Peter A. Zaleski

Economic Freedom and the Quality of Life: An Empirical Analysis

Previous empirical research on the social and economic impact of freedom has tended to focus on the link between freedom and economic growth rates. Only a few studies have looked at freedoms effect on the quality of life, and these generally focused on the effect of political freedom. Here, we attempt to bridge this gap by analyzing the effect of economic freedom on the quality of life. Taking advantage of newly developed measures of economic freedom, we analyze the impact of economic freedom on life expectancy and literacy rates. We find that greater economic freedom enhances the quality of life both across nations and increases the improvements in the quality of life over time.

The Effect of Religious Market Competition on Church Giving

This paper contributes to the debate over the effects of religious pluralism on religosity. A key innovative feature of the paper is the use of voluntary contributions from members as a measure of religiosity. Using data from 177 congregations, and employing both the Herfindahl Index and market share as measures of religious market competition, a two-stage least squares estimation technique shows that Protestants give more when their congregation is faced with substantial competition, while Catholics tend to contribute more when they represent a minority church in a heavily concentrated market. This outcome is explained by arguing that churches with more competition react by providing a more satisfactory product and do a better job of filling niches in the religious marketplace.

Campaign contributions from corporate PACs

ConclusionThis paper provides a theoretical model of the optimal level of campaign contributions by business firms. The model shows that market structure variables are key determinants of the level of campaign contributions.Furthermore, the empirical results support the models assertion that a reduction in government involvement in an industry could substantially decrease the level of campaign contributions from firms in that industry. Also, reductions in industry concentration through antitrust enforcement could, in fact, increase the level of campaign contributions.

Group size and the free-rider hypothesis: A re-examination of old evidence from churches: Comment

This paper comments on a recent study by Lipford (1995) which rejects the hypothesis of free ridership. This paper contends that Lipfords analysis suffers from two serious misspecification errors. A re-examination of Lipfords results suggests that free ridership could occur. Other hypotheses, however, are also consistent with the new results.

DETERMINANTS OF RELIGIOUS GIVING IN URBAN PRESBYTERIAN CONGREGATIONS

Using a sample of 320 urban Presbyterian congregations we tested four factors purported to affect contribution levels: socioeconomic level of the congregation, the stewardship approach used, programs sponsored, and the extent of democratic participation in decision-making. The strongest relationships were not with raw contributions but with the square root of contributions as a percentage of overall household income. The most important predictor was the economic level of the membership (the higher the income the lower the percent given to the church). Other predictors were church size (the larger the church the lower percent given), the number of new members, use of stewardship programs, effective congregational programs, and participatory decision-making. The study of religious contributions has become an important topic in the 1990s. Nearly every denomination has concerns about contributions. Roman Catholics have been prodded by the revelation made by Greeley and McManus (1987) and others that they contribute at only about half the rate of Protestants, costing the U.S. Catholic Church over

Leading institutional contributors to the elite economic journals

6 billion in lost revenue each year. Mainline Protestants have been concerned about the impact on contributions of decreasing membership, along with congregational declines in allocations to benevolences. These problems have spawned numerous studies. Some researchers have compared contributions across denominations, while others have focused on a single denomination. This paper examines only one denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). It presents some of the proposed theoretical explanations for levels of giving, analyzes them using a simple empirical model, and then discusses the implications of the findings. We study only urban churches, for two reasons. First, the data set we used is more reliable for urban than for rural churches. Second, rural congregations tend to be small and homogeneous, with less institutional variation and fewer identifiable determinants to distinguish different levels of giving.

The Effect of Industry Concentration on Free Riding

Given the prestige enjoyed by several economic departments, there is a natural curiosity regarding their contributions to the economic literature. This article, analyses the appearance of all academic institutions worldwide in the eight leading economic journals, the ‘Blue Ribbon Eight,’ from 1991 to 2005. We cite those institutions who appear the most, and analyse the composition of appearances across all eight journals to assess their degree of diversity. While it is tempting to use these measures as a ranking of institutions, the analysis is meant to be purely an historical appreciation of the contributions of these admirable institutions.

The most frequent contributors to the elite economics journals: Half century of contributions to the “Blue ribbon eight”

The conventional wisdom regarding industry concentration and cooperative behavior has not been fully supported by the empirical literature. This paper develops a game-theoretic model to explain these mixed results. In the context of an industry that lobbies the government for tariff protection, the model shows that the difficulty of enforcing a cooperative agreement is a function of not only the number of firms in the industry but also the rate of return to lobbying. Thus, when the rate of return to lobbying expenditures is high, the expected relationship may break down.

The American Economic Review at 100: A Summary of the Journal's Most Frequent Contributing Authors and Institutions

There is a natural curiosity within the economic academic community regarding who are the most frequent contributors to the economic literature. This paper presents an analysis of the top publishers in the “Blue Ribbon Eight” economics journals, over the past 50 years (1954–2003), plus two 25-year subperiods of 1954–1978 and 1979–2003. While it is tempting to use these results to rank economics departments, this paper is meant to be an historical appreciation of these authors and journals and not meant to imply any type of current ranking.

Partisan profiles in presidential policies: A reply to a partisan proponent

The American Economic Review (AER) celebrates it 100th anniversary during 2011. During this century of contributions to economic thought, the elite group of most frequent contributing authors and academic institutions revealed in this study represent major participants in the unparalleled role that the AER has played in the world of scholarly published research. These contributing authors and academic institutions are most deserving of our admiration.