The papers included in this symposium provide a compelling rationale for the role of health as an engine of economic growth, and thus for investing in health improvement as an important step in improving economic growth in the Mississippi Delta. This newer model of the relation between health and wealth, positioning health as an investment and as an important determinant of economic growth, has...

The importance of investing in R&D and knowledge for innovation and growth is now commonly acknowledged. So is the role for structural reforms aimed at making product and labor markets more flexible. More controversial however is the role that the state should play in the growth process. The debate on the role of the state has been revived by the financial crisis to the extent that this crisis ...

Alpha-investing is an adaptive, sequential methodology that encompasses a large family of procedures for testing multiple hypotheses. All control mFDR, which is the ratio of the expected number of false rejections to the expected number of rejections. mFDR is a weaker criterion than FDR, which is the expected value of the ratio. We compensate for this weakness by showing that alpha-investing co...

We develop a theoretical framework explaining why and how business owning families (BOF) engage in impact investing. Despite its exponential growth, the burgeoning field investing is still subject to competing interpretations varying practices. Building on proposed by Nason et al. (2019b), we argue that BOF’s frame of reference (backward vs. forward looking internally externally oriented) const...

Despite increasing recognition of the link between health and economic development in low-income countries, the relationship has to date received scant attention in rich countries. We argue that this lack of attention is not justifiable. While the economic argument for investing in health in rich countries may differ in detail from that in low-income countries, there is considerable and convinc...

Poorer countries are generally believed to be more vulnerable to climate change than richer countries because poorer countries are more exposed and have less adaptive capacity. This suggests that, in principle, there are two ways of reducing vulnerability to climate change: economic growth and greenhouse gas emission reduction. Using a complex climate change impact model, in which development i...

This paper explores whether a “value” investing strategy based upon different specifications of the residual income valuation model is riskier than a "growth" investing strategy. The paper motivates such an investigation by noting that, consistent with previous empirical work, the Ohlson (1995) model undervalues (overvalues) low (high) book-to-market stocks, whilst the Feltham-Ohlson model unde...