Public Sector
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Bribery, extortion, graft, embezzlement––these are just some of the grizzly faces of corruption. In some countries, corruption is so common that it is as expected as a handshake when ordinary people or businesses deal with government officials.
In a recent...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Back in the 1970s, Stanford professor Myra Strober wanted to understand how elementary school teaching became an occupation dominated by women. The trouble was the young economists in her interdisciplinary research group focused on statistical data from the...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Urban schools and those with lower-performing students tend to employ the least qualified teachers. But contrary to popular belief, this might not just be due to the fact that teachers prefer working with higher-performing kids.
New research shows that teachers...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—The United States once produced the highest percentage of bachelor's degrees in the world but now trails behind five other countries including Canada, Japan, and South Korea. Nearly 80 percent of the nation's post-secondary students attend non-selective four-...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS - California Governor Earl Warren, a relatively liberal Republican and future U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, was facing a difficult reelection challenge in 1950, the height of the McCarthy Era. With his conservative opponent making an issue of alleged...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—People vote for candidates based on their performance in office — right? While political scientists like to think so, new research argues that a political incumbent's fate can be influenced by far less weighty matters — like whether the local college football...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—Does racism affect voters' responses to President Barack Obama’s policies? In September, former president Jimmy Carter argued yes in an interview with Brian Williams of NBC. A Democracy Corps focus-group study published on Oct. 16 disagreed, concluding that...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—One need look no further than Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan's use of interest rates to manage the stock market and the economy to realize that expectations play a key role in economic well-being. In recent years, economists have learned a great deal...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—All dictatorships are cruel and wasteful. They deprive the populace of basic rights while enriching a small minority at the expense of rational development.
Some maintain power through terror and the naked use of force applied by huge standing armies and police...
STANFORD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF BUSINESS—In June finance ministers of the Group of 8, the world's wealthiest industrialized nations, agreed to cancel at least $40 billion in debt owed by the world's poorest nations, many of them in Africa. The move certainly sounds generous, but researchers caution it...