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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

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Economics

Economics Faculty Publications

Series

2023

Articles 1 - 9 of 9

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Assessing Proxies Of Knowledge And Difficultywith Rubric-Based Instruments, Ben O. Smith, Jadrian J. Wooten Sep 2023

Assessing Proxies Of Knowledge And Difficultywith Rubric-Based Instruments, Ben O. Smith, Jadrian J. Wooten

Economics Faculty Publications

The fields of psychometrics, economic education, and education have developed statistically-valid methods of assessing knowledge and learning. These methods include item response theory, value-added learning models, and disaggregated learning. These methods, however, focus on multiple-choice or single response assessments. Faculty and administrators routinely assess knowledge through papers, thesis presentations, or other demonstrations of knowledge assessed with rubric rows. This paper presents a statistical approach to estimating a proxy for student ability and rubric row difficulty. Moreover, we have developed software so that practitioners can more easily apply this method to their instruments. This approach can be used in researching education …

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Export Capacity And Capital Stock Augmentation Through Imports: Evidence From Sub-Saharan African Countries, Catherine Y. Co Apr 2023

Export Capacity And Capital Stock Augmentation Through Imports: Evidence From Sub-Saharan African Countries, Catherine Y. Co

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the capital goods imports of Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries from 2002 to 2017. The composition of capital goods imports has become less diverse over time in more than half of the countries studied. Colonial ties no longer determine the sourcing of capital goods as China is now the top source. Trade gravity regressions using the Poisson pseudo-maximum-likelihood estimator show that bilateral exports of non-primary products by SSA countries and their low-income peers are associated with increased net stock of imported general-purpose capital goods. Additionally, there is evidence that the net stock of some types of imported equipment …

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Environmental Regulations And The Environmental Effect Of Fdi, Mingming Pan Jan 2023

Environmental Regulations And The Environmental Effect Of Fdi, Mingming Pan

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper presents the hypothesis that tightening environmental regulation of a country would improve the effect of inward FDI on its environment. Estimations of a sample of 101 countries over the period 2006-2016 confirmed the hypothesis. The results also provide indirect evidence that countries with weak environmental regulations attract polluting FDI and might deter “clean” FDI.

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Using The Lsat As A Labor Market Thermometer For Lawyers, James V. Koch, Barbara Blake-Gonzalez Jan 2023

Using The Lsat As A Labor Market Thermometer For Lawyers, James V. Koch, Barbara Blake-Gonzalez

Economics Faculty Publications

We rely upon a 50-state, 20-year panel to find that the number of Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) takers is only loosely related to economic conditions—although slightly more for men than for women, who in 2020 accounted for 58% of all LSAT takers. The number of test takers rose more than 35% between 2014 and 2020. This wave accentuated an already existing downtrend in the median real income of lawyers, and thus provides support for the hypothesis that most states have more lawyers than they need.

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What Type Of Central Banker Dampens The Political Business Cycle? The Case Of Africa, Christine Strong Jan 2023

What Type Of Central Banker Dampens The Political Business Cycle? The Case Of Africa, Christine Strong

Economics Faculty Publications

This article investigates the extent to which central bank independence can help to reduce political business cycles in Africa. Like previous studies, we find evidence of political cycles in our sample of 34 African countries for the period 1980–2018, but our findings show that politicians' ability to manipulate both fiscal and monetary policy depends on the degree of alliance between the fiscal authority and the monetary authority. Indeed, our analysis reveals that the political business cycle worsens when the central banker is an ally whereas a non‐ally central banker is associated with a decrease in the ability of the incumbent …

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Unification And Division: A Theory Of Institutional Choices In Imperial China, Haiwen Zhou Jan 2023

Unification And Division: A Theory Of Institutional Choices In Imperial China, Haiwen Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

Ancient China experienced various rounds of division and unification. Unification was maintained through economic and political institutions such as low tax rates to reduce peasant rebellions and the division of authority among government officials to reduce usurpation of power. A ruler’s choice of institutions to maintain unification is studied in a theoretical model. Interactions among external threats, internal rebellions by peasants, and usurpation of power by government officials are established. A higher level of external threats induces the ruler to choose a higher level of autonomy for government officials and a higher tax rate. That is, equilibrium probability of internal …

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Economic Freedom And One-Way Truck Rental Prices: An Empirical Note, Alexander Cardazzi, Robert A. Lawson Jan 2023

Economic Freedom And One-Way Truck Rental Prices: An Empirical Note, Alexander Cardazzi, Robert A. Lawson

Economics Faculty Publications

This study examines the one-way truck rental prices for 378 cities. There are large price differentials in one-way rental prices between city pairs. The pull of people toward higher economic freedom locales and push away from lower economic freedom locales is found to be an important determinant of the city-pair price differentials.

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The Choice Of Technology In Economic Development, Lei Wen, Haiwen Zhou Jan 2023

The Choice Of Technology In Economic Development, Lei Wen, Haiwen Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

The impact of capital accumulation on job creation is an important and interesting issue in economic development. This model provides a general-equilibrium framework for studying technology choice with unemployment in a developing economy based on micro-foundations. Unemployment in the urban sector results from the existence of efficiency wages. Manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose technologies to maximise profits. A more advanced technology uses more capital and less labour. In the steady state, an increase in the amount of capital induces firms to choose more advanced technologies and the wage rate increases. While a higher capital stock always induces …

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Do Lawyers Inhibit Economic Growth? New Evidence From The 50 U.S. States, James V. Koch, Richard J. Cebula Jan 2023

Do Lawyers Inhibit Economic Growth? New Evidence From The 50 U.S. States, James V. Koch, Richard J. Cebula

Economics Faculty Publications

Whether the activities of lawyers might hamper economic growth has been hotly contested over the past three decades. Contradictory conclusions have flowed from evidence that typically has focused on the impact of lawyers on the growth rates of countries. Disputes over definitions and samples that vary among countries have colored portions of these debates. We surmount many of these issues by adopting a 50-state panel covering the period 2005-2018 for the United States and by utilizing widely accepted variables regarding economic activity and who is considered a lawyer. Further, we utilize two distinct measures of the activity of lawyers and …

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