Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exchange Rate Regimes And Nominal Wage Comovements In A Dynamic Ricardian Model, Yao Tang, Yoshinori Kurokawa, Jiaren Pang

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We construct a dynamic Ricardian model of trade with money and nominal exchange rate. The model implies that the nominal wages of the trading countries are more likely to exhibit stronger positive comovements when the countries fix their bilateral exchange rates. Panel regression results based on data from OECD countries from 1973 to 2012 suggest that countries in the European Monetary Union (EMU) experienced stronger positive wage comovements with their main trade partners. When we restrict the regression to the subsample of the EMU countries, we find a significant increase in wage comovements after these countries joined the EMU in …

The (Far) Backstory Of The U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement, Stephen Meardon

Economics Department Working Paper Series

In two pairs of episodes, first in 1824 and 1846 and then in 1892 and 1935, similar U.S.-Colombia trade agreements or their enabling laws were embraced first by protectionists and then by free traders. The history of the episodes supports the view that although political institutions exist to curb de facto political power, such power may be wielded to undo the institutions’ intended effects. The doctrinal affinities and interests of political actors are more decisive determinants of the free-trade or protectionist orientation of trade agreements than the agreements’ texts or legal superstructures. The long delay from signing to passage of …

On Kindleberger And Hegemony: From Berlin To M.I.T. And Back, Stephen Meardon

Economics Department Working Paper Series

The most notable idea of Charles P. Kindleberger’s later career is the value of a single country acting as stabilizer of an international economy prone to instability. It runs through his widely read books, The World in Depression, 1929-1939 (1973), Manias, Crises, and Panics (1978), A Financial History of Western Europe (1984), and kindred works. “Hegemonic stability,” the idea is called in the literature it inspired. This essay traces Kindleberger’s attachment to the idea back to his tenure as chief of the State Department’s Division of German and Austrian Economic Affairs from 1945 to 1947 and adviser to the …

Implementing The Optimal Provision Of Ecosystem Services, Stephen Polasky, David Lewis, Andrew Plantinga, Erik Nelson

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Many ecosystem services are public goods whose provision depends on the spatial pattern of land use. The pattern of land use is often determined by the decisions of multiple private landowners. Increasing the provision of ecosystem services, while beneficial for society as a whole, may be costly to private landowners. A regulator interested in providing incentives to landowners for increased provision of ecosystem services often lacks complete information on landowners’ costs. The combination of spatially-dependent benefits and asymmetric cost information means that the optimal provision of ecosystem services cannot be achieved using standard regulatory or payment for ecosystem services (PES) …

The Effects Of Exchange Rates On Employment In Canada, Yao Tang, Haifang Huang, Ke Pang

Economics Department Working Paper Series

Under the flexible exchange rate regime, the Canadian economy is constantly affected by fluctuations in exchange rates. This paper focuses on employment in Canada. We find that appreciations of the Canadian dollar have significant effects on employment in manufacturing industries; such effects are mostly associated with the export-weighted exchange rate and not the import-weighted exchange rate. The export-weighted exchange rate elasticity of employment is -0.52. However, we also find that exchange rate fluctuations have little impact on Canada’s nonmanufacturing employment. Because the manufacturing sector accounts for only about 10% of the employment in Canada, the overall employment effect of exchange …

How Did Exchange Rates Affect Employment In Us Cities?, Yao Tang, Haifang Huang

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We estimate the effects of real exchange rate movements on employment in US cities between 2003 and 2010. We explore the differences in the composition of local industries to construct city-specific changes in exchange rates and estimate their effects on local employment in manufacturing industries and in nonmanufacturing industries. Controlling for year and city fixed effects, we find that a depreciation of the US dollar increased local employment in the manufacturing industries, our proxy for the tradable sector. The depreciation also increased employment in the nonmanufacturing industries, the nontradable sector. Furthermore, the effects on nonmanufacturing employment were stronger in cities …

From Left To Right? White Evangelical Politicization, Gop Incorporation, And The Effect Of Party Affiliation On Group Opinion Change, Devon B. Shapiro

Honors Projects

While most white evangelicals in America have advocated moral, cultural, and social conservatism since the Founding, the group’s fiscal and social welfare preferences have been more volatile. Early 20^th century evangelicals tended to be socially conservative, fiscally liberal, and, to the extent that they were politicized, mostly Democratic partisans. Since that time, not only have white evangelicals abandoned the Democratic Party, but also they have largely become fiscal and social welfare conservatives. I attempt to explain that transformation. I first examine the dynamics of white evangelical politicization and GOP incorporation, providing social and historical context to the political and …

Who We Are: Incarcerated Students And The New Prison Literature, 1995-2010, Reilly Hannah N. Lorastein

Honors Projects

This project focuses on American prison writings from the late 1990s to the 2000s. Much has been written about American prison intellectuals such as Malcolm X, George Jackson, Eldridge Cleaver, and Angela Davis, who wrote as active participants in black and brown freedom movements in the United States. However the new prison literature that has emerged over the past two decades through higher education programs within prisons has received little to no attention. This study provides a more nuanced view of the steadily growing silent population in the United States through close readings of Openline, an inter-disciplinary journal featuring …

The Role Of Competition And Patient Travel In Hospital Profits: Why Health Insurers Should Subsidize Patient Travel, Joseph S. Durgin

Honors Projects

This paper explores the effects of patient travel distance on hospital profit margins, with consideration to the effects of travel subsidies on hospital pricing. We develop a model in which hospital agglomeration leads to a negative relationship between profit margins and patient travel distance, challenging the standard IO theory that profit margins are higher for firms with greater distances of customer travel. Using data on patient visits and hospital finances from the California Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD), we test our theory and confirm that a hospital tends to have less pricing power if it draws patients …

Social Media As Technologies Of Accountability: Explaining Resistance To Implementation Within Organizations, Jeffrey Treem

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

No abstract provided.

The Organization (Re)Invented By Its Blogs, Alex Primo

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

This article discusses how interactions in organizational blogs participate in the

emergence of the organization itself. Based on the principles of The Montreal School of organizational communication, the paper reflects on how the recursive relationship between texts and conversations in blogs, according to their affordances, mobilizes the organization and contributes to its continuing creation. In order to conduct this argument, the concept of social media, uses of organizational blogs and the main contributions of The Montreal School are analyzed. Finally, this article demonstrates how blogs contribute to the definition of the organization. Beyond their promotional potential, the blog’ role as …

Framing Ict Usage In The Real Estate Industry, Steven Jones

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

The real estate industry, like many, is one based on a competitive consumer culture in which professionals vie for the business and, ultimately, the loyalty of customers. In this case, those customers are purchasing what, for most, is a significant investment, requiring them to navigate various legal and regulatory processes that might be impossible without the assistance of a knowledgeable, seasoned agent. It is the presence of agency that renders real estate unique from retail and other industries where goods and services trade hands. Furthermore, the rise of various information and communication technologies (ICT) over the course of the past …

Microblogging Practices Of Virtual Organizations: Commonalities And Contrasts, Jing Wang

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Microblogging is becoming increasingly pervasive in computer-supported collaboration, attracting various types of users. Organizations, as one type, are willing to leverage this social media service for their operation, but lack guidance of how to effectively manage their organizational microblogs. However, research on microblogging practices at organizational level, especially in virtual organizations, is very limited. To enhance the understanding of how virtual organizations use microblogs in similar and different ways, we investigate microblogging practices of two virtual organizations by examining the content characteristics of their Twitter posts. We identify eleven categories of microblog themes of three dimensions, consisting of both common …

Virtual Communities Don’T Exist: Avoiding Digital Dualism In Studying Collaboration, Pj Rey, Nathan Jurgenson

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Effective collaboration in communities requires information sharing. Though digital media may have certain affordances that encourage us to communicate differently than in the past, the communities these media facilitate are no less real than communities bound together by voice or text. In this paper, we argue that idea of “virtual communities” is misleading. Communities and collaboration occur not in some virtual world or a new, cyber, space, but instead they are part of one reality influenced simultaneously by materiality and the various flows of information—digital included. In light of this argument, we implore researchers to take serious the influence of …

The “New” Prosumer: Collaboration On The Digital And Material “New Means Of Prosumption”, George Ritzer

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Many of “cyber-utopians” have lauded the Internet, especially social networking sites, for a variety of reasons, including making possible a dramatic and revolutionary increase in social collaboration (Benkler, 2007; Tapscott and Williams, 2006). The goal of this essay is to examine- and, at least in part, debunk- this claim from a new and unique sociological perspective- the relationship between collaboration and the “new means of prosumption”. Such an examination is suggested by the fact that collaboration is, by definition, a form of prosumption. That is, it involves one or more parties “producing” and other(s) “consuming” something of mutual interest and …

Measuring Creative Performance Of Teams Through Dynamic Semantic Social Network Analysis, Peter Gloor

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

In this project we compare communication structure and content exchanged by members of creative, interdisciplinary teams of medical researchers, physicians, patients and caretakers with their creative output. We find that longitudinal social networking patterns and word usage predict creative performance. We collected the e-mail archives of 60 members of a community of researchers working on 12 projects improving various aspects of the daily lives of patients of Crohn’s disease. Our results indicate that more creative projects show a decrease in group density, while more actors are involved, and more emails are exchanged, suggesting that a more successful project attracts more …

The Future Of Social Movement Organizations: The Waning Dominance Of Smos Online, Jennifer Earl

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

For scholars interested in the role of information communication technologies (ICTs) in protest and social movements, the importance of organizations doesn’t appear to be as axiomatic. Work over the past decade researching “Internet activism” has raised fundamental questions about SMOs and their continuing importance to protest: Do organizations play the same role in online protest as they have played in offline protest? Are SMOs as necessary for online movements and protest organizing? What role or functions do SMOs play in online protest? In this article, I address these questions by first surveying social movement research on pre-Internet protest to establish …

The Role Of Social Media For Knowledge Sharing And Collaboration In Distributed Teams, Nicole Ellison, Matthew Weber

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Social media are providing a medium through which individuals are reshaping how they do many things – finding romantic partners, providing social support, grieving for loved ones, even buying mundane items like toothpaste. They are also reshaping organizations – the way they function, the relationships they contain, and the ways organizations interact with external stakeholders. In this paper, we consider the changes that social media have introduced to organizational knowledge-sharing practices. We believe the social and technical affordances of social media create new challenges for organizations and necessitate research examining the ways in which: (1) technological affordances impact knowledge sharing …

Framing Social Media And Organizations, Dhiraj Murthy

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Social Media For Knowledge Sharing And Collaboration In Distributed Teams, Nicole Ellison, Matthew Weber

Collaborative Organizations & Social Media Conference

Abstract

The Effects Of Corporate Governance On The Innovation Performance Of Chinese Smes, Yao Tang, Daniel Shapiro, Miaojun Wang, Weiying Zhang

Economics Department Working Paper Series

We investigate the degree to which corporate governance and ownership affects the innovation performance of firms in China with a particular focus on privately owned small and medium enterprises (SMEs). We hypothesize that (1) board-related governance measures will enhance innovation because they improve monitoring and provide access to necessary resources; (2) ownership concentration initially facilitates innovation because large shareholders are more likely to commit to the long-term nature of innovation, and have the incentive to monitor managers whose time horizon may be shorter; however we argue that these effects weaken as large shareholders becomes entrenched at higher levels of concentration; …