We examine how selected high school characteristics – including type of diploma – contribute to students' academic success in an American-type university in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). We find no robust evidence that US, UK, and UAE systems of high school diploma produce different...

Substitutes for marital sexual gratification may impact the decision to marry. Proliferation of the Internet has made pornography an increasingly low-cost substitute. We investigate the effect of Internet usage, and of pornography consumption specifically, on the marital status of young men. We...

The strong economic ties between the GCC economies and the U.S. are manifested in three ways: currency peg, coupling of monetary policy, and the adoption of the U.S. dollar as the trading currency for oil. This paper examines how these dynamics result in a misalignment of the U.S. monetary...

Despite being a fixture of everyday life in the Arab world, wasta, which may be thought of as special influence by members of the same group or tribe, has received little attention from social scientists. Our casual empiricism suggests that wasta is an important determinant of how economic...

After independence, the GCC countries relied heavily on foreign workers from fellow Arab countries. Thus, remittances flowed from GCC to other countries in MENA. In the 1980s-1990s labor source switched to South Asia; so did the flow of remittances. This paper examines the consequences of the...

Using data that identify the respondents to student evaluation of teaching (SET), the author finds that respondents and nonrespondents are different along several characteristics. Students respond more if they are first-term freshmen, or if the course is a major requirement. Men, students with...

The Survey of Consumers probes consumer sentiment on personal finances, business conditions and buying conditions. We focus on the latter category by examining the surveys question ‘Generally speaking, do you think now is a good time or a bad time to buy a house?’ and the follow-up question...

The Michigan survey asks U.S. consumers about their 1-year expected directional change in interest rates. For 1978-1983 when interest rates are volatile, we find a strong association between the actual and predicted changes, with no asymmetry (the proportions of incorrectly predicted upward and...