Digital Commons Network^™

Infrastructure Capital And Private Sector Productivity: A Dynamic Analysis, Farrokh Nourzad

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This paper examines the relationship between public capital and private sector productivity in the context of a dynamic framework that distinguishes long-run equilibrium relations from short-run disequilibrium values. Using annual data covering the 1948-1987 period we find that there is a stable long-run relationship among private sector productivity, private inputs of capital and labor, and core infrastructure capital. Public capital exerts a positive influence on private sector productivity along this path, although the effect is statistically significant only at low levels of confidence. On the other hand, there appears to be no discernible effect on productivity by core infrastructure capital …

Migration As International Trade: The Economic Gains From The Liberalized Movement Of Labor, Howard F. Chang

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

An Evolutionary Theory Of Corporate Law And Corporate Bankruptcy, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

In this Article, Professor Skeel argues that the important recent literature exploring historical and political influences on American corporate law has neglected a crucial component of corporate governance: corporate bankruptcy. Only by appreciating the complementary relationship between corporate law and corporate bankruptcy can we understand how corporate governance operates in any given nation. To show this, the Article contrasts American corporate governance with that of Japan and Germany. America's market-driven corporate governance can only function effectively if the bankruptcy framework includes a manager-driven reorganization option. The relational shareholding that characterizes Japanese and German corporate governance, by contrast, requires a much …

Bargaining In The Shadow Of The Market: Is There A Future For Egalitarian Marriage?, Amy L. Wax

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Reconsidering Insurance For Punitive Damages, Tom Baker

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

"Not Just For The Fun Of It!" Governmental Restraints On Black Leisure, Social Inequality, And The Privatization Of Public Space, Regina Austin

All Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Effect Of Increases In Labor Supply On Real Wages, Christopher M. Jahnke

Masters Theses

The working class citizen is an important part of the United States. However, the manufacturing worker is getting paid less in real terms now, than in 1975. Because of this, working harder for less has become the battle cry of the blue collar worker. This study is focused on examining the decline in average real hourly wage in manufacturing.

The hypothesis of this paper is that large increases in female labor force participation rates have caused average real wages to fall since 1966. This hypothesis is examined through multiple regression analysis based on a model with three independent variables. The …

The Conditional Heteroscedasticity Of The Yen-Dollar Exchange Rates, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the conditional heteroscedasticity of the yen-dollar exchange rate. A model is constructed by extending the asymmetric power autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity model to a process that is fractionally integrated. It is found that, unlike the equity markets, the appreciation and depreciation shocks of the yen against the dollar have similar effects on future volatilities. Although the results reject both the stable and the integrated models, our analysis of the response coefficients of the past shocks and the application of the models to the estimation of the capital requirements for trading the currencies show that there are no substantial …

Problems In Using The Social Science Citation Index To Rank Journals, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Health Care In Social Economics, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Crowding Out And Government Spending, Marie Carrasco

University Avenue Undergraduate Journal of Economics

The purpose of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the relationship between budget deficits and private investment and to contribute to the discussion of whether or not such a relationship exists. We test the robustness of Cebula's (1985) model by extending the time period, by testing the model using a proxy for one of the variables, and by de-trending the variables.

"In The Eye Of All Trade": Maritime Revolution And The Transformation Of Bermudian Society, 1612-1800, Michael J. Jarvis

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

This study examines the settlement of the British colony of Bermuda in 1612 and its development to 1800. Drawing heavily on primary sources, it is the first social and economic history of the island and an exploration of trade and migration within a pan-colonial network. The purpose of this dissertation is to bring Bermuda's history to the attention of colonial historians and to map connections between Europe's colonies within the Atlantic world.;Part I examines Bermuda's initial settlement and its development under the Somers Island Company. The first English colony to successfully cultivate tobacco and to import slave labor, Bermudian society …

The Agroecologies Of A Southern Community: The Tye River Valley Of Virginia, 1730-1860, Lynn A. Nelson

Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects

The farmers of piedmont Virginia's Tye River Valley adapted agriculture to a commercial frontier during the eighteenth century. This 'frontier agroecosystem' optimized labor returns by exploiting the stored fertility of mature ecosystems at the expense of conservation, but proved vulnerable to population growth and soil exhaustion. Out-migration increased after the Revolution, and economic growth was stymied by limited capital and consumer formation. The frontier agroecosystem could not provide the reliable commercial returns needed to promote development or stable neighborhoods.;During the early 1800s, prominent planters demanded that Virginia farming be intensified---that land productivity be maximized, rather than labor productivity. This strategy, …

A New Approach To Expectation Theory: Rationality Revisited, Tamas Forgacs

Masters Theses

Expectations play an important role in economics. Traditionally two major branches of expectation theory are distinguished: that of adaptive and rational expectations. This study sets out the goal of investigating inflationary expectations based on real world experiences. The model proposed and tested here abandons the traditional fixed-time-interval-update models for a non-fixed-time-interval-update model. Although the penalty function attached to each error is still subject to debate, it is shown that by reacting with faster updates to errors in expectations economic agents achieve more precise expectations compared to those of a fix time interval update model. We also find the model rational …

Legal-Ware: Contract And Copyright In The Digital Age, Michael J. Madison

Articles

ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenberg, which enforced a shrinkwrap license for computer software, has encouraged the expansion of the shrinkwrap form beyond computer programs, forward, onto the Internet, and backward, toward such traditional works as books and magazines. Authors and publishers are using that case to advance norms of information use that exclude, practically and conceptually, a robust public domain and a meaningful doctrine of fair use. Contesting such efforts by focusing on the contractual nature of traditional shrinkwrap, by relying on market principles, on adhesion theory, on commercial law concepts of usage and custom, or on federal preemption doctrine, feeds …

Medicaid Managed Care And Disability Discrimination Issues, Mary Crossley

Articles

This article examines issues potentially raised under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) by states' decisions whether and how to include disabled Medicaid recipients in the massive shift towards Medicaid managed care. Part II briefly examines the special issues that disabled Medicaid recipients pose with respect to managed care enrollment. These include issues of cost, quality, access, and program design and implementation. Part III describes various approaches that state programs have taken or are proposing to take with respect to the enrollment of disabled Medicaid recipients in managed care. These approaches range from simply excluding the SSI population from managed …

What Makes An Entrepreneur?, David G. Blanchflower, Andrew J. Oswald

Dartmouth Scholarship

This article uses various micro data sets to study entrepreneurship. Consistent with the existence of capital constraints on potential entrepreneurs, the estimates imply that the probability of self‐employment depends positively upon whether the individual ever received an inheritance or gift. When directly questioned in interview surveys, potential entrepreneurs say that raising capital is their principal problem. Consistent with our theoretical model's predictions, the self‐employed report higher levels of job and life satisfaction than employees. Childhood psychological test scores, however, are not strongly correlated with later self‐employment.

Four Entries, Richard Adelstein

Richard Adelstein

Four entries: "American Institutional Economics and the Legal System" (I: 61-66); "John Rogers Commons" (I: 324-327); Richard Theodore Ely" (II: 28-29); and "Plea Bargaining: A Comparative Approach"

Testing For Vertical Economies Of Scope: An Example From Us Pig Production, Azzeddine Azzam

Azzeddine Azzam

A firm operating in two or more stages of production is said to have vertical economies of scope if the costs of jointly producing two or more vertically adjacent products is less than the costs of producing the products independently. As important as those economies are in theory, they have so far received no empirical treatment compared to scope economies in multi-output production, especially in agriculture. This paper tests for vertical economies of scope in US pig production, using 1990 firm-level cost data. Based on the Wilcoxon matched-pairs signed-rank test, no evidence of vertical economies was found, meaning that it …

Captive Supplies, Market Conduct, And The Open-Market Price, Azzeddine Azzam

Azzeddine Azzam

In this paper, the author examines the anatomy of the price captive-supplies relationship to ascertain if some of the interpretations offered in the empirical literature are defensible. B. L. Gardner's one-product, two-input model is extended to consider a partially integrated oligopsonistic industry. The main result is that, although the empirical relationship between captive supplies and the price received by independent producers is negative, it may or may not be attributed to noncompetitive conduct. Hence, for an econometric model to detect what type of conduct the relationship reflects, more structural detail is needed than what so far has been provided in …

Competition In The Us Meatpacking Industry: Is It History?, Azzeddine Azzam

Azzeddine Azzam

The U.S. meatpacking industry has become concentrated to a degree not experienced since the days of the 'Beef trust' a century ago. A number of mainstream studies have investigated if such concentration has been detrimental to competition. Just as earlier studies may have helped shape competition policy towards meatpacking a century ago, contemporary studies have made their way into current discussions and may shape competition policy at the turn of this century. This paper asks whether or not contemporary studies are useful in informing competition policy. After comparing how competition looks from the econometric vantage point with how it looks …

Saying Farewell To The Mythology Of Welfare Reform, Laura Stivers

Laura Stivers

Does Increasing The Beer Tax Reduce Marijuana Consumption, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula

Rosalie Liccardo Pacula

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Youth Characteristics And Experiences On Transitions Out Of Poverty, Michael C. Seeborg, Mark Israel

Michael Seeborg

Although the causes of intergenerational transitions from poverty have attracted the attention of economists and sociologists in recent years, there have been few attempts to integrate ideas from both disciplines. Using a sample of young adults who were impoverished as youth, this study explores the effects of a number of background characteristics such as early welfare dependency, substance abuse, teen parenthood and parent's educational attainment on the family income levels of young adults. It finds that many of these background variables have significant indirect influences on family income through intervening variables, especially the respondent's own educational attainment, welfare dependency, and …

Environmental Taxes And The Double-Dividend Hypothesis: Did You Really Expect Something For Nothing?, Don Fullerton, Gilbert Metcalf

Don Fullerton

The "double-dividend hypothesis" suggests that increased taxes on polluting activities can provide two kinds of benefits. The first dividend is an improvement in the environment, and the second dividend is an improvement in economic efficiency from the use of environmental tax revenues to reduce other taxes such as income taxes that distort labor supply and saving decisions. In this paper, we make four main points. First, the validity of the double-dividend hypothesis cannot logically be settled as a general matter. Second, the focus on revenue in this literature is misplaced. We demonstrate that three policies have equivalent impacts on the …

Policies For Green Design, Don Fullerton, Wenbo Wu

Don Fullerton

A simple general equilibrium model is used to analyze disposal-content fees, subsidies for recyclable designs, unit-pricing of household disposal, deposit-refund systems, and manufacturer “take-back” requirements. Firms use primary and recycled inputs to produce output that has two “attributes”: packaging per unit output, and recyclability. If households pay the social cost of disposal, then they send the right signals to producers to reduce packaging and to design products that can more easily be recycled. If garbage is collected for free, then socially optimum attributes can still be achieved by a tax on producers’ use of packaging and subsidy to recyclable designs.

Critique Of The Critique: Analysis Of Hodgson On Marx On Evolution, Howard J. Sherman

HOWARD J SHERMAN

Hodgson claims that Marxism is incompatible with Darwinian biological evolution. That was true of earlier Socialist and Communist theories of economic determinism, but it is not true of the contemporary generation of critical Marxists.

Review Of Timur Kuran, Private Truths, Public Lies: The Social Consequences Of Preference Falsification, Eric Bennett Rasmusen

Eric Bennett Rasmusen

A review of a book on what happens when people's statement of their information depends on what other people are saying.

Recent Initiatives In Antitrust Enforcement, Aaron S. Edlin

Aaron Edlin

No abstract provided.

People Adrift: Migration And Development (In Dutch), Free University, Amsterdam, Henk Lm Kox, Ko Heins

Henk LM Kox

People adrift is an edited volume that offers a rich perspective on migration and development. The introductory chapter by both editors provides an analytic survey of the major issues and their relations. The ten next chapters deal with migration motives, economic mechanisms, environmental issues, social and economic impacts on regions, relation with refugee flows and immigration barriers.