What does a nation owe its military veterans? Gratitude, esteem, land grants, medical care, pensions, higher education? Or is serving in the armed forces of one's country an obligation to be undertaken without any expectation of compensation? If veterans are to receive government aid, should a distinction be made between those who served in wartime or faced enemy fire and those who saw neither war nor combat? These questions have been answered in varying ways by the American people and their elected representatives since the Revolutionary War. Paid Patriotism? explores the genesis and growth of soldiers' pensions throughout the nineteenth century, the Bonus experiment after the First World War, the passage and consequences of the GI Bill of Rights, the growth of the nation's system of veterans' hospitals, the evolution of veterans' programs during the Cold War and Vietnam, the post-9/11 GI Bill, and contemporary scandals and reform efforts within the veterans' bureaucracy, from its promotion to a cabinet department to wrongdoing in the Veterans Health Administration. James T. Bennett examines the complex and politically charged history and heated present-day debate of what the late columnist William Safire called the "most sacred cow" in Washington: the veterans' bureaucracy. In the end, the United States and its citizens owe veterans a debt. But how has and how should that debt be honored-and at what cost?

This book makes an important contribution at the forefront of business cycle theory. The contributors evaluate historical evidence, present new empirical results and suggest that the explanation of business cycle phenomena may, in part, depend on the way in which historical data is interpreted.This innovative book places great emphasis on the complementarity between empirical and theoretical business cycle research. The authors present studies of business cycles concentrating on the Great Depression of the 1930s, early and late nineteenth century American economic history, the United Kingdom before 1914, interwar Germany and Japan, and Canada and the United States during the Gold Standard era. A number of contributions address the Phillips curve and labour markets, and provide illustrations of the use of both macro and micro data. An important finding is the contribution to business cycle research made by hitherto untouched sources of historical labour market microdata. The book demonstrates the importance of the reconstruction of well researched data to our conception and understanding of business cycle phenomena. This book will be useful reading for academics and students of macroeconomics and economic history, with an interest in understanding business cycles.

This book explores new topics in modern research on empirical corporate finance and applied accounting, especially the econometric analysis of microdata. Dubbed "financial microeconometrics" by the author, this concept unites both methodological and applied approaches. The book examines how quantitative methods can be applied in corporate finance and accounting research in order to predict companies getting into financial distress. Presented in a clear and straightforward manner, it also suggests methods for linking corporate governance to financial performance, and discusses what the determinants of accounting disclosures are. Exploring these questions by way of numerous practical examples, this book is intended for researchers, practitioners and students who are not yet familiar with the variety of approaches available for data analysis and microeconometrics. "This book on financial microeconometrics is an excellent starting point for research in corporate finance and accounting. In my view, the text is positioned between a narrative and a scientific treatise. It is based on a vast amount of literature but is not overloaded with formulae. My appreciation of financial microeconometrics has very much increased. The book is well organized and properly written. I enjoyed reading it." Wolfgang Marty, Senior Investment Strategist, AgaNola AG

Free market capitalism has created a divided American society. Conservative economic and social policy thinking drove the Right's Project from 1980 to its collapse in 2008, leaving the world in ruins and fascism on the march. The Vision of a Real Free Market Society challenges the Left to create new forms of the market economy that promote efficiency and equality while permanently thwarting concentrated power. Many recent commentators have offered policy recommendations based on existing economic institutions. By contrast, this book calls for root-and-branch changes to the inherent structure of American capitalism. The Vision of a Real Free Market Society: Re-Imagining American Freedom presents a Left-egalitarian case for limited government that overcomes the failures of conservatism while rescuing economic justice from the weaknesses of tax and transfer liberalism. The book explains why the system fails so many Americans in so many different ways, and outlines how we can build a better economy that simultaneously promotes freedom and social justice while crippling the powers of America's oligarchs. Exploring the idea of a left-wing case for strong but small government, the book makes the case for fundamental reforms that will lead to a truly free and fair society. This provocative book will be of great relevance to anyone with an interest in politics, philosophy or economics, and will challenge readers to rethink their assumptions concerning the prospects for combining justice with fairness in the modern world.

With the ever rising demand for meat around the world, the production of meat has changed dramatically in the past few decades. What has brought about the increasing popularity and attendant normalization of factory farms across many parts of the world? What are some of the ways to resist such broad convergences in meat production and how successful are they? This book locates the answers to these questions at the intersection between the culture, science and political economy of meat production and consumption. It details how and why techniques of production have spread across the world, albeit in a spatially uneven way. It argues that the modern meat production and consumption sphere is the outcome of a complex matrix of cultural politics, economics and technological faith. Drawing from examples across the world (including America, Europe and Asia), the tensions and repercussions of meat production and consumption are also analyzed. From a geographical perspective, food animals have been given considerably less attention compared to wild animals or pets. This book, framed conceptually by critical animal studies, governmentality and commodification, is a theoretically driven and empirically rich study that advances the study of food animals in geography as well as in the wider social sciences.

Lack of credit access is severe in low income and poor families that are normally considered to have fewer opportunities to borrow from banks due to insufficient valuable assets for collateral. These low-income households face limited opportunity to acquire new technology and working capital for agricultural production and thus tend to fall behind. As a result, providing access to finance to low-income rural households has been considered an important component of any rural development strategy. Microfinance programmes, in particular, have been gradually embedded in national strategies of many developing countries as they are poverty-focused. They aim to facilitate the access to financial services such as credit for the poor who are usually disadvantaged in terms of access to conventional financial services from formal financial institutions. The objective of this book is to provide an overview of microfinance programmes in Asia focusing in particular on the determinants of the accessibility of rural households to microcredit. The book studies seven Asian countries such as China, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Bangladesh with two specific case studies.

This book brings together a collection of seven papers on Transaction Cost Economics by Nobel Laureate Professor Oliver E Williamson. The applications of Transaction Cost Economics are extensive, ranging from the field of industrial organization and applied fields of economics such as labor, public finance, comparative economic systems and economic development, to the business fields of strategy, organizational behavior, marketing, finance, operations management, and accounting. In short, as Williamson states, 'any problem that originates as or can be reformulated as a contracting problem can be examined to advantage in transaction cost economizing terms.'What is referred to as New Institutional Economics is developed in the West in two mainly complementary ways: Property Rights Theory, and Transaction Cost Economics. Of the two, Property Rights Theory developed more rapidly. Transaction Cost Economics has nonetheless taken shape of late.In China, research on New Institutional Economics began in the 1990s and has grown rapidly since. China has similarly given much more attention to Property Rights Theory. Gengxuan Chen, the editor of this volume, recommends that China will benefit by bringing Transaction Cost Economics to bear. Simultaneously, for scholars who study the market economy, Transaction Cost Economics provides a very attractive way to explain the practice of the Chinese market economy.

The increasing capital flows in the emerging markets and developed countries have raised various concerns worldwide. One main concern is the impact of the sharp decline of capital flows - so-called sudden stops - on financial markets and the stability of banking systems and the economy. The sudden stops and banking crises have been identified as the two main features of most financial crises, including the recent Asian Financial Crisis and Global Financial Crisis. However, how capital flows and banking crises are connected still remains unanswered. Most current studies on capital flows are empirical work, which faces various challenges. The challenges include how data has been collected and measured in each country and how sensitive the results are to the data and the adopted methodologies. Moreover, the links between capital flows and banking systems have been neglected. This book helps provide some insight into the challenges faced by empirical studies and the lessons of the recent crises. The book develops theoretical analysis to deepen our understanding on how capital flows, banking systems and financial markets are linked with each other and provides constructive policy implications by overcoming the empirical challenges.

What does a nation owe its military veterans? Gratitude, esteem, land grants, medical care, pensions, higher education? Or is serving in the armed forces of one's country an obligation to be undertaken without any expectation of compensation? If veterans are to receive government aid, should a distinction be made between those who served in wartime or faced enemy fire and those who saw neither war nor combat? These questions have been answered in varying ways by the American people and their elected representatives since the Revolutionary War. Paid Patriotism? explores the genesis and growth of soldiers' pensions throughout the nineteenth century, the Bonus experiment after the First World War, the passage and consequences of the GI Bill of Rights, the growth of the nation's system of veterans' hospitals, the evolution of veterans' programs during the Cold War and Vietnam, the post-9/11 GI Bill, and contemporary scandals and reform efforts within the veterans' bureaucracy, from its promotion to a cabinet department to wrongdoing in the Veterans Health Administration. James T. Bennett examines the complex and politically charged history and heated present-day debate of what the late columnist William Safire called the "most sacred cow" in Washington: the veterans' bureaucracy. In the end, the United States and its citizens owe veterans a debt. But how has and how should that debt be honored-and at what cost?

The Middle East is at an unprecedented crossroads between the established Euro-centric system and the emerging Asian powerhouses like India and China. Their economies, policies and social structures are a half-way-house between these two dominant groups and are an important case study to examine in order to highlight future prospects and problems of the global system. The Middle East is an important missing piece in a huge global puzzle. This book makes a significant step towards understanding that puzzle and offers solutions for how to fully integrate this missing jigsaw piece into the global economic system. Analytical Peace Economics: The Illusion of War for Peace focuses on three critical issues in the Middle East that dominate discussions about their place in the global political economy: conflict, oil and (regional) development. Examining economic and social development in juxtaposition with conflict and peace, this book adapts, develops and applies historical, geographical, economic and psychological methods, creating a nuanced approach to the collective understanding of the economic and social dynamics in the region. By developing theoretical models and analysing empirical research, this book offers an economic analysis of the attempt to find peace through war and seeks to find alternative solutions. This book will be of interest to researchers, policy makers and doctoral students of economics, finance and social sciences as well as advanced undergraduate students of peace economics and development studies.

This new volume explores two alternative economic theories - the classical theory and the marginalist or neoclassical theory- through a discussion between two eminent economists, Pierangelo Garegnani and Paul Samuelson. The key themes of the volume are the difference in approaches to the explanation of the distribution of income and relative prices, and therefore different approaches to all other economic problems, in particular capital accumulation and economic growth. The book discusses whether there is a 'classical' approach to the theory of value and distribution at the core of economic theory that is fundamentally different from the later marginalist or neoclassical theory. In the volume, the late Pierangelo Garegnani argues for the validity of Piero Sraffa's position on this issue, whilst the late noble laureate Paul Samuelson vehemently contests it. At a time of economic crisis, the future of the discipline is far from certain, and so it is extremely important to bring these debates back into the light, by reproducing them together for the first time. A comprehensive introduction by Heinz Kurz sets the debate in this context, and provides crucial background to the arguments.

Microeconomics studies the choices made by individuals under conditions of scarcity of resources and time and the interaction between different decision makers. Scarcity forces economic actors to choose one opportunity among many. Microeconomics with Spreadsheets starts with the mathematical preliminaries and covers consumer theory, producer theory, general equilibrium, game theory, market structure and economics of information.The reader will use numerical tools to analyse problems that cannot be analysed analytically. There is a natural synergy between rigorous proofs and numerical methods, since before using a numerical method one should also prove that a solution exists and analyse whether it is unique, and therefore be able to interpret properly the output of a program.

This book brings together cutting edge contributions in the fields of international economics, micro theory, welfare economics and econometrics, with contributions from Donald R. Davis, Avinash K. Dixit, Tadashi Inoue, Ronald W. Jones, Dale W. Jorgenson, K. Rao Kadiyala, Murray C. Kemp, Kenneth M. Kletzer, Anne O. Krueger, Mukul Majumdar, Daniel McFadden, Lionel McKenzie, James R. Melvin, James C. Moore, Takashi Negishi, Yoshihiko Otani, Raymond Riezman, Paul A. Samuelson, Joaquim Silvestre and Marie Thursby.

The questions such as, 'why the focuses of national policies vary significantly across countries, although their sources of policies are to a great extent identical'; 'why national development experiences mostly cannot be transplanted successfully among countries'; 'why some ineffective institutions persist over long periods of time', have attracted numerous efforts. This book provides a new perspective and argues that the answers lie in the existence of the networks of institutions and thus of national systems of policies (NSP) within national frameworks. Institutions are the equilibria of games and exist as rules of games. Therefore, a basic setting is that institutions emerge endogenously from a series of social interactions, and the interacting human agents are connected and interdependent at the overlapping interaction platforms. National policies and developmental strategies can be modelled in this approach too. The networks of institutions describe the dynamic connected structure among institutions in the process of social interactions over time. Regarding the national policies response to the recent economic crises, this book argues that the difference comes from the distinct understandings of the tags of the policies, which highly depend on the distinct national contexts, such as national interests, cultural background, political systems and so forth. This book represents a significant contribution to the literature which will be essential reading for those interested in institutional economics, network theory, social structures and economic policy. In particular, the approach of applying network game theory in institutional emergence, and the terms developed, i.e. tags of institutions, and national systems of policies, in this book, are illuminating and deserve more attention.

Lee brings together the discourses of political economy and cultural studies in order to shed light on our social situations. Lee sees the commodity as the vital touchstone behind both analysis of the economy and culture.

Micro-econometric analyses cover a wide range of new innovation 'input' and 'output' indicators. Among the robust findings about determinants of innovation is evidence on the importance of technological opportunity, of appropriability of innovation benefits, and of Schmooklerian demand-pull effects. As opposed to the evidence from standard R&D data, small firms appear more innovative and the impact of market power on innovation is, in the best case, modest.

In this pioneering study of the development of the Asian department store, economists, anthropologists and historians examine various aspects of retailing, business organization, networking and consumerism in the expanding economies of Asia.

This volume includes chapters by a number of leading researchers in the area of reading and spelling development. They review what is currently known about both normal and impaired development of decoding, comprehension, and spelling skills. They also consider recent work on the remediation of reading and spelling difficulties in children and discuss effective remedial strategies.

Although land reform in Latin America has long been heralded by scholars and development economists, as well as by revolutionaries, as the essential ingredient for economic growth, the results of actual land reform projects have been largely disappointing. This book attempts to identify the reasons for these results by analyzing some of the microeconomic factors underlying the inadequate performance of reform sector agriculture. Basing her analysis on a detailed case study of agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic, Meyer deals specifically with the organizational structure of the reform project itself, evaluating the relative efficiency of associative, individual, and collective organizational structures.

Meyer begins by providing both a comprehensive survey of the issues surrounding agrarian reform projects in Latin America and an introduction to the history, land settlement patterns, and agriculture of the Dominican Republic. The following chapters detail the history and institutional structure of agrarian reform in the Dominican Republic, review the literature relevant to the study of reform sector projects, and offer case studies of particular reform projects. The author then develops original microeconomic models to explore the implications of the individual, collective, and associative organizational structures. Taken as a whole, Meyer's study provides both theoretical and empirical evidence to support the superior efficiency of the associative organizational structure over either the individual or collective farming approach in the Dominican Republic.

In this carefully articulated investigation of the Walrasian general equilibrium model, the author sets forth one perception or explanation of how the microeconomy might operate. The focus is primarily on the behavior of individual consumers, firms and markets under perfectly competitive conditions and on the simultaneous interactions that occur among them. Central to his argument is that all of these elements fit together to form a unified whole for a complete, consistent, and cohesive picture of the perfectly competitive microeconomy. The book provides substantial discussion of the model's methodological background; returns to scale; the transformation surface and the fixed-factor-supply economy; existence, uniqueness, and stability of equilibria; the dynamics of market adjustments; methodological individualism and the theory of price determination; imperfectly competitive markets; welfare economics; and the role of money capital in the operation of the firm. The author suggests that the abandonment of general equilibrium theory by microeconomists is a mistake, and that it is too soon to give up on the possibility of constructing an adequate analysis of uniqueness, global stability, and price determination. Students and scholars of economics will find much of interest in this thorough exploration of the operation of the microeconomy.

This book introduces special programs designed to enhance thinking and problem solving at the preschool, elementary, secondary, college, and graduate levels, as well as proven instructional methods to aid the elderly in retaining or regaining essential mental skills. The volume also considers difficult problems confronting psychology, including such disparate issues as the appropriate content of courses to develop thinking, resistance to the introduction of programs in schools and universities, and psychology's limitations on progress in these areas.

This book brings together empirical evidences and theoretical perspectives to provide a comprehensive overview of the microfinance sector in India. The essays in the volume: focus on the application of information and communication technology (ICT) solutions in microfinance institutions to strengthen the savings movement and widen credit access to the poor and marginalized sections of society; present case studies on self-help group (SHG) movements, federations and SHG-Bank Linkage programmes; propose measures for strengthening regulatory and governance structures of the microfinance sector; and identify linkages between overall financial inclusion and the contribution of microfinance institutions (MFIs). The volume will be indispensable for scholars and researchers of microeconomics, South Asian economics and development economics as well as professionals and aspirants in the microfinance, rural banking and financial inclusion sectors.

Primary commodities - food, raw materials, fuels and base metals - continue to be a substantial proportion of the exports of many developing countries and account for over 40 per cent of world trade. The determinants of primary commodity prices, and the terms on which they are traded for manufactured goods, are topics of considerable importance for development economists.The Economics of Primary Commodities brings together in one volume important new work by a group of leading scholars on the economic analysis of primary commodity markets. Their detailed coverage of major recent developments in the field include discussion of modelling and policy issues. Topics addressed include excess co-movement of commodity prices, the stabilization of earnings in volatile commodity markets, a macroeconomic framework for trade terms between north and south, and the influence of economic policy on commodity markets. The essays should provide the reader with an overview of the current 'state-of-the-art' and a useful platform on which future research might be based. This book will be welcomed by academic researchers, practitioners and postgraduate students concerned with the economics of trade, economic development and international economics.

First published in 1992, A Political Theory Primer is designed as an introductory course for students in the application of game theory to modeling political processes. Examining those very phenomena that power political machineries--elections, legislative and committee processes, and international conflict--the book attempts to answer fundamental questions about their nature and function. Included at the end of each chapter is a set of exercises designed to allow students to practice the construction and analysis of political models. Although the text assumes only training at the basic algebra level, the student who completes a course around this text will be equipped to read nearly all the professional literature that makes use of game-theoretic analysis. Each chapter also contains suggestiosn for further reading for those students who want to broaden their learning and expertise.

This is the first book to address the design needs of older people in the outdoor environment. It provides information on design principles essential to built environment professionals who want to provide for all users of urban space and who wish to achieve sustainability in their designs. Part one examines the changing experiences of people in the outdoor environment as they age and discusses existing outdoor environments and the aspects and features that help or hinder older people from using and enjoying them. Part two presents the six design principles for 'streets for life' and their many individual components. Using photographs and line drawings, a range of design features are presented at all scales of the outdoor environment from street layouts and building form to signs and detail. Part three expands on the concept of 'streets for life' as the ultimate goal of inclusive urban design. These are outdoor environments that people are able to confidently understand, navigate and use, regardless of age or circumstance, and represent truly sustainable inclusive communities.