Abdul Munasib

• University of Georgia

Purpose Information is often available to consumers through their social networks. Focusing on dairy consumers in India, this paper aims to present evidence of peer effects in consumers’ attitudes towards various food safety attributes and food safety practices. Design/methodology/approach Unobserved individual heterogeneities are crucial confound...

Using firm-level transaction records from the proprietary Chinese Customs data we estimate differential impacts of the Great Recession (GR) of 2008–2009 on exports of private domestic firms (PDFs) and foreign invested firms (FIFs). We exploit the longitudinal nature of the data spanning almost a decade (2003–2011), as well as product level details...

In this paper, we use the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) to examine the impact of a state’s adoption of a Right-To-Work (RTW) law on income inequality. We explore possible pathways through which RTW laws may impact inequality, namely, unionization, investment, and wages. Our finding of a lack of impact of RTW laws on inequality is further supported...

We study the impact of social networks on housing tenure choice in Indonesia. Since the homeownership decision is often associated with a change of location—and social networks in large part being tied to the physical location—studying the impact of social networks on tenure choice in isolation of the mobility decision may not be meaningful. Addres...

We explore the impact of the Stand Your Ground (SYG) law on gun deaths by degree of urbanization. Unlike firearm homicides the definition of firearm deaths does not depend on the broadening of the self-defense provision that the SYG law represents. Using a difference-in-difference design, we find that the SYG law had no impact on gun deaths at the...

An increased recognition of the possibility of treatment heterogeneities of policy changes has resulted in the rise of comparative case studies. Our analysis uses the synthetic control method (SCM) to examine if the passage of the Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws had dissimilar effects on homicides and firearms deaths in the US states that passed these...

If the views of people are conditioned by those around them, then local socializing interactions could explain the observed spatial patterns of attitudes towards socio-political issues (e.g., legal abortion). Using the U.S. General Social Survey (GSS) data on attitudes, combined with economic and population data from the U.S. Census and the Bureau...

Purpose – This paper aims to study low adoption of modern technology for pearl millet in Rajasthan, India, from the perspective of social networks. The state has the lowest adoption of modern pearl millet seeds among Indian states. . In particular, this paper tries to identify the limitations of channels with endogenous effects, thereby limiting la...

There is an ongoing debate about whether changes in labor regulations such as Right to Work (RTW) laws are contributing to the rising trend of income inequality in the U.S. We adopt Synthetic Control Method (SCM) for comparative case study to examine the impact of a state’s adoption of RTW law on its income inequality. We use a wide range of inequa...

Social trust can facilitate access to alternative sources of finance to firms when formal finance is scarce or entails large transaction costs, especially in economies with less developed financial systems. Since exporting firms are relatively more dependent on external finance, we find that high levels of social trust in an economy with a relative...

We test if remoteness of a county is one of the environmental factors that contribute to obesity. First, we employ geographically weighted regressions (GWRs) that allow us to observe local or regional patterns. We find that county obesity rate is spatially non-stationary, remoteness affects county obesity rates, and there are spatial heterogeneitie...

We hypothesize that exports of differentiated products, which entail greater upfront costs, increase more as financial reforms take place. We find strong and robust empirical support of this hypothesis with a comprehensive set of measures of reforms encompassing the banking sector, interest rates, equity and international capital markets.

Using the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth along with the child survey, we examine the relationship between urban sprawl of U.S. metro counties and the body mass index (BMI) of children who reside in these counties. We make a distinction between urban sprawl in a county and its geographical placement in the urban hierarchy. Even after acc...

Importing country standards emerge as an effective trade barrier when they exceed those of the exporting country’s domestic market. We introduce a new concept: bridge to cross (BTC), the regulatory gap between the exporting and importing countries. Importer regulations cannot be identified in a gravity model when multilateral resistance is correctl...

We provide evidence that financial reforms (over 1976-2005) significantly affected exports, in particular, of industries with higher external capital dependence and low asset tangibility. The coverage of reforms is comprehensive, encompassing the banking sector, interest rates, equity and international capital markets. Our methodology improves upon...

We investigate whether social capital in the form of community involvement affects farmers’ choice to use sustainable agricultural practices. Using associational memberships as a measure of community involvement we study its effects on agricultural practices among Georgia farmers. Our findings show that, first, community involvement had a positiv...

This research assesses the effects of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards in international trade by introducing a new concept, bridge to cross (BTC), with product standards. The BTC in this paper is the regulatory gap between the exporting and importing countries with regard to any particular SPS measure. Assuming that each country's standar...

There is widespread belief that exposure to television has harmful effects on children's cognitive development. Most studies that point to a negative correlation between hours of television watching and cognitive outcomes, fail to establish causality. Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) we study young children between 5 and 10 ye...

While a substantial amount of research has been devoted to showing what social capital does, research explaining social capital itself lags behind. The literature has a long tradition of examining the effect of social capital on local economic growth and development. In this paper we examine whether local economic development can explain the variat...

The number of hours a typical child watches the television is almost double the suggested guideline by American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). A very large number of studies have claimed an adverse effect of television on children and teenagers. In this paper, we use The National Longitudinal Survey (NLS), a rich, nationally representative data set t...

While an extensive literature studies social capital outcomes, the evolution process of social capital remains largely ignored. This paper presents a dynamic model of lifetime decision making of the individual's social capital accumulation. Structural parameters of the model - estimated using the method of simulated moments - explain the observed l...

This paper compares the transition of young adults from renting to first-time homeownership in Britain and the U.S. By adopting a common theoretical and methodological framework, we identify behavioural similarities and differences in transitions in the two countries. We find that the higher ownership rates among British young adults are caused by...

This paper examines the hypothesis that social capital at the individual level affects environmentally friendly practices. Social capital represents the social connectedness of the individual. An individual with higher social capital is more likely to have better exposure and access to information about the importance of environmentally friendly pr...