Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Understanding Income Inequality In The United States, Mark J. Stelzner

Doctoral Dissertations

In a democracy where the median income is substantially less than the mean, why does the poor majority not implement a significant level of redistribution? Despite fears that democracy would empower the poor majority to such ends, constituents of below average income have a mixed record of utilizing democracy to ameliorate economic inequality in the United States. How do we understand this puzzle? Why does the poor majority not maintain a constant level of redistribution in a democracy? In the first part of my dissertation, I provide a game theoretic answer based on historical research which is in accord with …

Financialization Of The Commodities Futures Markets And Its Effects On Prices, Manisha Pradhananga

Doctoral Dissertations

After declining for almost three decades, the food price index of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) rose by 90 percent between January 2002 and June 2008. Besides the magnitude, the rise in prices was remarkable for its breadth, affecting a broad range of commodities including agricultural (wheat, corn, soybeans, cocoa, coffee), energy (crude oil, gasoline), and metals (copper, aluminum). According to the US Department of Agriculture, this price spike was responsible for increasing the number of malnourished people by 80 million. These dramatic developments in prices coincided with a rapid inflow of investment into the commodities futures market -- …

Care Time In The U.S.: Measures, Determinants, And Implications, Joo Yeoun Suh

Doctoral Dissertations

These essays focus on improving both the measurement and valuation of time devoted to family care, as well as exploring factors, such as gender, age, and earnings, that affect time allocation. The first essay examines whether time devoted to primary child care activities can be truly understood to represent the total amount of time devoted to child care (as is implied by the focus on primary care activities that dominates the time-use literature), exploring problems of conventional definitions of child care and utilizations of time-use surveys. The second essay explores the measurement issues of relative temporal burden on “sandwich” family …

Productive Stagnation And Unproductive Accumulation In The United States, 1947-2011., Tomas N. Rotta

Doctoral Dissertations

My doctoral research addresses the question of how productive and unproductive forms of capital accumulation interact in the United States. My contribution is to first develop a new understanding of the labor theory of value in order to better explain how financial and rentier forms of revenues relate to the wealth created in productive activities. Second, I offer an innovative analysis of historical trends regarding unproductive accumulation in the postwar United States economy. For that purpose, I propose a new methodology to estimate Marxist categories from conventional input-output matrices, national income accounts, and employment data. A core feature of my …

Essays On The Minimum Wage, Ben Zipperer

Doctoral Dissertations

This three-essay dissertation empirically examines the effects of minimum wages on teen and restaurant earnings and employment, and also on the receipt of public benefit programs. In the first chapter, co-authored with Arindrajit Dube, we extend the synthetic control approach to 32 state-level case studies of minimum wage increases. We do not find a statistically significant effect on teen employment, with the mean elasticity close to zero. There is also no indication of heterogeneous treatment effects. Finally, we discuss some important practical challenges, including the ability to find close matches and the choice of predictors used for constructing a synthetic …

Three Essays In Macroeconomic History, Joshua W. Mason

Doctoral Dissertations

Following Minsky, an economy can be understood as a set of units linked to each other by flows of money payments and by the commitments to future payments reflected on balance sheets. This dissertation offers three accounts of the historical evolution of the US economy, conceived of a network of balance sheets, over the course of 20th and early 21st century. The first essay looks at changes in the pattern of payment flows between nonfinancial corporations and financial markets associated with the ``shareholder revolution" of the 1980s. It argues that the shift in payouts to shareholders from a quasi-fixed stream …

Temporary Employment And Earnings Inequality In South Korea, Hyeon-Kyeong Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

My dissertation explores the effect of growth of temporary employment on earnings inequality. In the first essay, I find that during a time when there was a nearly 10 percentage points increase in the share of temporary workers in the Korean labor market (but prior to the global recession), the rise in temporary employment can account for a substantial part (20-30 percent) of the growth in overall wage inequality. These results appear to be robust to alternative ways of performing the decomposition, including using the recently developed recentered influence function approach of Firpo, Fortin and Lemieux. In addition, the rise …

Output Fluctuations And Economic Growth In Latin America In The Aftermath Of The Great Recession, Gonzalo Hernandez Jimenez

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the short and long run effects of the Great Recession on Latin America. For the short run, this study evaluates (i) the existence of a business cycle co-movement between the US and Latin America, (ii) the role of the Latin American export structure as an aspect that may amplify the growth spillover effects of the output fluctuations in the US, and (iii) the terms of trade as a determinant of the short run output fluctuations in Colombia, a primary commodity exporter that resembles the assumptions of open small dependent economies. Consistent with the historical evidence, the US …

Advertising And The Creation Of Exchange Value, Zoe Sherman

Doctoral Dissertations

Advertising and the Creation of Exchange Value explores the economics of the industry and the commodification of communications that characterizes consumer goods advertising in the U.S. I consider three phases of communications that take on three distinct commodity forms. First is access to attention, the interception of the audience’s perception; Chapter One, “The Commodification of Audience Attention in the U.S., 1865-1920” traces the conversion of audience attention to commodity form as advertising space/time. Second is content; Chapter Two, “The Value Analytics of Advertising,” examines the nature of advertising content as a commodified form of speech, produced on demand for purchasers …

The Financial Underpinnings Of The Eu Crisis: Financial Deregulation, Privatization, And Asymmetric State Power, Nina Q. Eichacker

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation asks the following questions. How has financial liberalization affected the incidence of financial crisis in Europe? How have power asymmetries within Western Europe facilitated the process of financial liberalization, and distributed the costs and gains from this liberalization? How have these dynamics been demonstrated at the state level? It charts the institutional liberalization and privatization of European finance from the 1960s onward and presents a survey of descriptive statistics that show how different financial stability, financial flow, and macroeconomic variables have changed in Western Europe since the early 1980s, generally increasing financial and economic instability. It also demonstrates …

The Financialization Of The Nonfinancial Corporation In The Post-1970 U.S. Economy, Leila Emami Davis

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation analyzes the financialization of nonfinancial corporations (NFCs), emphasizing changes in firm-level financial behavior in the post-1970 U.S. economy. The dissertation consists of four essays. These essays ask what is the financialization of NFCs, explore why NFCs have ‘financialized’, and evaluate the implications for fixed investment behavior. Chapter 2 lays out a simple stylized framework describing firm-level portfolio choice and utilizes this framework to analyze the implications of increasing NFC involvement in the provision of financial services, increasingly entrenched shareholder value norms, and rising firm-level demand volatility for NFC financial structure. By articulating underlying determinants of firm-level portfolio and …

Common Pool Resources And Rural Livelihoods In Stung Treng Province Of Cambodia, Pitchaya Boonsrirat

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation assesses the contribution of fish and forest products in the livelihoods of villagers in Strung Treng province of Cambodia, as these two common pool resources are threatened by the construction of the Lower Sesan 2 hydropower project. Household survey data collected under the Challenge Program on Water and Food (CPWF) are used in the analysis. It is found that, in general, fish accounts for a higher overall contribution in household’s livelihoods compared to forest products. Fishery products are most important for direct consumption, while forest products are more important for cash income. Across the study area, the households …

Essays On The Evolution Of Inequality, Cem Oyvat

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the evolution of inequality during the development process. Specifically, the study will focus on two factors that crucially in influence the evolution of distribution: 1) industrialization and urbanization, and 2) agrarian structures and land inequality. The dissertation consists of three essays: The first essay examines the impact of the initial conditions of agrarian structures on income inequality over the long run. It develops a model showing that at the same level of national income, countries with more unequal land distribution can be expected to experience greater agglomeration in the urban sector. The excess labor in the urban …

Interpreting, Stephanie Jo Kent

Doctoral Dissertations

What do community interpreting for the Deaf in western societies, conference interpreting for the European Parliament, and language brokering in international management have in common? Academic research and professional training have historically emphasized the linguistic and cognitive challenges of interpreting, neglecting or ignoring the social aspects that structure communication. All forms of interpreting are inherently social; they involve relationships among at least three people and two languages. The contexts explored here, American Sign Language/English interpreting and spoken language interpreting within the European Parliament, show that simultaneous interpreting involves attitudes, norms and values about intercultural communication that overemphasize information and discount …

The Financial Sector And Inclusive Development In Africa: Essays On Access To Finance For Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises In South Sudan And Kenya, James A. Garang

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation, consisting of three essays, uses data from field surveys of banks and small and medium enterprises (SMEs) conducted in South Sudan and Kenya from July 2011 through September 2012. The first essay examines the role of financial sector development in expanding access to finance by SMEs in Kenya. We find that while the financial system in general, and the Central Bank of Kenya in particular, have made headway in expanding financial inclusion in Kenya, small firms continue to face more constraints in access to finance compared to larger firms. The policy emphasis on financial inclusion, coupled with the …

Empirical Studies On The Effectiveness Of Soda Taxes To Curb Obesity, Francesca Colantuoni

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation presents a series of empirical studies to evaluate the effectiveness of soda taxes to curb the obesity epidemic. Chapter 1 describes the extent and severity of the obesity problem in the U.S., and discusses the policy interventions that have been proposed or enacted with the intent to fight obesity (e.g., sales taxes). Chapter 2 contains a study on the effect of two tax events on soda consumption: a 5.5% sales tax on soft drinks imposed in Maine in 1991, and a 5% sales tax on soft drinks levied in Ohio in 2003. We investigate this question by using …

The Cable Network In An Era Of Digital Media: Bravo And The Constraints Of Consumer Citizenship, Alison D. Brzenchek

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation takes a historiographical approach to the evolution of cable television over thirty years. Case analysis of archival data is used to trace the trajectory of the Bravo cable network from 1980 through 2010. My dissertation is a vital contribution to critical cultural studies, feminist studies, citizenship studies, and media history because it historicizes the role branding, commodification, and convergence played in Bravo’s evolution from a highbrow arts programmer guided by bourgeois consumer citizenship, to a affluent lifestyle network guided by nouveau riche consumer citizenship. My combination of production studies and political economic analysis gives visibility to the interpenetrating …

Essays On Resource Allocation Efficiency And Behavior, Julianna Marie Butler

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is comprised of three papers in the field of microeconomics. The first examines bidder’s choice auctions using both field and laboratory experiments. The field experiments demonstrate that traditional bidder’s choice auction theory does not always hold; the laboratory experiments subsequently isolate several characteristics of this auction format to explain why. We find that while price revelation does not impact the revenue superiority of the auction mechanism, multi-good demand significantly reduces the revenue premium. Intuitively, risk aversion plays less of a role when bidders have the opportunity to win multiple goods. The second chapter is theoretical and presents a …

Essays On Fiscal Policies In Open Economies, Ahiteme Nicodeme Houndonougbo

Doctoral Dissertations

Investigating various fiscal policy issues in the context of an open economy, this dissertation consists of three essays.

The first essay addresses the question of the volatility of foreign aid and its impact on resource-constrained developing economies. A small open-economy business cycle model is developed that accounts for the effect of external shocks specific to developing economies. The model produces business cycle patterns consistent with the data and key stylized facts. The model is calibrated to reflect the structural empirical regularities of an aid-dependent developing country. The parameters of the exogenous stochastic shocks are estimated using Bayesian methods and 50 …

State Space Modelling Of Dynamic Choice Behavior With Habit Persistence, Kang Bok Lee

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, I present a new approach to capturing dependence across time in dynamic choice data. To achieve this, I develop a state space dynamic choice model and a novel algorithm to fit the data. Instead of capturing dependence in outcomes through lagged response variables, referred to as state dependence, I introduce a lagged utility term through the latent state equation. The lagged utility term captures habit persistence, which has not been explored directly in earlier models (Heckman, 1981b). The autoregressive nature of the lagged utility provides a significantly richer summary of prior utility than a lagged outcome variable. …

Tax Policy And Entrepreneurship, Xiaowen Liu

Doctoral Dissertations

Small businesses and the entrepreneurial spirit are among the driving forces in economic growth and development in the United States. The US governments (both federal and state) have long been aware of the importance of entrepreneurship, and many policies are directed toward helping small businesses. However, whether such policies give rise to expected behavioral responses from small businesses remains inconclusive. This dissertation looks into the behavioral response of self-employed filers to individual income tax and the impact of state and federal tax policies on entrepreneurship. In the first chapter, we examine taxpayers’ behavioral response to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT). …

The Role Of Individual Investors' Gambling Preference In January Effect, Nan Shao

Doctoral Dissertations

Rozeff and Kinney (1976) were the first to End that stocks in NYSE provide abnormally large returns in January. Following researchers such as Keim (1983), Branch and Chang (1990), and Bhardwaj and Brooks (1992), examine this "January effect" and find that small firms and low price stocks are more prone to this effect. The January effect is so robust that it is not a unique phenomenon in U.S., but also occurs in other countries (e.g., Gultekin and Gultekin, 1983; Kato and Schallheim, 1985; Tong, 1992); In addition, it not only occurs in the stock market, but also in the bond …

Essays On The Optimality Of Delaying Quality Tests And The Reverse Hold-Up Problem, Natalia Gritsko

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of two chapters that examine the optimality of delaying quality tests of new products and the effects of cancellation payments on the hold-up problem.

Chapter 1 analyzes the possibility of delaying quality testing of a new product when the market consists of an early adopter and a follower who receive some private information about the quality. In our social learning framework, delaying a test can lead to better informed decisions regarding conducting the test by the regulator because she, along with other market participants, gains more information about the product quality by observing early adopter's informative actions. …

Essay On Firm Inventory And Innovation Behavior, Ye Gu

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies firm’s decisions on inventory investment and innovation activities. The first chapter examines firm inventory behavior. It resolves and simulates the production smoothing/buffer stock model using different sets of parameters. It shows that the relationship between a sales shock and inventory investment could be ambiguous which is different from previous predictions. The production smoothing/buffer stock model and the (S, s) model of inventory are tested using a rich Chinese firm-level dataset covering 769 manufacturing firms from 1980 to 1989, and I find that sales are positively correlated with inventory for raw materials, but negatively correlated with …

Two Essays On Insider Trading And Option Grants Around The Filing Of Influential Patents, Liu Pan

Doctoral Dissertations

Research documents that insiders, who have access to private information, appear to trade with profits before major corporate events like mergers, bankruptcy, dividend announcements, and future cash flow news (see, e.g., Seyhun, 1990; Seyhun and Bradley, 1997; John and Lang, 1991; Jiang and Zaman, 2010). Another recent stream of studies find that the size and quality of a firm's patent portfolio are positively related to the firm's future stock returns (Hirshleifer, Hsu, and Li, 2012; Pandit, Wasley, and Zach, 2011). However, there is little systematic evidence on whether insiders act opportunistically when they possess private information about the firm's patent …

Two Essays On Insider Trading And Option Grants Around The Filing Of Influential Patents, Liu Pan

Doctoral Dissertations

Research documents that insiders, who have access to private information, appear to trade with profits before major corporate events like mergers, bankruptcy, dividend announcements, and future cash flow news (see, e.g., Seyhun, 1990; Seyhun and Bradley, 1997; John and Lang, 1991; Jiang and Zaman, 2010). Another recent stream of studies find that the size and quality of a firm's patent portfolio are positively related to the firm's future stock returns (Hirshleifer, Hsu, and Li, 2012; Pandit, Wasley, and Zach, 2011). However, there is little systematic evidence on whether insiders act opportunistically when they possess private information about the firm's patent …