Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Collectible Pricing And Collector Utility: The Role Of Production Commitments, Corey J.M. Williams, Kole Reddig, Adam Nowak

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

This paper investigates the effect of production commitments on consumers of collectable goods. Using data on prices for Magic: The Gathering trading cards, we estimate that the reprinting of certain card varieties caused a 34% decrease in the relative price of reprinted cards. We interpret this estimate with a model of a forward-looking consumer that views collectibles as both a source of enjoyment and a store of wealth. Using a mapping between structural parameters of the model and difference-in-differences regression parameters, we compute lifetime discounted utility decreased by as much as 14% for collectors holding mainly reprinted cards.

Learning By Doing, Productivity, And Growth: New Evidence On The Link Between Micro And Macro Data, Brad Humphreys, Scott Schuh, Corey Williams

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

No abstract provided.

Sports Team Success And Managerial Decisions: The Role Of Playing Time Concentration, Alexander Cardazzi, Brad R. Humphreys, Kole Reddig

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Professional sports teams employ highly paid managers and coaches to train players and make tactical and strategic team decisions. A large literature analyzes the impact of manager decisions on team outcomes. Empirical analysis of manager decisions requires a quantifiable proxy variable for manager decisions. Previous research focused on manager dismissals, tenure on teams, the number of substitutions made in games, or the number of healthy players on rosters held out of games for rest, generally finding small positive impacts of manager decisions on team success. We analyze manager decisions by developing a novel measure of game-specific coach decisions based on …

The Growth Of Firms, Markets And Rents: Evidence From China, Daniel Berkowitz, Shuichiro Nishioka

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

The evidence for whether China become more competitive following its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) is mixed. Using recent methods for estimating markups and profit shares, this paper documents that Chinese manufacturing firms on average collected more rents after the accession because the rate of net entry of firms lagged the rapid growth of the domestic market. While the selection on large productive firms drove the rise in the aggregate markups in the United States (De Loecker et al, 2020), these competitive forces played a secondary role in China.

Measuring Persistent Global Economic Factors With Output, Commodity Price, And Commodity Currency Data, Arabinda Basistha, Richard Startz

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

In this study we use monthly G7 industrial production data, commodity price index data, and commodity currency exchange rate data in a dynamic factor model to examine the global economic factors useful for commodity price prediction. We differentiate between the dynamic factors by specifying a persistent factor and a non-persistent factor, both as a single global factor using all data and as factors for each category of data. The in-sample predictive performances of the three persistent factors together are better than the non-persistent factors and the single global factors. Out-of-sample outcomes based on forecast combinations also support the presence of …

The Economic Impact Of West Virginia University Institute Of Technology, Eric Bowen, John Deskins

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

In this report, we estimate the economic contribution of West Virginia University Institute of Technology's operational and student spending to the state and Raleigh County economies. Between the operations of the campus and spending from its student population, WVU-IT has a broad economic footprint in West Virginia and its local region.

Political Regimes And Firms' Decisions To Pay Bribes: Theory And Evidence From Firm-Level Surveys, Shuichiro Nishioka, Sumi Sharma, Tuan Le

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

This paper makes the most of the observed actions of bribe takers and givers from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys and studies how a taker’s action influences a giver's decision to pay bribes. To motivate our empirical study, we consider Kaufmann and Wei's (1999) Stackelberg game between a tax authority and a firm that undergoes tax inspection. The model predicts that, when the authority can use its action as a credible threat for the firm's profitability, the authority disturbs the firm by inspecting more, and the firm is more likely to pay bribes. Consistent with the theoretical prediction, we find …

The Broad Economic Impact Of West Virginia Metallurgical Coal In The United States, Christiadi, Eric Bowen, John Deskins

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

In this report, we examine the economic impact of the production of West Virginia met coal and the economic impact of the production of steel by the US steel mills that are supplied by West Virginia’s met coal mines. Estimates are based on the West Virginia met coal production and the US steel production in 2019, respectively.

Now You Can Take It With You: Effects Of Occupational Credential Recognition On Labor Market Outcomes, Kihwan Bae, Edward Timmons

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Occupational credentials are typically not portable across geography. Using policy reforms by U.S. states, we show that the limited portability of occupational licenses constrains labor market activity and geographic mobility of licensed individuals. After states implement universal recognition, a policy that allows individuals with occupational licenses issued by other states to work without repeating a costly relicensing procedure, we find that the employment ratio increases by 0.98 percentage points among licensed individuals in the sample relative to unlicensed individuals. The employment effect is co-driven by additional labor market participation and a reduction in unemployment after the policy. With the employment …

Certifiably Employable?: The Effects Of Occupational Regulation On Unemployment Duration, Ilya Kukaev, Edward Timmons

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Occupational regulation is a labor market institution that has received a growing amount of attention by researchers. Existing research has explored the effects of occupational regulation on wages and employment. To the best of our knowledge, no existing study has estimated the effect of occupational credentials on unemployment duration in the US. We derive a random search model to explain differences in individual unemployment duration resulting from heterogeneous effects from licenses and certificates. Our model predicts that an occupational credential with a stronger signaling or human capital effect results in a shorter individual unemployment duration. To estimate the effect of …

The Scope Of Variable Inputs And Markup Estimates, Shuichiro Nishioka, Mari Tanaka

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

This paper builds an empirically tractable framework for the analysis of marginal costs in markup estimates from the production approach and examines how markups differ by the scope of variable inputs. Using plant-product matched data from Japan, we show that changes in markups can capture price and marginal cost dynamics, irrespective of the scope of variable inputs. Markups, however, are negatively and conditionally correlated with real output when only the most flexible intermediate inputs are selected as variable inputs. We find that the properties of markups depend on how variable inputs are selected and how underlying marginal costs are specified.

Synergies Between Residents: Evaluating Support And Concerns Of Recreation And Tourism Economic Development Within The Monongahela National Forest Region, Morgan R. Martin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Tourism has continually been presented as a growing economic sector around the world. Having become an area of increased interest for diversifying rural economies, tourism is an attractive alternative to the declining traditional economic engines of rural communities like agriculture, forestry, and mining. Rural destinations have become increasingly attractive to outside visitors who seek to pursue activities embedded within the local culture and distinctive attractive assets available in rural regions. The USDA has recognized the increasing importance of recreation and tourism economies as an emerging or priority area of national need and an effective means for rural development. Even with …

Three Essays In Applied Microeconomics: Philly Style, Alexander Christian Marsella

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

My dissertation analyzes several contemporary policy-based and institutional occurrences in an urban setting to help guide further advancements in reducing violence, drug overdose deaths, and other unhealthy behaviors that city governments look to curb. Several recent developments in Philadelphia offer a promising setting for studying policies that have broad implications.

Chapter 1 examines the effect of the West Philadelphia Promise Zone initiative on violent crime rates in a high-crime area of West Philadelphia, where a series of educational, public-safety, and quality-of-life improvement grants were disbursed from 2014 onward. My difference-in-differences analysis with two-way fixed effects and cluster bootstrapped standard errors …

Three Essays On Emotional Cues, Clay Collins

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The first paper investigates the relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) and United States presidential elections. There exists a sizeable literature studying IPV that occurs during or after stressful events (such as a sports team loss), and a considerable non-economics literature examining election-related stress. However, very limited research has been done studying potential negative outcomes after a political loss (when one’s candidate loses), and these findings in other fields have not been synthesized into the economics lexicon. By interacting with the margin of victory for each state, I find large and significant decreases in IPV in states that vote for …

Essays On The Economics Of Law And Crime, Zachary J. Porreca

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The first chapter examines the connection between gentrification and urban violence. I demonstrate a positive and plausibly causal relationship between urban redevelopment and gun violence in Philadelphia. As the underlying mechanism, I focus on gentrification's displacement effect on local drug markets. Treating the city as a spatial network of city blocks and using two-way fixed effects differences-in-differences estimators, I show the gentrification of one block increases violence across the surrounding neighborhood. I find that some 2,400 (8%) of Philadelphia's shootings between the years 2011 and 2020 can be attributed to spillover effects from the gentrification of drug blocks. This effect …

Three Essays On Political Economy, Colin Michael Steitz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The first chapter studies the impact of conventions and multi-day events on
hotel demand in the Indianapolis metro area. Using hand-collected data on
sporting events and conventions, we study the impact on hotel metrics: ADR,
Occupancy, Daily Rate, and Revenue. We show that traditional sporting
events generate little impact when compared to multi-day conventions. We
show that mega-events such as major championship games generate significant
increases in hotel demand. We find large and statistically significant effects for
multi-day conventions on hotel demand with very little evidence of crowding
out. A single day of a multi-day convention brings in approximately $928,000 …

Three Essays On Health And Environmental Economics: Applications Of Spatial Econometrics And Spatial Analysis, Mohammed Syedul Islam

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Spatial interaction and the locational structure between observations play key roles in the field of econometrics for both cross-sectional and panel data analysis. Compared to a non-spatial econometric model, a spatial model relaxes the assumption of independency in observations. This research applies spatial and non-spatial econometrics in three different fields of applied economics: (1) drinking water and air quality violations impacts on lung and bronchus cancer incidence in the contiguous United States (U.S.); (2) spillover effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 cases across the contiguous U.S. counties; and (3) urbanization impacts on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in …

Sovereign Wealth Funds, Corporate Governance, And Corporate Performance, Feiyu Liu

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This dissertation comprises three chapters regarding the impact of sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investments on target firms’ corporate governance, cost of debt, and corporate social responsibility performance.

The first chapter is entitled “The Corporate Governance Consequences of Small Shareholdings: Evidence from Sovereign Wealth Fund Cross-Border Investments.” This chapter shows that firms’ corporate governance decrease following SWF cross-border investments. This impact holds for small SWF cross-border equity investments only, and is stronger for firms that are weakly governed and for those located in jurisdictions with weak shareholder protection. The negative relation is more pronounced when SWFs’ home countries have lower-quality investor …

Essays In Applied Microeconomics, Joshua C. Martin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The first chapter examines the role that same-sex marriage legalization had on the number of adoptions of children from foster care in the United States. We do so by employing a synthetic difference-in-differences estimator which leverages both the differential timing of these laws across states and the subsequent wave of state-level legal protections which give foster-care agencies the right to deny service to same-sex couples based on religiously-held beliefs. Using highly detailed, county-level data of nearly 20 million children in the foster care system from 1995-2020, our findings reveal that same-sex marriage legalization led to a 3.8%-5.9% increase in the …

Willingness To Pay For Policies To Reduce Health Risks From Covid-19: Evidence From U.S. Professional Sports, Brad Humphreys, Gary A. Wagner, John C. Whitehead, Pamela Wicker

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Airborne transmission of COVID-19 increased the need for health policies to reduce transmission in congregate settings associated with minimal risk before the pandemic. While a large literature estimates tradeoffs between policies designed to reduce negative health outcomes, no empirical research addresses consumer willingness to pay for health policies designed to reduce airborne virus transmission. Using survey data from 1,381 fans of professional sports teams, we estimate consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for reduced likelihood of coronavirus transmission through mask and social distancing policies using a stated preference approach. The results indicate increased attendance likelihood if the venue requires masks and …

The Effect Of Monitoring And Crowds On Crime And Law Enforcement: A Natural Experiment From European Football, Brad R. Humphreys, Alexander Marsella, Levi Perez

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Technological advancements like the presence of smart phones and body cameras have led to increased monitoring of police, but little evidence exists on their impact. We address these problems using data on fouls from football matches in five European football leagues over six seasons. This period contains exogenous changes in monitoring rule enforcers through introduction of Video Assistant Referee review and limited "bystanders" from Covid-19 restrictions. Results from difference-in-differences models estimated separately for each league indicate that both events influenced the number of fouls called with substantial heterogeneity across leagues and home/away teams.

Public Interest Or Policy Diffusion: Analyzing The Effects Of Massage Therapist Municipal Licensing, Darwyyn Deyo, Kofi Ampaabeng, Conor Norris, Edward Timmons

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Massage therapy is widely licensed by the states. However, municipalities also often passed massage therapist licensing, motivated by preventing prostitution. Using a novel dataset on municipal licensing and crime data from the FBI, we test if local massage therapist licensing reduced prostitution. We also test a policy diffusion hypothesis, in which cities pass responsive massage therapist licensing. We find that municipal massage therapist licensing does not lead to a reduction in prostitution, but we find support for the policy diffusion hypothesis, with municipalities up to 65% more likely to pass responsive licensing within three years of their neighbor doing so.

The Growth Of Firms, Markets And Rents: Evidence From China, Daniel Berkowitz, Shuichiro Nishioka

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Using recent methods for estimating firm-level markups and profit shares, we document that Chinese manufacturing firms collected more rents following China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). This is because the net entry of firms lagged the massive growth in the domestic market. These effects were particularly strong in domestic markets where state ownership was pervasive. While selection on large productive firms drove the rise in the aggregate markups in the United State (De Loecker et al, 2020), these competitive forces played a secondary role in Chinese manufacturing.

Are West Virginia Banks Unique?, Eduardo Minuci, Scott Schuh

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Many factors contribute to weak economic growth in Appalachia, but little research has examined the role of banking heterogeneity and efficiency across states. This paper documents how West Virginia (WV) banks' financial behavior differs from other U.S. banks and shows these differences cannot be explained fully by the composition of banks in the state. Despite experiencing faster banking consolidation, West Virginia still has more and smaller banks that are less efficient and profitable. WV banks' customers and managers heavily favor liabilities (time deposits) and assets (real estate loans) with longer maturity and lower risk and returns. Although shares of time …

The Economic Impact Of Coal Production And Coal-Fired Power Generation In The United States, Christiadi, Eric Bowen, John Deskins

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

While coal production in the United States has declined by nearly 50 percent since its peak in 2008, the sector remains an important part of the US economy in many ways. In this report, we consider the contribution of coal production and coal-fired power generation to the U.S.’ employment base, economic output, labor income, and tax revenue.

Vertical Integration And Competitive Balance In Professional Sports: Evidence From Minor League Baseball, Qi Ge, Brad R. Humphreys, Alexander Eisert

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Major League Baseball (MLB) teams regularly call up players from their Minor League Baseball (MiLB) affliates to fulfill roster needs. This paper utilizes a manually collected panel of player call-ups between 1946 and 2019 and studies their impact on competitive balance in the minor leagues. Our results indicate an overall positive relationship between call-ups and competitive balance in the MiLB, with the pro-competitive effect primarily driven by the AA leagues and not AAA leagues. We also  find suggestive evidence of the effect being likely explained by the promotion of MiLB players to MLB, rather than the demotion of MLB players …

The Political Effects Of Trade With Japan In The 1980s, Shuichiro Nishioka, Eric Olson

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

The 1974 trade act substantially increased the executive branch's authority in trade negotiations through the granting of fast-track and Section 301 authority. This paper evaluates the effect on U.S. voting behavior resulting from trade with Japan over 1976-1992 time period after the act was passed. To capture U.S. trade exposures to Japan, we develop the Bartik index from Autor et al (2013) for import competition with Japan and show that local exposure to import competition had statistically significant negative impacts on Republican presidential candidates over the 1976-1984 period. Although the second Reagan administration used Section 301 to open Japan's markets …

Economic Impact Of The West Virginia International Yeager Airport Expansion, Eric Bowen, John Deskins

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

West Virginia International Yeager Airport in Kanawha County serves the largest metropolitan area in West Virginia and has the greatest amount of airplane traffic in the state. The airport has begun construction on a new terminal building and plans a variety of other construction projects in order to upgrade its facilities and handle the expected increased traffic through the area. In this report, we provide an economic impact estimate of the terminal’s expansion and associated growth in region on the West Virginia economy.

The Economic Impact Of The North Central West Virginia Airport Expansion, Eric Bowen

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

The North Central West Virginia (NCWV) Airport in Clarksburg/Bridgeport has experienced rapid growth over the last decade. The number of airline passengers through the airport increased nearly four-fold between 2010 and 2019. The airport was also chosen as the primary US hub for the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries airplane refurbishment facility, which services airplanes from most major airlines.

Because of this rapid growth, the NCWV Airport has begun construction on a new terminal building in order to handle the increased traffic through the area. In this report, we provide an economic impact estimate of the terminal’s expansion and associated growth in …

Municipal Finances In West Virginia, Christopher Plein, Priscila Borges Marques Dos Santos, Eric Bowen, John Deskins

Bureau of Business & Economic Research

West Virginia’s municipalities are part of the lifeblood of our state. From the smallest incorporated towns and villages to our larger cities like Charleston, Wheeling, and Morgantown, our state’s cities and towns often act as hubs for civic, social, cultural, and economic activity. We associate these municipalities and their surrounding communities as places to shop, work, worship, and receive services like healthcare and education. This report seeks to place West Virginia’s cities and towns in this broader context of change, challenge, and opportunity by providing an in-depth study of major features, trends, and factors in municipal finance.