Cowboy Economics News - August 2009 Archives
Pro-labor policies pushed by President Herbert Hoover after the stock market crash of 1929 accounted for close to two-thirds of the drop in the nation's gross domestic product over the two years that followed, causing what might otherwise have been a bad recession to slip into the Great Depression, concludes a UCLA economist in a new study. The findings suggest that the depression was at least three times worse than it otherwise would have been.
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A new policy paper by Rice University's Baker Institute for Public Policy shows a clear increase in the size and influence of noncommercial traders, or "speculators," in the oil futures market since regulations were eased by the Commodities Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Speculators now constitute about 50 percent of those holding outstanding positions in the US oil futures market.
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LSU Professor and Chair of Environmental Sciences Nina Lam and Professor and Louisiana Real Estate Commission Chair Kelley Pace, along with colleagues from LSU, Tulane University and Texas State University, published the results of a study analyzing business return to New Orleans post-Katrina.
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Disclosure of financial conflicts of interests to potential participants in research is important, but may have a limited role in managing these conflicts, according to a new study by Johns Hopkins, Duke and Wake Forest.
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Live in an expensive city? Think you pay too much in federal taxes? If so, a study in the current issue of the Journal of Political Economy finds that you're exactly right.
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Back in the day, planes, trains and automobiles all sported one brand name. If you bought a Boeing, you got, nose to tail, a Boeing. These days, however, complex industrial equipment is starting to look like NASCAR vehicles festooned with logos. Why does it matter? "When component brands become powerful it changes the industry," says George John, Marketing Department Chair at the University of Minnesota's Carlson School of Management.
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UCLA political scientist Lynn Vavreck contends in a new book that they're only two routes to the White House: exploiting the nation's economic situation at the time of the campaign or staking out an issue on which the candidate is closer to voters than his or her opponent and one that the opponent cannot -- for whatever reason -- adopt. Barack Obama's campaign illustrated the first and John F. Kennedy's illustrated the second.
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A unique new study that shows unexpected inheritances hasten retirement, lending new credence to a widely held economic theory that people value leisure time and will parlay newfound wealth into less work.
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Service quality beliefs are usually positively related to customer satisfaction -- the higher the perceived service quality, the higher the customer's satisfaction. However, an article published in the August issue of the Journal of Service Research finds this relationship may be more complicated in "negative service environments" (i.e., services that consumers would prefer not to have to use), such as health screening, diagnostic tests, or even auto repair.
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In recent years, the motivations of business leaders such as financier Bernard Madoff and former Enron CEO Ken Lay have come under increased scrutiny as a result of behavior that caused both their employees and the public considerable distress. Unquestionably, many of the documented lapses in judgment can be traced to selfishness and a failure to check one's ego.
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Genealogical tourism redefining leisure travel market, professor says
Rush to develop stock markets has huge downside
'Main Street' economic conditions misread by GDP
Stiff party competition, modest salaries good for state government, study shows
'Subjective time' can improve your bottom line