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The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between state economic development incentives programs and entrepreneurial activity.

The authors use panel data and a fixed-effects model to examine the determinants of five measures of entrepreneurial activity. To measure state economic development incentives programs, they use a new and substantially improved data set from Bartik (2017). They also include a measure for economic freedom, the Fraser Institute’s Economic Freedom of North America index.

The authors find a robustly negative relationship between development incentives and patent activity. They find some evidence that incentives are negatively associated with small business establishments (<10 employees) as a percentage of total establishments but positively associated with the large business establishment (>500 employees) share. They also find evidence of a positive relationship between economic freedom and both patent activity and net business formation.

The results imply that economic development incentive programs are unlikely to increase entrepreneurial activity and may decrease it. They also imply increased economic freedom (lower taxes, lower spending, and lower governmental restrictions on labor markets) may increase entrepreneurial activity.

To the authors’ knowledge, this paper provides the first examination of the relationship between development incentives and entrepreneurial activity that utilizes Bartik (2017), a new vastly improved data set of state economic development incentive programs. The paper also contributes to the literature on the relationship between economic freedom and entrepreneurial activity.

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do, or do without. While the consumer hardships that inspired this Yankee saying have gone the way of flintlock firearms, the harsh conditions facing corporate America are far from history. ♦ In order to help planners cut costs, we searched everywhere to uncover the many overlooked ways that companies still waste money. We found corporations concerned with everything from floor space to fax machines, coffee to corporate locations, and time‐on‐hold to holding time. ♦ Many of the cost‐saving ideas we discovered are simply common sense. Others are more “New Age” in spirit. Some are downright Scroogely. ♦ To get yourself into a thrifty mindset, take a look at the gamut of cost cutting ideas and strategies on the following pages.

Cross-country studies have shown that higher costs to starting a business tend to reduce entrepreneurship (Chambers and Munemo, 2019) and that an unfavorable environment for business can increase poverty and income inequality (Chambers et al., 2019a; Djankov et al., 2018). Building on the current literature, the authors test whether barriers to starting a business at the state and city level in the USA are associated with changes in entrepreneurship and income inequality.

Measures of entrepreneurship (establishment entry rate and exit rate) are regressed on measures of barriers to entry in a cross-section of 50 states as well as a cross-section of 73 cities in the USA. Further, the authors regress measures of income inequality on measures of barriers to entry using the same two cross-sections. State level data on barriers to entry are from Teague (2016), published in the Journal of Entrepreneurship and Public Policy. City level data on barriers to starting a business are from the Doing Business in North America (DBNA) dataset.

Results show that there is a negative and significant association between barriers to starting a business and the rate of firm exit. A standard deviation increase in barriers to entry is associated with a five percent decrease in the firm exit rate at the state level. The authors find only limited evidence that barriers to entry are associated with income inequality.

Despite a large volume of scholarship on how regulation and barriers to entry influence entrepreneurship, no study (to the authors’ knowledge) has investigated how general entry regulation affects the entry or exit rate of establishments at the state or municipal level in the USA.

Purpose – Role-taking refusal was a foundational problem in Mead's work but was ignored by subsequent interactionists who focused on the benefits of role-taking – empathy and solidarity – but failed to examine how they are destroyed or crippled from emerging as inclusionary aspects of social consciousness. Role-taking refusal constitutes both the microfoundation of dehumanization in the case of the oppressor and, in the case of the oppressed, the microfoundation of resistance. Role-taking refusal is linked to Giddens's notion of the reflective project of the self, Omi and Winant's racial formation theory, Feagin's theory of systemic racism, and the perspective of Critical Race Theory.

Methodology – I shall portray role-taking refusal by using historical, theoretical, and empirical works, especially ethnographic studies.

Social implications – The oppressed know the image their oppressors have of them. Refusing to internalize this image is the first step – the microfoundation – of resistance. Role-taking refusal in the oppressed fosters critical consciousness, which, if solidarity with others is formed, can lead to collective action and, possibly, permanent institutional change.

Originality – “The superiority delusion” is the paradigmatic ideology of all oppressors, deployed to justify their power, privilege, and prestige. This delusion is maintained by the microfoundation of dehumanization, which is a systematic refusal to role-take from those over whom oppressors oppress. All other ideologies that justify oppression are derived from some form of “the superiority delusion,” identifying for the first time role-taking refusal as paradoxically both the original sin of social relations and the foundation of social resistance.

Due to the limited research on fatherhood and dyspraxia, this study is critical as it highlights the challenges that fathers face in parenting a child that presents with dyspraxia. The purpose of this study is to inform various interventions while simultaneously highlighting a largely neglected area of research.

The principal aim of this study was to explore the subjective challenges that fathers experience in parenting a child that presents with dyspraxia in the Cape Metropole area. This study adopted a qualitative approach utilising an exploratory design to understand and provide in-depth information about fathers' subjective experiences of parenting a child that presents with dyspraxia (Mack et al., 2005). Data were collected using semi-structured individual interviews with fathers.

The authors’ findings highlight that fathers' roles are inextricably more complex, shifting between more traditional conceptions such as the provider toward the all giving and nurturing care. Future research would benefit from adopting a more masculinity-focused framework to determine the effect that learning disorders have on constructing and challenging more traditional gendered constructions of what it means to be a man, masculinity and what it means to be a father, fatherhood and fathering.

The study was limited to the challenges faced by fathers whose children were engaged in some or other treatment plan. In addition, the study was limited to children who presented with dyspraxia, rather than those who had received an official diagnosis and this relates directly to the obscurity and ambiguity surrounding diagnosis of the disorder itself.

The study has shed light in terms of the common features between dyspraxia and that of other developmental disorders. This is further extended to include the comorbidity of this disorder with other learning disabilities.

Mental health professionals may benefit from identifying the issues raised by fathers within this study and to further aid and support both children and parents in the treatment of dyspraxia.

The study has shed much needed light on two very neglected areas – the area of learning disabilities, in particular, the issue of dyspraxia and second, including fathers’ voices in the discussion of their experiences.

This study investigates factors contributing to residential mortgage loans default by utilizing a unique dataset of borrowers' default data from one of the pioneer lending institutions in Malaysia that provides home financing to the public. Studies on mortgage loan default have been extensively examined, but limited studies utilize the individual borrower's data, as financial institutions generally hesitant to reveal their customers' data due to confidentiality issue.

This study uses logistic regression model to analyze 47,158 housing loan borrowers' data for the year 2016.

The findings suggest that male borrowers, Malay and other type of ethnicity, guarantor availability, loan original balance, loan tenure, loan interest rate and loan-to-value (LTV) ratio are the significant factors that influence mortgage loans default in Malaysia.

Future studies may expand the sample by employing data from other types of financial institutions that would give greater insights as findings might vary due to differences in objectives, functions and regulations. In addition, the findings are subjected to the censoring bias where future studies could perform the survival analysis to control for censoring bias and re-validating the findings of the present study.

The findings provide valuable insights for lending institutions and the government to formulate housing loan policy in Malaysia.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study in the context of emerging economies that uses financial institution's internal data to investigate factors of mortgage loan default.

THE following list of contracts placed by the Air Ministry during October is extracted from the November issue of The Ministry of Labour Gazette:

This essay demonstrates how information systems — collections of documents, data, or other information-bearing objects — function internally as sites for creative manipulation of genre resources. In the information systems context, these textual activities are not clearly traced to the purposeful actions of specific writers.

Genre development for information systems can result from actions that may appear individually to be rote, repetitive, passive, and uninteresting. But as these actions are aggregated at increasing scales, genre components interact and shift, even if change is limited to one element of the larger assemblage. Although these changes may not be initiated by writers in accordance with targeted work activities and associated rhetorical goals, the composite texts thus produced are nonetheless powerful documents that come to partially constitute the broader activities they appear to merely support.

In demonstrating “writerless” phenomena of genre change in distributed, regulated systems, this essay complements and extends the strong body of existing work in genre studies that emphasizes the writer’s perspective and agency in its accounts of genre development. By showing how continually evolving compound documents such as digital libraries constitute such sites of unacknowledged genre change, this essay demonstrates how the social actions that these composite documents facilitate for their users also change.

We explore how economic freedom measurements can be used to guide policy.

We propose a method for creating a growth-enhancing economic freedom index, which allows for nonlinearities and interaction effects between the components to economic freedom. We use this method to illustrate that US states differ in which policy area generates the greatest gains.

To validate the method presented, we apply our index to state bond markets. Financial market participants have the incentive to properly evaluate states’ policies. If our measurement is useful, then it should correlate with bond ratings. Consistent with this hypothesis, we present evidence that state bond ratings are strongly correlated with our growth-enhancing economic freedom index.

It has been well-established that economic freedom is associated with good economic outcomes. Economic freedom is comprised of numerous dimensions. Thus, the marginal benefit of improving policy in one area can be expected to depend on the amount of freedom in the other dimensions. Which policy improvement is most impactful depends on the entire menu of current policies and, therefore, differs between states. Our new method can then be used as a guide to determining for a particular state which policies can be expected to impact economic well-being the most.

Attention was called in the March number of this Journal to the promotion of a Bill for the reconstitution of the Local Government Board, and the opinion was expressed that the renovated Department should contain among its staff “experts of the first rank in all the branches of science from which the knowledge essential for efficient administration can be drawn.”