This paper examines the relationship between racial segregation and poverty. Using data primarily from the 2000 Census, I control extensively for metropolitan area characteristics and other factors. In addition, I use metropolitan area physical geography characteristics as instruments for racial segregation as one approach to address the problem of endogeneity bias. I find significant and posit...

The effect of job satisfaction on organisational commitment has attracted a great deal of interest in the human resource management and organizational psychology literatures. However, much of the empirical work is based on relatively small sample sizes and neglects the possibility of endogeneity of job satisfaction, potentially leading to biased estimates of the effect of job satisfaction on or...

Previous U.S. M&A studies have shown that the acquisitions of under-performing firms by well-performing firms generate greater synergies; however this is inconsistent with the well-documented “Cherry Picking” behavior of foreign investors in emerging markets. This paper develops a theory within the “law and finance” framework to explain this puzzle. First, highly profitable firms will self sele...

The rapid increase in the prevalence of childhood obesity in the United States has alarmed researchers who have increasingly sought to identify the cause of this public health problem. Despite a large number of potential explanations for the rise in obesity rates, the reserach to data has been methodological diverse with no clear consensus on the cause. This has greatly complicated and hindered...

This paper examines the effect of governance and managerial alignment on dynamic dividend behavior of managers. I use a novel empirical approach to provide evidence on the role of governance and managerial alignment in explaining variation in dividend smoothing, incremental dividend decisions, and dynamic dividend behavior. Managers subject to weak monitoring and misaligned incentives are under...

This paper tests for empirical evidence of learning by doing in banking with the aim of identifying a micro-founded driver of financial sector development. Learning by doing entails cumulative experience reducing the amount of labor or other inputs required to produce the same amount of output. However identifying this experience effect poses challenges because firms may increase output as inpu...

Using new and unique panel data, we investigate the role of long-term health and childhood malnutrition in schooling outcomes for children in rural India, many of whom lack basic numeracy and literacy skills. Using data on students’ performance on mathematics and Hindi tests, we examine the role of the endogeneity of health caused by omitted variables bias and measurement error and correct for ...

This article examines variation in partisanship levels across the United States between 1880 and 1940 and suggests that the introduction of three electoral laws in this time period—party registration, primaries and secret ballots—can explain the geographic variation in partisanship levels across the United States during this era. Specifically, the article argues that the introduction of party r...

This paper examines the relationships between the built environment—both ‘neighborhood’ design characteristics and relative location—and motor vehicle ownership and use in a rapidly motorising, developing city context, that of Santiago de Chile. A vehicle choice model suggests that income dominates the household vehicle ownership decision, but also detects a relationship between several built e...