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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

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Business

West Virginia University

Series

2017

Articles 1 - 6 of 6

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Do Tourists Tip More Than Consumer? Evidence Of Taxi Rides In New York City, Amir B. Neto, Adam Nowak, Amanda Ross Jan 2017

Do Tourists Tip More Than Consumer? Evidence Of Taxi Rides In New York City, Amir B. Neto, Adam Nowak, Amanda Ross

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

We revisit the mechanisms that drive tipping behavior by comparing tourists and locals in New York City. It is unlikely a tourist will tip as a way of enforcing repeated interactions since they are not from the area, while a local may tip as an enforcement mechanism. However, if people tip because of social norms, we should see both tourists and locals tipping similar amounts. We compare locals and tourists who are theatergoers to control for education and income, as these factors are likely to affect tipping behavior. Using data from the New York City and Limousine Commission on yellow …

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The Impact Of Marketization On Entrepreneurship In China: Recent Evidence, Yang Zhou, Joshua C. Hall Jan 2017

The Impact Of Marketization On Entrepreneurship In China: Recent Evidence, Yang Zhou, Joshua C. Hall

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

While marketization has been linked to provincial-level economic growth in China, how marketization leads to growth has not been explored. We hypothesize that marketization creates an environment that encourages entrepreneurship, which manifests itself in economic growth. While this argument is not new, it has not been explored in the Chinese context. We fill this gap by empirically testing the relationship between marketization and measures of entrepreneurship across Chinese provinces. Our primary measures of entrepreneurship are level changes in the number of “private enterprises” and “self-employed individuals”. We find that higher levels of marketization are positively related to higher levels of …

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Agent Intermediation And Racial Price Differences, Adam Nowak, Patrick S. Smith Jan 2017

Agent Intermediation And Racial Price Differences, Adam Nowak, Patrick S. Smith

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Most housing transactions are brokered wherein the buyer and seller do not meet in person. In which case the buyer’s race is not revealed to the seller, so the seller cannot discriminate based on race. Despite this observation, previous studies find racial price differentials based on the race of the buyer. We provide evidence that these estimates suffer from an omitted variable bias attributable to the time-varying attributes of the house. After controlling for the time-varying attributes of the house, we find that minority (black and Hispanic) and non-minority (white) buyers pay a similar price for comparable housing. We also …

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Some Remarks On Real Estate Pricing, Crocker H. Liu, Adam Nowak, Patrick S. Smith Jan 2017

Some Remarks On Real Estate Pricing, Crocker H. Liu, Adam Nowak, Patrick S. Smith

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

This paper develops a framework for addressing the omitted variable bias that plagues most real estate research. We incorporate qualitative information from text to control for property attributes that are generally unobserved. The textual information is entered by real estate agents for every property sold on a Multiple Listing Service (MLS). The agents, who arguably have the most local market and property specific knowledge, use the unstructured text to highlight important information that is not clearly conveyed in other areas of the listing. Although the framework can be applied universally in real estate research, we demonstrate its effectiveness in the …

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Homeowner Preferences After September 11th, A Microdata Approach, Adam Nowak, Juan Sayago-Gomez Jan 2017

Homeowner Preferences After September 11th, A Microdata Approach, Adam Nowak, Juan Sayago-Gomez

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

The existence of homeowner preferences - specifically homeowner preferences for neighbors -is fundamental to economic models of sorting. This paper investigates whether or not the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (9/11) impacted local preferences for Arab neighbors. We test for changes in preferences using a differences-in-differences approach in a hedonic pricing model. Relative to sales before 9/11, we find properties within 0.1 miles of an Arab homeowner sold at a 1.4% discount in the 180 days after 9/11. The results are robust to a number of specifications including time horizon, event date, distance, time, alternative ethnic groups, and the …

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Chinese Superstition And Real Estate Prices: Transaction-Level Evidence From The Us Housing Market, Brad Humphreys, Adam Nowak, Yang Zhou Jan 2017

Chinese Superstition And Real Estate Prices: Transaction-Level Evidence From The Us Housing Market, Brad Humphreys, Adam Nowak, Yang Zhou

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

We investigate the impact of Chinese superstition on prices paid by Chinese home buyers in Seattle, Washington. Chinese consider 8 lucky and 4 unlucky. Empirical results indicate Chinese buyers pay a 1-2% premium for addresses including an 8 and a 1% discount for addresses including a 4. These results are unrelated to unobserved property quality: no premium exists when Chinese sell to non-Chinese. Absent explicit identfiers for Chinese individuals, we develop a binomial name classifier using methods from the biomedical and document classification literature, allowing for falsification tests using other ethnic groups and mitigating ambiguity attributable to transliteration of Chinese …

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