.

This dissertation focuses on the effects of a third-party mediator in protracted conflict settings. I primarily use formal models based on game theory and mechanism design, employing case studies and empirical work to further my analysis. The question of mediation effectiveness in the literature is still an open one, addressed empirically but with little theoretical support. While some work has emphasized the important role of enforcement, there is no consensus as to whether, how and why these tactics work. I use formal modeling to examine the mediator's enforcement ability and show the ways in which manipulative mediation can in fact improve upon bilateral results.

The first chapter examines the use of different types of enforcement in conflict mediation. This paper compares potential outcomes of bilateral negotiations with the outcomes achievable with the help of a mediator capable of various levels of enforcement, seeking to gain insight into how to end ongoing war using a signaling framework. I find that a mediator with sufficient enforcement capabilities can improve on the bilateral outcome, perhaps creating peace that would not have been possible bilaterally. However, while exhibiting enforcement capabilities can help a mediator to mandate peace in the short term, there can sometimes be a lower likelihood of lasting results, consistent with stylized facts about mediation.

The second chapter models conditions for efficiency gains from third-party conflict mediation when concessions are risky. Each party engaged in a conflict can indicate its interest in peace through costly signaling, or concessions. Through a formal model, I explore ways in which a mediator can act as a guarantor that promised concessions will be delivered, thereby reducing inefficiencies and increasing the potential for peace. In this process, I open up a rationale for mediation: to remove the inefficiencies of signaling in the pre-play round of negotiations.

The third chapter uses a game-theoretic framework to explain the persistence of de facto independent states that are not internationally recognized. This paper uses a four-player, game-theoretic framework to model the stalemates that often arise between the secessionist elite and home state central government and leverages this model to explore paths to settlement. We emphasize the pivotal role of an outside patron in sustaining unrecognized statehood as a stable equilibrium, but we also argue that the international community is capable of inducing peaceful settlement in these conflicts if it is sufficiently motivated to do so.

In just 30 years microfinance has transformed from a credit-based rural development scheme that has claimed to reduce poverty and empower poor women, to a $70 billion financial industry. In the process, the traditional NGO-led model has given way to commercialized institutions, resulting in an increased emphasis on profitmaking. This has also led to confusion in the sector around its mission: is it to alleviate poverty and empower poor women or simply to provide the "unbanked" with access to formal sources of finance? This research considers the main debates in microfinance with regard to its mission and presents empirical evidence on the effectiveness of microfinance. The study is based on the Pakistani microfinance sector, which provides an ideal opportunity for a comparative analysis of two distinct models of microfinance – the nonprofit microfinance institutions (MFI) and the microfinance banks (MFB). The research compares the depth of outreach, mission, practice, and borrower experiences of MFIs and MFBs, employing a political economy framework. The data includes 140 interviews with policymakers, donors, senior, mid and low-level microfinance officers, and their clients; as well as observations of practitioner-client interactions, including the process of disbursement and collection, group meetings, and field visits with loan officers in urban Pakistan. It also comprises two district-level surveys: the microfinance outreach survey from the Pakistan Microfinance Network (PMN) and the Government of Pakistan's Social and Living Standards Survey (PSLM). The surveys are analyzed econometrically to test whether district-level socioeconomic differences affect patterns of outreach. This study broadens our understanding of the extent to which the local political economy shapes the outcomes of a market-based intervention, such as microfinance. It also provides an insight into the evolution of microfinance, specifically as framed by the global development discourse and subsequent public policy choices. Finally, the study provides an authoritative account of how institutional structure affects microfinance's effectiveness as a tool for poverty alleviation, empowerment and financial access.

Poverty remains the scourge of the modern world. Millions of people live in poverty despite the best efforts of the most powerful governments in the world. Due to a myriad of political and historical reasons, the most vulnerable of these are in Africa, and the sub-Saharan region of Africa remains the poorest region in the world. Over the last two decades, the world's two largest economies, the United States and China, have emerged as the preeminent aid donors to the African continent. The purpose of this research is to analyze the competition between both development models, discern which model is responsible for the alleviation of the most poverty and assess the human values questions that arise from both approaches.

The analysis used data from 2004–2008 because the timeframe is considered the golden age of American Aid to the continent, is free of data skewed from the 2008 economic downturn and represents a mature Chinese foreign aid mechanism. Chinese and United States aid allocations to Angola, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo, often the poster childs of negative connotations of Chinese foreign aid, were analyzed and compared from this timeframe.

Despite various problems with the quality of data and considering the long-term viability of the poverty alleviation, the data showed a positive correlation to both the United States' and Chinese models of aid and poverty alleviation. The data also showed a clear indication that the Chinese model affected poverty levels at a greater measure than the United States' model.

Based on the data and research concerning the two development aid models, the American development aid system was found to be characterized by a bureaucratic process, insistency on aid conditionality, and a focus on good governance that collectively neglected poverty reduction. The Chinese model was found to be more conducive to poverty reduction due to a minimal development aid structure, nominal aid conditionality and a consistent focus on infrastructure projects, despite the system's opacity which presented some trouble in data collection.

Three primary human values concepts also arose from the dichotomy of the two development aid problems. The impoverished were found to be better served by a focus of development aid on infrastructure rather than good governance. The United States' focus on good governance was found to essentially punish those in poverty for their government's ineffectiveness. Finally, the ascension of the Chinese development aid model changed both the Chinese and United States' development aid model positively.