Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Business Cycles, Exchange Rates, And Commodity Prices In Transition Economies, Salome Giorgadze

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation studies macroeconomic connectedness in the transition economies through the business cycle and exchange rate channels and the downside risk relationship between commodity prices and exchange rates of developing economies. My first two chapters focus on the transition economies of the Commonwealth of Independent States, the CIS, a group of former Soviet republics, and my third chapter considers other developing countries too. The first chapter examines macroeconomic connectedness in the CIS region through business cycle synchronization. I investigate the role of the global factor and the CIS factor in evolution of business cycles in the CIS countries by applying …

Three Essays In Health Economics, Sezen Ozcan Onal

Theses and Dissertations

In the first chapter of my dissertation, I examine the effects of the Affordable Care Act Medicaidexpansion on the labor supply decisions of older workers. To investigate this, I employ a triple-differences (DDD) methodology, utilizing variations in individuals’ health insurance status and the expansion choices made by states. The results of my analysis shows that with Medicaid expansion, insured workers without retirement health insurance (RHI) decreased full-time work by 7.06 percentage points relative to those with RHI and those without any employer-sponsored coverage at all. Among those no longer working full-time, 82 percent transitioned to complete retirement. Moving on to …

Air Cargo: Carriers, Cost, And Competition, Zoe Laulederkind

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the cost structure of U.S. air carriers participating in the freight transport sector. From 1991 to 2021, events such as the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the global financial crisis, and the COVID-19 pandemic have coincided with various events directly impacting the air freight transport industry. During this 30-year period, air transport has developed and implemented global tracking systems, engaged in labor negotiations, and weathered supply-chain shocks all of which warrant comprehensive evaluation of the U.S. air freight transport industry from the cost perspective. Chapter 1 of this thesis explores existence of natural monopoly and economies of scope among …

Policy Uncertainty, Tariff Rate, Monetary Policy And Income Inequality: An Asymmetric Analysis, Mehrnoosh Hasanzade

Theses and Dissertations

This study offers a contribution to the income inequality literature within the traditional Kuznets model and explores the relationship between income inequality and a set of macroeconomic variables such as policy uncertainty, tariff rate, and monetary policy. By implementing a Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, I aim to identify the possible nonlinear effects of policy uncertainty, tariff rate -as a measure of trade openness-, and monetary policy on income inequality in United States and its 50 states and District of Columbia. The advantage of choosing this methodology is that it helps researchers to explain both long run relationships and …

Essay In Bayesian Econometrics, Loren P. Wagner

Theses and Dissertations

Bayesian Econometrics is not as popular as the more common frequentists methods. However, there are problems that Bayesian methods can handle that are not amenable to frequentists methods. The essays to follow show two such applications where Bayesian methods offer solutions to problems posed in widely different areas of economics. In the first essay, the predictive posterior distribution is used to calculate a number of economic quantities that often require extensive work arounds using frequentist methods. In the second essay, it is shown that Bayesian estimation techniques can handle situations wherein an independent variable exhibits no variability, a situation that …

Essays On Measuring Credit And Property Prices Gaps, Nam Nguyen Tam Hoai

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation studies credit expansion and its effect on house prices and financial stability. In the first chapter, I examine the idea that house prices and credit to households are jointly determined, affecting each other in the short and long run. I decompose the movements of the two variables of interest into permanent long-run and transitory short-run components using an unobserved components vector autoregressive model. The dynamic model shows findings to support the hypothesis that a short-run positive shock to house prices is associated with an increase in household credit above its long-run trend. Furthermore, by utilizing additional information generated …

Essays On Housing Market, Akash De

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation studies different aspects and phenomena of the housing market in the United States. In the first chapter, I explore the long-run relationship between housing starts and building permits along with its short-run deviations. This paper fits a pre-specified cointegration model to verify the long-run co-movement property of building permits and housing starts in the U.S., and its census regions to improve the predictability of housing starts at different forecast horizons. The out-of-sample forecasting performance of housing starts is derived from the feature of the short-run vector error correction model that suggests that only housing starts adjusts to correct …

Human Capital In The Knowledge Economy : A 3-Country Case Study In Healthcare, James Scott Mccallum

Theses and Dissertations

During the present knowledge economy there appear to be labor shortages at the same time and in the same regions in which there is an excess of labor supply. Such a pattern would run counter to previous major economic disruptions, as well as questioning traditional free market economic theory of supply and demand principles. Implications for policy where there are global labor shortages along with surplus labor availability in a market economy, are significant. It will likely indicate a drag on economic growth for business sectors, for regions and perhaps globally. It would indicate an accompanying growing disparity of income. …

A Beer For The People: Black Capitalism And The Brewing Industry In Civil Rights Era Wisconsin, John L. Harry

Theses and Dissertations

The term “Black Capitalism” was coined by Richard Nixon during the 1968 presidentialcampaign as a means of both quelling the unrest of the previous decade regarding the more volatile factions within the larger civil rights movement as well as helping African Americans enter the economic mainstream. Once president, Nixon’s rhetoric became a policy through the creation of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise and loans through the Small Business Administration. In 1970, a group of Black businessmen in Milwaukee took advantage of these programs to become the first Black brewery owners in Wisconsin when they purchased Peoples Brewing Company in …

Determinants Of Income : Hours, Alcohol And Non-Cognitive Skills, Shrathinth Venkatesh

Theses and Dissertations

The determinants of income has been a key area of research in labor economics, and a large part of this has focused on the relationship between education and wages. This ignores the many other ways that income is influenced. I explore additional avenues by which income is determined. I examine how education affects income by influencing the hours of work rather than wages directly. Next explore the mechanism that determines the relationship between drinking and income. And finally I continue exploring the importance of non-cognitive and other skills, particularly as they relate to job sorting and therefore determine income

The …

Essays On Private And Public Debts, Financial Integration And Economic Volatility, Prince Osei-Sarfo

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays on surges of private and public debt flows and how these debt flows through financial integration affect output and consumption volatility (risk sharing) in emerging markets. Chapter 1 focuses on a common characteristic of many of the recent emerging market financial crises – a preceding surge in the debt inflows not only in the public but also in the private sector. In this chapter, I examine the drivers of the occurrence and magnitude of foreign debt surges to 28 emerging market economies (EMEs) over 1990-2016. Using the threshold method of defining a surge on …

Essays In Labor Economics, Tianfang Li

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two chapters on labor economics. Despite differentia between topics, both share a similar property: causal effects analysis in the presence of unobserved variables. The first chapter examines the effects of China's two-child policy on childbearing, marriage, and female labor force participation. Using data from the China Labor-Force Dynamic Survey (CLDS) for 2012, 2014 and 2016, it generates three broad results. First, the universal two-child policy had a significant positive impact on having a second child during a portion of its phase-in. Second, the two-child policy did not influence the likelihood of marriage for young people. Third, …

Skills, Tasks, And Wages In Labor Markets, Eduard Storm

Theses and Dissertations

A key interest in labor economics is to understand quality differences between workers and why technology helped some types of labor, while hurting others. Conventional methods rely on formal qualifications such as education or experience to measure skill differences between workers. These are crude measures, however, as they assume that workers with comparable formal qualifications perform similar activities at work and thus earn similar wages. To provide remedy, this dissertation extends the task approach to labor markets, popularized by Autor, Levy & Murnance (2003), by utilizing information on tasks performed at work. This strand of the literature utilizes information on …

Inequality In The United States 1946-2015, John Albert Schwendel

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays which are concerned with the measurement and description of Income Inequality. Chapter 1 studies the measurement of inequality when data is presented in binned form. While various methods have been proposed for this purpose, I reveal an issue which has not yet been addressed in the literature. I demonstrate that differences in mean earnings can cause differences in the measures of inequality, even if underlying income shares remain constant. The consequence of this issue is that the usage of many of the available methods will create estimates of inequality not suitable for descriptive purposes …

A Game Modeling Of A Closed-Loop Supply Chain In A Water-Energy Nexus: Technology Advancement, Market Competition And Capacity Limit, Nabeel Hamoud

Theses and Dissertations

Water and energy are two scarce and concerning resources interconnected in the water-energy nexus. In the nexus, production of energy needs water, and production of water needs energy. For better management of these resources in the nexus, this research considers a supply chain that consists of water suppliers, power suppliers, and consumers of these commodities. In the chain, water suppliers purchase power from power suppliers, and power suppliers purchase water from water suppliers. Other consumers can also buy these resources at the water and power markets. Each firm tries to maximize its own profit. The suppliers of water and power …

Essays In Financial Economics, Kamilla Kasymova

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays concerning financial economics.

In the first essay, I focus on the role of the life insurance in the financial markets and the factors that drive the development of life insurance industry. The essay examines the causality of the banking sector development on the development of the life insurance market measured by the total premiums received by life insurers using panel estimation for about 90 countries over the period 1996-2010. I employ the dynamic System Generalized Method of Moments estimation technique to resolve the endogeneity problem between the development of the life insurance and the …

Economic Policy Uncertainty And Macroeconomic Activity: An Asymmetric Approach, Majid Makinayeri

Theses and Dissertations

In the new global economy, uncertainty has become a critical determinant of financial and economic stability. This thesis aims to study the impact of uncertainty on a set of macroeconomic variables such as demand for money, investment, and consumption. Different measures of uncertainty are used by scholars in the investigation of money demand, investment, and consumption like monetary and output uncertainty. This study employs a more general and inclusive measure of uncertainty, policy uncertainty, which measures uncertainty in fiscal, regulatory and monetary policies. By implementing a Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model, I aim to identify possible non-linear effects of …

Equilibrium Modeling And Policy Analysis Of A Biofuel Supply Chain With A Hydroelectric Reservoir, Jinwoo Bae

Theses and Dissertations

This research proposesd a game theoretic model of a biofuel supply chain (BSC) where a utility company supplies reservoir water to two farmers, located in downstream and upstream of a hydropower dam. The decision-making process of the model is formulated as a three-stage Stackelberg game. We analyze the equilibrium of the decentralized systems and the effect of the government subsidy on energy crop (switchgrass) production for cellulosic biofuel industries, with two forms of subsidy: (1) discriminated subsidies and (2) equalized subsidies.

The results show that both forms of subsidy improve social welfare in the BSC unless the amount of subsidy …

Essays In Women's Fertility And Public Policies, Safoora Javadi

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation consists of three essays on the relationship between public policy, women’s education, and birth rates in two very different societies, Iran and the United States. A sharp decline in the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in Iran over the last three decades has put the country at the risk of an aging population. In the first two chapters, I detail the dimensions of changes in Iran’s TFR, examines some possible determinants, and estimate the impact of the government’s family planning policies on Iranian women’s fertility and marriage. I find that the policies mainly operated through the former channel – …

Essays On The Resource Sector, International Finance, And Environmental Policy, Alexey Yukhov

Theses and Dissertations

Possession and production of energy resources affects the host country's wealth. This dissertation considers the effects of technological and policy shocks that originate in the energy sector and the implications they create for the host country's international financial flows, environment, and wealth of population groups.

In Chapter 1, I model how the decisions made upon an oil discovery by the country's firms and households impact the current account. I use a small open economy DSGE model with an oil sector to express the current account as a function of oil discoveries. In this model, an oil discovery creates a realistic …

Developmental State Economic Model Versus Neo-Classical Principles: The Case Of Rwanda And Burundi, Maxime Sarah Mianzokouna

Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the significance of the developmental state model using the economic performances of two African countries, Burundi and Rwanda. The two neighboring African countries share similar economic characteristics and face virtually same social and political challenges. In the last two decades, Burundi and Rwanda have taken two different approaches to develop their economies. Burundi is using a standard neoclassical economic model in contrast to Rwanda that is applying the developmental state model. I use the standard method of difference-in-difference and the annual data over the period 1974-2014 from the two countries to compare …

Essays On The Career Choices Of Doctoral Students In The U.S., Chandramouli Banerjee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis consists of three essays on the post-graduation career choices of doctoral

students in the U.S. and the impact these choices may have on innovation and the

competitiveness that the U.S. enjoys in the global science and engineering landscape.

The first chapter studies the location choice of work of foreign-born U.S. doctorates,

who have been playing a central role in shaping the U.S. skilled workforce over the

past few decades. Evidence suggests that not all foreign-born U.S. doctorates choose

to remain in the U.S. following graduation. This chapter uses a new data set -

the International Survey of Doctoral …

On The Relationship Between Exchange Rate Changes And Domestic Production: Asymmetric Cointegration Approach, Amirhossein Mohammadian

Theses and Dissertations

In the international economic literature studies mainly focused on the response of output to exchange rate in developing countries and find a positive, negative and sometimes neutral relationship between exchange rate changes and output in short run and long run. Perhaps, the mixed results are due to assuming a linear dynamic adjustment process in all previous models. This study investigates the asymmetry effects of exchange rate changes on output in a nonlinear modeling framework based on bounds testing approach which provides a flexible model to estimate short and long run effects jointly regardless of the degree of integration of variables. …

The Labor Of Play: The Political Economy Of Computer Game Culture, Justin Schumaker

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation questions the relationship between computer game culture and ideologies of neoliberalism and financialization. It questions the role computer games play in cultivating neoliberal practices and how the industry develops games and systems making play and work indistinguishable activities. Chapter 1 examines how computer game inculcate players into neoliberal practice through play. In chapter 2, the project shows Blizzard Entertainment systematically redevelops their games to encourage perpetual play aimed at increasing the consumption of digital commodities and currencies. Chapter 3 considers the role of esports, or professional competitive computer game play, to disperse neoliberal ideologies amongst nonprofessional players. Chapter …

Three Essays On The Housing Market And Financial Intermediaries, Majid Haghani Rizi

Theses and Dissertations

My dissertation utilizes the valuable information present in forward looking financial intermediaries and effects of the housing market on macroeconomy. In the second chapter, I study the dynamic relationship in the shadow banking system. Particularly, I investigate theshort-runandthelong-runrelationshipamongthefinancialassetsofthemoneymarket funds, the commercial paper, and the repurchase agreement markets by undertaking a cointegration analysis of quarterly data over the 1985-2013 period. The evidence suggests that there exists a common long-term cointegrating trend among these three components of the shadow banking system. Any disequilibrium in this long-run relationship among these variables is corrected by movement in the financial assets of the money market …

Individual Demographic Transitions And Financial Hardship, Martin Erik Meder

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two essays on the relationship between individual demographic transitions, major life events that alter how an individual may be categorized by demographers, and financial wellbeing. Recent literature on Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) has reported an absence of substitution behavior between SSDI and other social insurance programs, which is unexpected considering the observed countercyclicality of SSDI awards. In the first chapter, I decompose the increase in the SSDI enrollment rate over the period surrounding the Great Recession, finding that 54.9% of the increase in the enrollment rate can be attributed to individuals who did not previously …

Fitting A Complex Markov Chain Model For Firm And Market Productivity, Julia Ruth Valder

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis develops a methodology of estimating parameters for a complex Markov chain model for firm productivity. The model consists of two Markov chains, one describing firm-level productivity and the other modeling the productivity of the whole market. If applicable, the model can be used to help with optimal decision making problems for labor demand. The need for such a model is motivated and the economical background of this research is shown. A brief introduction to the concept of Markov chains and their application in this context is given. The simulated data that is being used for the estimation is …

Market Power And The Nonprofit Sector, Gabriel Courey

Theses and Dissertations

The first chapter of this dissertation is composed of three related notes on spatial price discrimination under convex production costs. First, I consider upstream monopoly when two firms downstream have convex production costs. I find that the reduction in social welfare associated with the location distortions from upstream monopoly remain but are reduced under convex costs. This first section has been published (Courey, 2016). Second, I consider sequential location choice by two firms with convex costs (without a upstream monopoly). I find that when the slope of the marginal cost curve is steep enough, sequential choice can yield locations with …

On The Relation Between Income Inequality And Economic Growth: An Asymmetric Analysis, Amid Motavallizadeh Ardakani

Theses and Dissertations

Economic growth and income inequality are two prominent topics in development economics due to their close relation to social stability. The main objective of this thesis is to investigate the short-run and long-run dynamics between income inequality and income growth. Additionally, it is important to consider the dynamic between income inequality and income volatility. This investigation fills a gap in the literature by examining whether changes in income, as well as changes in income volatility, have asymmetric effects on income distribution. The study of asymmetric impacts is critical because it might not be always true that economic booms and busts …

Nonlinear Ardl Approach And The Housing Market In The U.S., Seyed Hesam Ghodsi

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates the existence of linear cointegration, nonlinear cointegration or no cointegration between house prices and fundamentals in the U.S. states over the period of 1975Q1-2014Q3. I employ Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model by Pesaran et al. (2001) to test for linear cointegration and Nonlinear Autoregressive Distributed Lag (NARDL) model by Shin et al. (2014) to test for nonlinear cointegration between house prices and fundamentals. Decomposing fundamentals into positive and negative components in the nonlinear ARDL model allows me to study the nature of impacts of income and/or mortgage rates on house prices. By using these methods (ARDL and …