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This paper is the first to use the individual level, longitudinal catch-up growth of boys and girls in a historical population to measure their relative deprivation. The data is drawn from two government schools, the Marcella Street Home (MSH) in Boston, MA (1889–1898), and the Ashford School of the West London School District (1908–1917). The paper provides an extensive discussion of the two schools including the characteristics of the children, their representativeness, selection bias and the conditions in each school. It also provides a methodological introduction to measuring children’s longitudinal catch-up growth. After analysing the catch-up growth of boys and girls in the schools, it finds that there were no substantial differences between the catch-up growth by gender. Thus, these data suggest that there were not major health disparities between boys and girls in late-nineteenth-century America and early-twentieth-century Britain.

There is a pressing need for practitioners to adopt viable analytic procedures that may help them optimize resource allocation to strengthen customer satisfaction. This paper reviews a range of procedures used for measuring customer satisfaction that are identified in the literature and tests which procedures might be more useful to practitioners.

Customer satisfaction measurement procedures developed in the literature are reviewed to assess the non‐linear and asymmetric relationship between attribute performance and overall satisfaction. A convergent validity test between the two measurement procedures that the review suggests are the most suitable for application in practice is then conducted to discover the relative merits of each. The test is based on an empirical investigation carried out in the mobile communication industry.

Two measurement procedures were identified as the most appropriate to practitioners, “regression with dummy variables” and the “Importance Grid”. These were compared using a convergent validity test, which revealed a lack convergent validity between the two. Discussion about the reliability of the two procedures and the implications for practice is provided. On balance, the regression with dummy variables was identified as the better approach.

The paper highlights the importance that recognition is given to the non‐linear and asymmetric response of customer satisfaction to the performance of different product/service attributes if appropriate decisions are to be made for allocating marketing resources. While research on customer satisfaction has emphasized the need to account for the non‐linear and asymmetric relationship between attribute performance and overall satisfaction, no effort has been made to disseminate these insights fully among practitioners. Since understanding the relationship between attribute performance and overall satisfaction is paramount if resource allocation to improve attribute performance is to be prioritized correctly, there is a pressing concern to move customer satisfaction programs closer to the theory predictions. A range of measurement procedures is reviewed and compared. Through this work, academics and practitioners may gain further insight into procedures for measuring customer satisfaction and an understanding of the relative benefits and limitations of the procedures that may be adopted.

We examine the informational roles of trades and time between trades in the domestic and overseas US Treasury markets. A vector autoregressive model is employed to assess the information content of trades and time duration between trades. We find significant impacts of trades and time duration between trades on price changes. Larger trade size induces greater price revision and return volatility, and higher trading intensity is associated with a greater price impact of trades, a faster price adjustment to new information and higher volatility. Higher informed trading and lower liquidity contribute to larger bid–ask spreads off the regular daytime trading period.

The study examines the role of a country's legal system in predicting the corporate cash holdings using a sample of 18 countries inherited with distinct legal traditions. The central point of the study is the comparative assessment of legal frameworks in shaping the corporate finance policies.

The authors employ host of regression techniques including dummy variables, panel data regression and Fama–MacBeth regressions to establish the relationship.

The study results support the idea of “theory of law and finance” that legal tradition is a key factor determining corporate behaviour and policy. In particular, the authors observe that firms operating in civil law systems hold significantly higher cash as compared to their peers from common law systems. Moreover, the authors report that the law system affects the corporate cash holdings through the channels of economic development and shareholder's protection, yet in opposite directions. This is because the authors find that in developed countries where civil law tradition prevails, firms hold reasonably higher cash. Moreover, if the firm belongs to high investors' protection country with civil law traditions, the cash holdings get substantially reduced. Besides, the authors find that the predictability of widely held determinants of cash holdings is not invariant of law traditions, and it holds true also when analysed in conjunction with the financial crisis. Overall, the authors find support for their postulation that corporate cash management policies are likely to be different across legal traditions. The study results are robust to the controls for various firm and country-specific antecedents of cash holdings and to the alternate econometric techniques.

The study findings would encourage the government and firm policymakers and regulators in strengthening the investor protection rights which would further augment the legal system and firm-specific corporate governance mechanisms. This would mitigate agency issues and managers would be forced to undertake investor-friendly financial policies especially corporate cash holdings which would be resulting into shareholder value maximization.

The study contributes uniquely since the existing literature is largely silent on the role that legal tradition of a country has on the cash holdings of its firms.

Foreign fighters (FFs) appeared in at least approximately one-fourth of conflicts over the past 200 years. This study aims to reveal the impact of FFs in conflicts, whether they resolve the conflict faster or they drag out the conflict, and investigate the single and simultaneous impacts of ethnic conflict (EC) and FFs on conflict duration (CD).

The data set consisting of 352 conflicts from 1818 to 2022 was collected from different sources. Logarithmic Linear Regression with Dummy Variables and the Cox Regression models were used to check the hypotheses.

One of the key findings of this analysis is that the use of FFs extends the duration of conflicts. Similarly, conflicts involving EC increase CD. Additionally, the simultaneous effect of FFs and EC together increases the CD much more, and it is noted CD significantly varies regionally.

As this study focused on the factors that affect the duration of the conflict in the hypotheses, the findings only can contribute to explaining the duration rather than factors such as the number of casualties and economic losses. The authors believe that policy and key decision-makers can benefit from the results and think twice before deciding to use FFs in conflicts.

This study offers a separate and simultaneous effect of EC and FFs on CD, which provides some empirical contributions to conflict management by filling the gap in this area.

The primary objective of the paper is to demonstrate the importance of borrower‐specific characteristics as well as local situation factors in determining the demand prospect as well as the risk of credit loss on residential housing loan repayment behavior in India.

Using 13,487 housing loan accounts (sanctioned from 1993‐2007) data from Banks and Housing Finance Cos (HFCs) in India, this paper attempts to find out the crucial factors that drive demand for housing and its correlation with borrower characteristics using a panel regression method. Next, using logistic regression, housing loan defaults and the major causative factors of the same are examined.

In analyzing the housing demand pattern, some special characteristics of the Indian residential housing market (demographic and social features) and the housing loan facility structure (loan process, loan margin, loan rate, collateral structure etc.), that have contributed to the safety and soundness of the Indian housing market have been deciphered. The empirical results suggest that borrower defaults on housing loan payments is mainly driven by change in the market value of the property vis‐à‐vis the loan amount and EMI to income ratio. A 10 percent decrease in the market value of the property vis‐à‐vis the loan amount raises the odds of default by 1.55 percent. Similarly, a 10 percent increase in EMI to income ratio raises the delinquency chance by 4.50 percent. However, one cannot ignore borrower characteristics like marital status, employment situation, regional locations, city locations, age profile and house preference which otherwise may inhibit the lender to properly assess credit risk in home loan business, as the results show that these parameters also act as default triggers.

This study contributes on the micro side of the housing market in India, since it uses unique and robust loan information data from banks and HFCs. The empirical results obtained in this paper are useful to regulators, policy makers, market players as well as the researchers to understand housing market demand and risk characteristics in an emerging market economy such as India.

This chapter uses a college-by-graduate degree fixed effects estimator to evaluate the returns to 19 different graduate degrees for men and women. We find substantial variation across degrees, and evidence that OLS overestimates the returns to degrees with the highest average earnings and underestimates the returns to degrees with the lowest average earnings. Second, we decompose the impacts on earnings into effects on wage rates and effects on hours. For most degrees, the earnings gains come from increased wage rates, though hours play an important role in some degrees, such as medicine, especially for women. Third, we estimate the net present value and internal rate of return for each degree, which account for the time and monetary costs of degrees. Finally, we provide descriptive evidence that satisfaction gains are large for some degrees with smaller economic returns, such as education and humanities degrees, especially for men.

This paper attempts to examine which theory is best at explaining the geographic concentration in Java, an island in which most of the Indonesia’s large and medium manufacturing industries have located overwhelmingly. Our previous studies on Java have found that there was a stable – albeit increasing trend – and persistent geographic concentration in Java over the period 1976‐1995. Yet some critical questions exist: Why geographic concentration in Java persisted during this period? To what extent relevant theories and empirical literature can be used as an explicit test of competing theories on agglomeration forces? In answering those questions, we compare the three major grand theories of geographic concentration: Neo‐Classical Theory (NCT), New Trade Theory (NTT) and New Economic Geography (NEG). Using the regional specialization index as a measure of geographic concentration of manufacturing industry and pooling data over the period 1991‐002, our econometric analysis integrates the perspectives of industry, region (space) and time. We further explore the nature and dynamics of agglomeration forces underpinning the industrial agglomeration in Java by testing some key variables. Our econometric results rejected the NCT hypotheses and showed that the NTT and NEG can better explain the phenomena. It’s apparent that manufacturing firms in Java seek to locate in more populous and densely populated areas in order to enjoy both localization economies and urbanization economies, as shown by the significance of scale economies and income per capita. The former is associated with the size of a particular industry, while the latter reflects the size of a market in a particular urban area. More importantly, the results suggest that there is a synergy between thickness of market and agglomeration forces. The interplay of agglomeration economies is intensified by the imperfect competition of Java’s market structure. We find that Java’s market structure may restrict competition so that firms tend to concentrate geographically. Instead of providing some important recommendations for local and central governments and practical implications for investors and manufacturing firms, this paper gives empirical evidence with respect to path dependency hypothesis. The finding supports the NEG’s belief that history matters: older firms tend to enhance regional specialization.