Copyright (c) 2011 All rights reserved. http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam Recent documents in Samia Islam en-us Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:46:23 PDT 3600 http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/6 http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/6 Wed, 20 Jul 2011 08:03:31 PDT Although there is a well developed corpus of knowledge concerning female entrepreneurs in developed nations, relatively less is known about counterparts in developing and transitional economies. This paper uses a survey of 180 women entrepreneurs in Bahrain to examine the influence of various socio-economic factors on their decision to choose entrepreneurial careers. We find human capital to be instrumental in respondent’s choice of business, type of financing sought, and level of networking. The expectation that ties to religious groups would confer an advantage when doing business in an Islamic country was not supported. Nevertheless, women who abided by Islamic customs were accepted in a typically male-dominated business world.

]]> John C. McIntosh et al. http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/5 http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/5 Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:20:10 PDT The economic performance of Appalachian counties in the USA varies substantially across the region. The Appalachian Regional Commission has divided the 410 counties into four major categories: distressed, transitional, competitive, and attainment. This paper applies spatial models that account for spatial interdependence to evaluate the impact of Appalachian highways on economically disparate counties. Using a spatial autoregressive model in a production function framework, it is found that distressed counties gain from highways whereas competitive counties actually suffer from a negative backwash effect that tends to draw productive activity away from these counties into neighboring counties.

]]> Samia Islam http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/4 http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/4 Wed, 30 Mar 2011 14:20:07 PDT This paper presents theory and methods used to construct an interregional commodity by industry flow matrix for the United States. The interregional flow matrix method involves the construction of single-state (and DC) social accounting matrices (SAMs) using data derived from IMPLAN. Once complete, the interregional flows connecting states are estimated using a method based on the commodity flow survey data published by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. The estimated interregional SAM is then adjusted to insure the integrity of intra-regional and system-wide accounts. The procedures have been designed with ease of replicability as a goal so that updates and extensions of the database can be generated efficiently and at low cost as new data are released. The resulting US interregional framework describes flows within and among the 51 regions. The method is flexible and will provide a valuable database for a broad range of analyses on regions, interregional relationships, and policy.

]]> Randall W. Jackson et al. http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/2 http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/2 Mon, 07 Feb 2011 13:26:51 PST The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of NAAQS non-attainment status on the entrepreneurial activity in a metropolitan statistical area (MSA). Most of the existing research on the relationship between non-attainment and the financial robustness of areas focuses on the big polluters (e.g., plastics, organic chemicals, steel smelting and refining, etc.), and examines how many of the big polluters failed or relocated, measured by the change in the number of plants/businesses when an area moved from attainment to non-attainment. Our paper will use a 306 MSA panel data set over the 1989-2003 timeframe, to address the question more comprehensively by looking at all industries, not just a targeted few polluters. Controlling for other time-variant confounding effects, such as population growth, per-capita income, tax rate changes, minimum wage rates, energy costs, regional inflation measures, and spatial phenomena (such as, natural disasters) we isolate the effect of non-attainment status on large polluters as well as the linkage industries. We show that if an area is designated non-attainment status in a particular year, it leads to a decline in the total number of business starts in the MSA in the following year. We also determine whether the impact of non-attainment varies across businesses of different sizes.

]]> Scott E. Lowe et al. http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/1 http://works.bepress.com/samia_islam/1 Thu, 06 May 2010 13:48:38 PDT In this paper, we use 2006 FARS data to estimate seatbelt use in the United States. We apply a method to correct the FARS data for sample selection bias introduced by Levitt and Porter (2001), as well as discuss the advantages of using FARS data for seatbelt analysis. Furthermore, based on assumptions of independence for seatbelt choice, we establish a lower and upper bound for seatbelt usage rates, and that once we correct for sample selection bias, the seatbelt usage estimates from the corrected FARS emerge at least as a comparable alternative to NOPUS estimates. This implies that researchers can use corrected FARS to complement NOPUS, thus being able to utilize the rich cross-sectional details available in FARS data to analyze various relevant research questions.

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