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We present an approach for pricing American put options with a regime-switching volatility. Our method reveals that the option price can be expressed as the sum of two components: the price of a European put option and the premium associated with the early exercise privilege. Our analysis demonstrates that, under these conditions, the perpetual put option consistently commands a higher price during periods of high volatility compared to those of low volatility. Moreover, we establish that the optimal exercise boundary is lower in high-volatility regimes than in low-volatility regimes. Additionally, we develop an analytical framework to describe American puts with an Erlang-distributed random-time horizon, which allows us to propose a numerical technique for approximating the value of American puts with finite expiry. We also show that a combined approach involving randomization and Richardson extrapolation can be a robust numerical algorithm for estimating American put prices with finite expiry.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Asian Americans' perceptions of the police, specifically how they construct support. Although such literature has been growing in recent years, research on Asian American interactions with the police remains limited. Additionally, this paper is situated within the theoretical framework of system justification theory to account for Asian Americans' views of the police.

This study relies on interview data collected from 20 Asian Americans residing in mid-Atlantic states. Participants were either recruited directly by the researchers or through the snowball-sampling method.

Police support is influenced by perception of neighborhood safety, personal police contact and empathetic feelings toward the police. Specifically, regarding the latter component, humanizing or empathizing with police officers is a form of rationalizing individual police misconduct that reinforced police legitimacy. Most participants had similar characteristics and displayed police justification. Additional research is needed regarding what characteristics or patterns are likely to lead to lower levels of police justification.

This article's findings improve our understanding of system justification among Asian Americans, particularly as it relates to policing.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between the productive structure and the size of the informal economy in Latin American countries.

The study employs econometric techniques for panel data covering the period from 2002 to 2017 and considering 17 Latin American countries. The evidence presented is based on the informal economy data generated by Medina and Schneider (2018) who estimate the size of the informal economy using a structural equation model and the share of manufacturing in total employment as a measure of the size of the manufacturing sector. Also, the study addresses the possible endogeneity bias in the relationship studied and makes the conclusions more robust, thus avoiding spurious correlations that weaken the findings.

The results indicate that most industrialized Latin American countries are associated with a smaller size of the informal economy.

The findings have important policy implications, as they suggest that Latin American economies need to switch the structure of the economy toward more sophisticated productive structures if they want to reduce the size of the informal economy. Thus, more efforts should be deployed to policies to diversify and upgrade economies.

The study contributes to the literature on the informal economy by connecting the country’s productive structure and informality. Specifically, the results show that the productive structure of countries is a plausible explanation for the size of the informal economy.

Limited research exists on the perceptions of police within specific ethnic minority groups. The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the experiences of Korean and Korean American residents in the Metro Atlanta area regarding their perceptions of cooperation with the police, particularly in relation to hate crimes, along with their perceptions of police legitimacy and other relevant factors. By focusing on this specific population, the study aims to shed light on their unique perspectives and contribute to a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics between ethnic minorities and law enforcement.

The authors’ sample comprised 128 Korean residents who were asked about their demographics, victimization experiences, self-rated English proficiency and police legitimacy. Multiple linear regression analyses were employed to investigate the impact of police legitimacy, victimization experiences and English-speaking skills on the participants' level of cooperation with the police.

Police legitimacy and self-rated levels of English proficiency emerged as the most significant factors in predicting the level of cooperation among residents with the police. Furthermore, individuals who have experienced crime victimization in the past were more willing to cooperate with the police compared to those who have not. Additionally, men showed a higher tendency to cooperate with the police compared to women participants.

The findings of this study suggest important implications for the policies and strategies aimed at enhancing the relationship between the Korean American community and the police. These implications include the need for improved language support for non-English speaking community members and the importance of building trust and fostering mutual understanding to cultivate positive police-community relations. By implementing measures based on these findings, it is recommended to promote a more inclusive and effective approach to policing within the Korean American population.

President Trump's tenure was accompanied by a series of protectionist measures that intended to reinvigorate US-based production and make manufacturing supply chains more “local”. Amidst these increasing institutional pressures to localise, and the business uncertainty that ensued, this study investigates the extent to which manufacturers reconfigured their supply bases.

Bloomberg's Supply Chain Function (SPLC) is used to manually extract data about the direct suppliers of 30 of the largest American manufacturers in terms of market capitalisation. Overall, the raw data comprise 20,100 quantified buyer–supplier relationships that span seven years (2014–2020). The supply base dimensions of spatial complexity, spend concentration and buyer dependence are operationalised by applying appropriate aggregation functions on the raw data. The final dataset is a firm-year panel that is analysed using a random effect (RE) modelling approach and the conditional means of the three dimensions are plotted over time.

Over the studied timeframe, American manufacturers progressively reduced the spatial complexity of their supply bases and concentrated their purchase spend to fewer suppliers. Contrary to the aims of governmental policies, American manufacturers increased their dependence on foreign suppliers and reduced their dependence on local ones.

The research provides insights into the dynamics of manufacturing supply chains as they adapt to shifting institutional demands.

The purpose of this study is to examine two issues, namely the degree of current account deficit (CAD) sustainability and the degree of capital mobility.

The sample for this study comprises 24 Latin American and Caribbean countries, including three regional agreements: Andean Community, MERCOSUR (Mercado Común del Sur), and SICA (Central American Integration System). This study employs the dynamic common correlated effects mean group (DCCEMG) estimator in a panel data set to investigate the long-run relationship between savings and investment along with short-run dynamics.

The findings indicate that CAD is weakly sustainable in the Latin American and Caribbean region, MERCOSUR, and SICA, while CAD is strongly unsustainable in the Andean Community. The sub-period analysis reveals that CAD has been adversely affected by the 2008 crisis. However, in the post-crisis period, CAD has been slowly decreasing in the Latin American and Caribbean region and Andean Community, whereas CAD has continued increasing in MERCOSUR and SICA. Further, the estimates of error-correction terms and short-run coefficients indicate that the Andean Community and MERCOSUR observe a higher degree of long-run and short-run capital mobility than SICA.

The results carry fundamental implications for policy-making processes aimed at maintaining sustainable CADs.

This study gives an alternative interpretation of the “Feldstein-Horioka” coefficient in terms of CAD sustainability and analyses the saving–investment relationship in light of Chudik and Pesaran (2015).

It is critical for those who are engaged in the work of resisting the movement of academically restrictive policy to understand that it is a deliberate act on the part of conservatives to outlaw critical race theory (CRT) specifically, because it is a theoretical mechanism for discrediting the rhetorical foundations of their policy movement. The knee-jerk institutional courses of action to now defund initiatives and curriculum related equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) represent what has always been a deeply rooted investment in white supremacy on the part of the institutions (Baldwin, 2021; Patel, 2021; Squire, 2021).

The author explores and defines the CRT tenets of interest convergence (Bell, 1980) and whiteness as property (Harris, 1993) in relation to EI (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011) as frameworks for examining three EGOs in the region where these policies have become most dominant. All three are critical tools of analysis for understanding the stake the White conservative political elite have in EGOs, and the magnitude of EI these policies represent, and stand endorse in their rhetoric. Definitions of EI often rely on the work of Amanda Fricker’s (2013) text on the subject, but this paper is invested in the expansions of this theorization for speaking to the nature of the injustice that EGOs represent as a matter of historical trend, with grave implications for futures marked by continued oppression. Whiteness as property and interest convergence are points for explicating the dialectic and material aspects of issues of race and equity in this country; namely, how knowledge processes inherent to higher education sound even more alarms as EGOs become commonplace for college campuses.

To support the arguments laid out, the author provides a historical review of the settler-colonial foundations of higher education as an american institution. This is meant to provide contour to the image of postsecondary education that exists today. In accordance with this paper’s allegiance to CRT, many of the texts would be considered revisionist history (Delgado and Stefancic, 2023), which stray from dominant narratives of american comfort and speak more accurately to the experiences of minoritized populations. The author then applies the same analysis to the sociopolitical contexts of EGOs, and to policy language itself. Each section is closed with an explanation of its connection to tenets of CRT and EI so as to provide a thread to follow into the subsequent discussion section.

In the first presentation of the early writings of this work, the author was lucky enough to be in community with Barbara Applebaum at the annual meeting for the American Educational Studies Association and engage in discourse surrounding EI and CRT applications to EGOs. In conversations surrounding the will in the willful ignorance that is exemplified in the movement of EGOs, the author had shared with Dr Applebaum the early thinking on how that will was the same force that brought together converging interests, which have continually forecasted interest divergence. This is commonly referred to as “political backlash.” The author had said something along the lines of: “if we follow the interest convergence, we can get in front of the subsequent political moves to turn the clocks on what was once celebrates progress.” This conversation planted the seed for what is the thesis of this paper. Interest convergence and divergence happen at the will of white populations because of the american truth of whiteness as property. In the context of higher education, this means that because educational pursuit has largely been white property, it has served as an arena for white populations to converge and diverge their interests with those of the minoritized. For example, the policies that drained federal funding for higher education in the 1970s were passed on the tails of a Civil Rights Movement that shook the very foundation of this country and expanded access to postsecondary education for racially minoritized groups (Berret, 2015).

Ensuring that this social construction is a matter of status quo has largely been the work of postsecondary institutions, and EGOs represent the most recent attempt at epistemically imposed inferiority. Explicit attention to the fact of higher education’s complicity and overall investment in the socialization of oppression is necessary to engage in transformative practice that resists anachronism. If higher education researchers and practitioners do not recognize the stake in both the presence and resistance to EGOs, there would likely be acts of resistance that will belie an act of interest convergence – and later divergence – on the part of the state.

Research shows that having student loan debt in retirement is associated negatively with life satisfaction, suggesting that student debt is a bane of retiree well-being. The rationale for this study is to determine the factors related to owing student debt in retirement, given the adverse effects on the well-being of retired households.

The study utilizes pooled cross-sectional data from the 2015 and 2018 U.S. National Financial Capability Study. The empirical analysis uses a sample of retired Americans aged 65 years and older (N = approximately 8,000) and estimates two-block logistic regression models to examine the effects of demographic, socioeconomic and behavioral factors on student loan indebtedness in retirement. A sensitivity analysis is performed for the subsample of retirees holding student debt for their children's education. Statistical interpretations use odds ratios.

The findings indicate that financial literacy, age, homeownership and high subjective financial knowledge are associated with a low likelihood of holding student loan debt in retirement. However, being Black, having postsecondary education, having difficulty covering expenses, having financially dependent children, having high-risk preferences and spending more than income increase the likelihood of holding student debt in retirement. The ensuing discussion will assist financial planners and educators identify practical ways to shape decisions regarding student loan debt in retirement.

The amount of student loan debt is unavailable in the dataset for analysis. One cannot infer causal relations from the study. The factors examined do not reflect the time the student loan was obtained.

The study focuses on the determinants of student loan indebtedness among retired Americans rather than young adults or older adults on the verge of retirement. The paper enhances the understanding of student loan holdings in the decumulation phase of the life cycle. Many US individuals have low retirement savings from which they draw a retirement income. The more the student debt burdens on retired Americans, the greater the likelihood of outliving their resources and experiencing poverty.

The study analyzed how the service-learning (SL) methodology can become a university social responsibility (USR) strategy that generates shared value for the university and its stakeholders.

This qualitative and exploratory–descriptive research had a nonexperimental field and cross-sectional design that used field techniques such as focus groups and in-depth interviews with the participants of the USR program “MIPyME vs COVID-19” in two Latin American countries.

This study revealed the perceptions of students who participated in the USR program on how a virtual service-learning (vSL) strategy related to the use of technology generates a positive impact on the development of shared learning between students and micro-entrepreneurs from a global and Latin American perspective, as well as for the internationalization of their study plans.

The field study was conducted in only two Latin American countries; however, the USR program has been implemented in eight universities from eight Latin American countries with very similar social, political and health contexts.

It is one of the first studies on SL used in a strategic and articulated way in universities with a USR approach. It analyzed traditional evaluations of this methodology, incorporating others such as virtuality (produced by the effects of the COVID-19), which led the authors to generate methodological innovations based on new ways of connecting, linking and generating shared learning and value for all.

The purpose is to understand how farmers in rural American communities perceive crime, safety and policing.

An online survey, adapted from a version used in Victoria, Australia (Harkness, 2017), was modified and administered through social media and farming organizations throughout three US states. The survey covers topics relating to crime and victimization, feelings of safety or fear in rural areas, policing practices and trust in police in their areas and any crime prevention practices that respondents use.

With nearly 1,200 respondents and four scales investigated, results indicate that those respondents with more favorable views of law enforcement and the criminal justice system had the highest fear of crime, those who had been prior victims of crime had a higher fear of crime than those who did not, those with higher community involvement had higher fear of crime, and those from Nebraska compared to Colorado had higher fear of crime.

A better understanding of the agricultural community’s perceptions of crime, safety and policing will aid law enforcement in community policing efforts and in farm crime investigation and prevention. Limitations of the study, including the distribution method will be discussed.

Farm- and agriculture-related crimes have serious financial and emotional consequences for producers and local economies. Stereotypes about rural areas being “safe with no crime” are still prevalent. Rural American farmers’ perceptions of crime, safety and police are largely absent from the literature and are important for improving farm crime prevention.