Location Efficiency and Mortgage Risks for Low-Income Households

Abstract

Household energy expenditures, especially for transportation, are fairly inelastic. Their effects on low-income households may be significant, due to the potential for energy consumption to displace other types of consumption when energy prices rise. Using accessibility as a proxy for lower transportation costs, we test the hypothesis that low- and moderate-income residents are less likely default when they are located in more accessible places. We find that regional accessibility has almost no effect on risks of default, but local job diversity has moderate mitigating effect.     

The Philippines Discovers its Maritime Domain: The Aquino Administration’s Shift in Strategic Focus from Internal to Maritime Security

With China’s naval expansion in the South China Sea, the Philippine government has eased up its counter-insurgency/counter-terrorism campaign and has vigorously pursued instead the modernization of the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) particularly in developing the deterrence capability of the Philippine Navy (PN). However, slow-paced and hampered by scant resources, the naval build-up will hardly deter China’s encroachment on the Philippine maritime territory. Faced with this predicament, the Philippines has resorted to forging new security partnerships with the United States and Japan, two major naval powers in East Asia. The paper concludes that maritime security will remain the Philippines’ priority concern way into the third decade of the 21st century.     

STR data for the AmpFlSTR profiler plus loci from Majorcan, Minorcan and Valencian populations (Eastern Spain)

Frequency data of the nine STRs included in the AmpFlSTR profiler plus kit were determined in a sample of 304 unrelated individuals from three Spanish populations: 103 from Majorca, 100 from Minorca, and 101 from Valencia.     

Searching for the source of technical inefficiency in Italian judicial districts: an empirical investigation

In this paper, we conducted a two-stage analysis of technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts by focusing on civil cases in 2006. Unlike most of the works that apply the Data Envelopment Analysis technique to study the justice sector, in the first stage, we employed the smoothed bootstrap procedure to generate unbiased technical efficiency estimates. In the second stage, we used a semi-parametric technique (Simar and Wilson in J Econom 136(1): 31–64, 2007) that produces a robust inference for an unknown serial correlation between efficiency scores. Our results show that technical efficiency is explained by demand factors and supports the conclusion that opportunistic behaviour from both claimants and lawyers negatively affects technical efficiency in Italian judicial districts.     

Who Receives Electoral Gifts? It Depends on Question Wording: Experimental Evidence from Mexico

Political Behavior - This research shows that prior studies have been based on a survey methodology that systematically underestimates vote buying. Survey questions that rely on filter questions...     

Coups d’état and defense spending: a counterfactual analysis

We explore how institutional set-ups, in particular changes in political institutions through coups d’état, can affect the way military expenditures are determined. We use a counterfactual approach, the synthetic control method, and compare the evolution of the military burden for 40 countries affected by coups with the evolution of a synthetic counterfactual that replicates the initial conditions and the potential outcomes of the countries of interest before exposure to coups. Our case studies suggest that successful coups result in a large increase in the military burden. However, when no effects or a decrease in the defense burden are found, it is often the consequence of a democratization process triggered by the coup. These results are in keeping with recent theoretical developments on the bargaining power of the military in authoritarian regimes. Failed coups, by contrast, produce a smaller, and mostly positive, effect on the military burden, possibly as a result of the incumbent’s strategy to avert further challenges to the stability of the regime by buying off the military.