Search results for "Conventional wisdom"
showing 5 items of 5 documents
Another "French paradox": explaining why interest rates to microenterprises dit not increase with the change in French usury legislation
2015
Conventional wisdom indicates that the growth of credit may not materialize if credit rates remain capped by usury laws, as had long been the case in France. France therefore abolished usury ceilings on loans to microenterprise in an effort to increase financing for microentrepreneurs. This should have led to an increase in interest rates and increase in microcredit. However, we do not find any increase in interest rates and this is therefore a paradox. The paper provides a brief literature review and the salient features of the legislative changes in France. It follows this up with a presentation of interest rate movements. The discussion of possible explanations of the paradox includes cl…
The Mediatization of E-Campaigning: Evidence From German Party Websites in State, National, and European Parliamentary Elections 2002-2009
2012
The rise of e-campaigning is often associated with its ability to circumvent journalistic principles of news selection and presentation. By this, parties and candidates are said to free themselves from the discretionary power of the mass media and to reach voters in an unfiltered way. This conventional wisdom is tested through a comparative content analysis of German party websites in state, national, and European parliamentary elections between 2002 and 2009. The results show that e-campaigns in all elections adhere in their messages to the media logic. Specifically, they replicate those patterns of offline coverage that have been held accountable for rising political alienation and civic …
Opacity of young businesses: Evidence from rating disagreements
2008
Abstract A conventional wisdom in the contemporary corporate finance literature argues that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are informationally opaque. We use data from two credit information companies and in particular their disagreements over the creditworthiness of SMEs to study the empirical relevance of this often invoked assumption. Our panel data analysis shows that once unobserved firm-effects are controlled for, the disagreements (i.e., rating splits) are inversely related to the age of firms. We are not able to document such a robust relationship between the disagreements and the size of firms. This finding holds a lesson for empirical corporate finance researchers who n…
Trade Liberalization, Female Labor Force Participation and Economic Growth
2008
This research argues that the interaction between international trade and female labor force participation has played a significant role in the process of development. The main concern of our study is to show how differences in per household capital stocks, via international specialization, affect household choice of female labor force participation and fertility, and how these decisions, in turn, feed back and affect the accumulation of capital. Interestingly, and in contrast to conventional wisdom, our theory suggests that specialization in female's comparative advantage sectors expands these sectors but hinders female labor force participation, while specialization in male's comparative …
Do social networks bridge political divides? The analysis of VKontakte social network communication in Ukraine
2014
New electronic forms of political communication have become increasingly popular in countries with weak democratic institutions. The effectiveness of these new forms of association in altering political behavior, however, remains uncertain even in developed democratic regimes. This paper investigates connections between regional variation in electoral behavior and regional distribution of electronic social networks in the case of Ukraine's polarized and institutionally unstable democracy. Our analysis of online networks shows that, somewhat contrary to conventional wisdom, electronic communication does not bridge political divides. This finding casts doubt on the effectiveness of online for…