This paper examines the political economy of Indian higher (tertiary) education. We first provide an empirical mapping of Indian higher education and demonstrate that higher education in India is being de facto privatized on a massive scale. But this privatization is not a result of changing ideological commitments of the key actors—the state, the judiciary or India’s propertied classes. Rather...

Religiosity and Consequentialist Moral Thinking 2 Three studies demonstrated that the moral judgments of religious individuals and political conservatives are highly insensitive to consequentialist (i.e., outcome-based) considerations. In Study 1, both religiosity and political conservatism predicted a resistance towards consequentialist thinking concerning a range of transgressive acts, indepe...

This cross-sectional study examined the daily discretionary time experiences of 246 (107 boys, 139 girls) fifth through eighth grade urban African American adolescents using the Experience Sampling Method. Relations between the types of activities (i.e., active structured, active unstructured, passive unstructured) engaged in during discretionary time and self-reported levels of motivated engag...

This study incorporates Zakat into a simple macroeconomic model of an Islamic economy and analyzes the role of Zakat in the national income determination. The reduced form aggregate consumption function suggests that the determinants of consumption are: Zakat expenditure, taxes, income, and asset holdings of individuals. Zakat could be used as a counter-cyclical policy through the discretionary...

As in traditional commerce, parties to a contract in ebusiness environments are expected to operate in good faith and comply with mutually agreed terms of contract. It may be the case however that deviation from the agreed contract obligations occur either intentionally or due to force majeure. In this paper we argue that there is value in providing various levels of automated support to deal w...

Human multitasking is often the result of self-init iated interruptions in the performance of an ongoing task. These self-interruptions occur in the absence of external triggers such as electronic alerts or email notifications. Compared to externally induced interruptions, self-interr uptions have not received enough research attention. To address this gap, this paper develops a typology of sel...

The global financial crisis of 2008–09 has sent public debt on sharply higher trajectories, as governments have provided large-scale support to the financial system, implemented discretionary fiscal stimulus, and accommodated steep drops in tax revenue. With the economic recovery gradually taking hold, the focus is now shifting to fiscal “exit strategies.” Indeed, many countries are set to face...

This article seeks to analyze the allocation of federal government discretionary spending among Brazil’s states. In Brazil, the bulk of federal public budget must be compulsorily executed. Personnel expenditures and social taxes, social security benefits and a series of constitutionally mandatory transfers to states and municipalities are examples of expenditures over which the government has n...

This study investigates the influence of ownership structure and board characteristics on discretionary accruals and real earnings management using the data of A-shares in Chinese Shanghai and Shenzhen Stock Exchange Securities Market from 2002 to 2012. The empirical results show that institutions with high shareholding proportion or great shareholding concentration give managers incentives to ...

Discretionary Latitude and Relational Contracting We use economic experiments to examine the nature of relational trading under a menu of incomplete contracts ranging from the repeat purchase mechanism of Klein and Leffler (1981) to highly incomplete contracts that are completely unenforceable by third-parties. Our results suggest that, with barriers to complete contracting, increasing the degr...