Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Interest Rate Policy In China: The Impact Of Suppressed Deposit Rates On Household Income From 2000-2007, Zhuliang James Zhang

Undergraduate Economic Review

An often-overlooked impact of China’s policy of maintaining low interest has been the suppression of household interest income, which has increased the propensity of households to save while decreasing their consumption rates. This paper posits that from 2000 to 2007, deposit rates in China were suppressed annually by around 720 basis points, imposing an implicit tax on annual per-capita income of 12.8% on average. Raising deposit rates will increase household income and boost consumption in the medium-term if the Chinese government is able to initiate policy shifts that distribute the gains of economic growth more equitably to households. Research advised …

The Historical Background Of The Communist Manifesto, George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

[Excerpt] The Manifesto of the Communist Party, published 150 years ago in London in February 1848, is one of the most influential and widely-read documents of the past two centuries. The historian A. J. P. Taylor (1967, p. 7) has called it a "holy book," and contends that because of it, "everyone thinks differently about politics and society." And yet, despite its enormous influence in the 20th century, the Manifesto is very much a period piece, a document of what was called the "hungry" 1840s. It is hard to imagine it being written in any other decade of the 19th …

The Poor Law, Migration, And Economic Growth, George R. Boyer

George R. Boyer

The loss to the English economy caused by decreased migration resulting from relief payments to agricultural laborers is estimated. I conclude that, at worst, the Poor Law had a small negative impact on national product. If poor relief and wages were substitutes, the Poor Law may have had a positive impact on capital formation and economic growth.

New Estimates Of British Unemployment, 1870-1913, George R. Boyer, Timothy J. Hatton

George R. Boyer

We present new estimates of the British industrial unemployment rate for 1870- 1913, which improve on the Board of Trade's prior estimates. We use similar sources, but our series includes additional industrial sectors, allows for short-time working, and aggregates the various sectors using appropriate labor-force weights from the census. The resulting index suggests a rate of industrial unemployment that was generally higher, but less volatile, than the board's index. We then adjust our series to an economywide basis, and construct a consistent time series of overall unemployment for 1870-1999.

The Massachusetts Environmental Industry: Facing The Challenges Of Maturity, Betty J. Diener, David Terkla, Erick Cooke

David G. Terkla

For most of the past 20 years, the environmental industry has been a very significant one, both in Massachusetts and across the country. Some have placed it alongside the electronics, computer hardware, software, biotechnology, fiber optics, and composite materials industries as part of the high-technology sector that has diversified and strengthened the state’s economy. Nationally, environmental industry employment exceeded that of several major manufacturing industries, including chemicals, paper, and aerospace. In the late 1990s, however, the momentum of the environmental movement began to wane. A decline in both employment and sales suggests that many of the most pressing environmental concerns …

Rethinking A Carbon Tax In An Era Of Budget Deficits, Chad Covert

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

The Role Of Science In The Uruguay Round And Nafta Trade Disciplines, David A. Wirth

David A. Wirth

The central theme of this article is the necessity for deference to decision-making processes of national regulatory authorities in the application of these new trade disciplines and the need for trade-based reviews of national regulatory measures to operate within clearly defined limits. Accordingly, this article first examines and summarizes the relevant texts, including the original 1947 GATT, the Uruguay Round, and the NAFTA texts on standards. Next, the article considers the role of science in the standard-setting process with reference to the copious literature on this topic. Finally, the article takes up the difficult question of the application of the …

At War With The Environment, David A. Wirth

David A. Wirth

In this Article, Professor Wirth reviews the book National Defense and the Environment by Stephen Dycus, a recognized expert in both environmental and national security law. The emphasis of the book is on containing and remediating the environmental excesses of the American defense-industrial complex, with a domestic policy focus. While Professor Wirth considers Dycus’ work an intellectually rewarding and refreshing new entry into the ongoing environment-as-security colloquy, he does not consider the book to be accessible to a general audience given the book’s fundamentally legalistic nature.

Risk Classification And Health Insurance, Georges Dionne, Casey G. Rothschild

Economics Faculty Scholarship

Risk classification refers to the use of observable characteristics by insurers to group individuals with similar expected claims, compute the corresponding premiums, and thereby reduce asymmetric information. An efficient risk classification system generates premiums that fully reflect the expected cost associated with each class of risk characteristics. This is known as financial equity. In the health sector, risk classification is also subject to concerns about social equity and potential discrimination. We present different theoretical frameworks that illustrate the potential trade-off between efficient insurance provision and social equity. We also review empirical studies on risk classification and residual asymmetric information.

Restoring The Natural Law: Copyright As Labor And Possession, Alfred C. Yen

Alfred C. Yen

In this Article, Professor Yen explores the problems associated with viewing copyright solely as a tool for achieving economic efficiency and advocates for the restoration of natural law to copyright jurisprudence. The Article demonstrates that economics has not been solely responsible for copyright’s development and basic structure, but has rather developed along lines suggested by neutral law, despite modern copyright jurisprudence. The Article considers the consequences of extinguishing copyright’s natural law facets in favor of the blind pursuit of efficiency and concludes by exploring the implications of restoring natural law thinking to copyright jurisprudence.

Justice, The Bretton Woods Institutions And The Problem Of Inequality, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

The Bretton Woods Institutions are, together with the WTO, the preeminent international institutions devoted to managing international economic relations. This mandate puts them squarely in the center of the debate concerning development, inequality and global justice. While the normative analysis of the WTO is gaining momentum, the systematic normative evaluation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is comparatively less developed. This essay aims to contribute to that nascent inquiry. How might global justice criteria apply to the ideology and operations of the Bank and Fund? Political theory offers an abundance of perspectives from which to conduct such …

Is Free Trade "Free?" Is It Even "Trade?" Oppression And Consent In Hemispheric Trade Agreements, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

In order for free trade as a policy to deliver fully on its social promise, it must be both “free” and “trade.” In fact, it must be free, in the sense of voluntary, to be trade at all. In other words, for normative and practical reasons, free trade requires that global economic relations be structured through agreements which reflect the consent of those subject to them. The neoliberal trading system today only imperfectly lives up to this obligation. In this essay, I will examine the role of consent in trade agreements, drawing on examples from CAFTA as representative of important …

The Moral Hazard Problem In Global Economic Regulation, Frank J. Garcia

Frank J. Garcia

Global regulation of international business transactions presents a particular form of the moral hazard problem. Global firms use economic and political power to manipulate state and state-controlled multilateral regulation to preserve their opportunity to externalize the social costs of global economic activity with impunity. Unless other actors can effectively counter this at the national and global regulatory levels, globalization re-creates the conditions for under-regulated or “robber baron” capitalism at the global level. This model of economic activity has been rejected at the national level by the same modern democratic capitalist states which currently dominate globalization, creating a crisis of legitimacy …

Institutional Repositories: Keys To Success, Joan Giesecke

UNL Libraries: Faculty Publications

Institutional repositories are a relatively new activity for higher education. They are defined most often as a set of services that are offered by an institution for the management and dissemination of digital materials created by the members of the institution or scholarly community. This article will describe the challenges institutions are facing in creating repositories, will explore the economics of managing repositories, and will offer a model for creating a successful set of services.

Optimal Sequential Search And Optimal Consumption-Leisure Choice, Sergey Malakhov

Sergey Malakhov

This paper describes the static model of consumption-leisure choice in which both the maximization of utility and the maximization of precautionary savings for sequential purchases are constrained by the equality of the marginal costs of search to their marginal benefits. The marginal rate of substitution of leisure for consumption appears in the specific form, which updates the Cobb-Douglas utility function and provides search behavior with the optimal stopping rule. This rule bridges the gap between the neoclassical explanation of search behavior and the search-satisficing concept. The original arrangements of polar models of behavior, the overconsumption effect, the Veblen effect, and …

Strategic Substitutes Or Complements? The Game Of Where To Fish, Robert L. Hicks, William C. Horrace, Kurt E. Schnier

Economics - All Scholarship

The ‘‘global game with strategic substitutes and complements’’ of Karp et al. (2007) is used to model the decision of where to fish. A complete information game is assumed, but the model is generalized to S > 1 sites. In this game, a fisherman’s payoff depends on fish density in each site and the actions of other fishermen which can lead to congestion or agglomeration effects. Stable and unstable equilibria are characterized, as well as notions of equilibrium dominance. The model is applied to the Alaskan flatfish fishery by specifying a strategic interaction function (response to congestion) that is a non-linear …

Financing Maine's State Employees And Teachers Retirement System: Comparative Trends And Progress, 1982 - 2010, Moargan Beschle, Eric Davis, Tim Feeley

Muskie School Capstones and Dissertations

Among the many tough choices states must make is how to address funding shortfalls in public employee pension systems. In public sector employment, pensions have long been a key component of the compensation system and an integral way to attract and retain talent in public service positions. The pension is considered a form of deferred compensation, which means that workers receive a salary lower than the going rate for their education, skills and job requirements in exchange for an enhanced retirement package (Bender & Heywood, 2010). State employees incur an opportunity cost by taking a lower-salaried state job over a …

Optimal Taxation With Rent-Seeking, Casey G. Rothschild, Florian Scheuer

Economics Faculty Scholarship

Recent policy proposals have suggested taxing top incomes at very high rates on the grounds that some or all of the highest wage earners are engaged in socially unpro- ductive or counterproductive activities, such as externality imposing speculation in the financial sector. To address this, we provide a model in which agents can choose between working in a traditional sector, where private and social products coincide, and a crowdable rent-seeking sector, where some or all of earned income reflects the capture of pre-existing output rather than increased production. We character- ize Pareto optimal linear and non-linear income tax systems under …

Income Mobility, Gary S. Fields

Gary S Fields

Income mobility means different things to different people. This article explains the six different mobility concepts used in the literature, reviews the various indices used in the mobility literature to measure these concepts, summarizes the difference the use of different mobility concepts and measures makes in practice, presents the axiomatic approach to income mobility, and discusses a number of other issues that arise in the mobility literature.

The Balanced Scorecard: An Intentional Academic Fraud?, David Randall Jenkins

David Randall Jenkins

The Kaplan and Norton 1992 Balanced Scorecard was intentionally structured to aid an Informal Capital Market Cartel in search of the next John Maynard Keynes.

The Marginalist Revolution In Corporate Finance: 1880-1965, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fundamental changes in economic thought revolutionized the theory of corporate finance, leading to changes in its legal regulation. The changes were massive, and this branch of financial analysis and law became virtually unrecognizable to those who had practiced it earlier. The source of this revision was the marginalist, or neoclassical, revolution in economic thought. The classical theory had seen corporate finance as an historical, relatively self-executing inquiry based on the classical theory of value and administered by common law courts. By contrast, neoclassical value theory was forward looking and as a result …

Workers’ Remittances And Real Exchange Rate In Bangladesh: A Cointegration Analysis, Mamta B. Chowdhury, Fazle Rabbi

Fazle Rabbi

Workers’ remittances have an ever important role as one of the major sources of foreign exchange earnings for the Bangladesh economy. It accounts for over 12 per cent of GDP in 2010 and having colossal socio economic implications for the country. Using Cointegation an Error Correction model, this paper attempts to contribute to the literature by investigating the effects of increasing flow of remittances on the real exchange rate of the country. Our results suggest that the influx of workers’ remittances significantly appreciating the real exchange rate by lowering the relative prices tradables to nontradables of the country compared to …

Review: Robert H. Nelson, The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion Vs. Environmental Religion In Contemporary America, Andre Wakefield

Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research

This is a book review of Robert H. Nelson's The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America. Nelson argues that environmentalism and economics represent competing religious worldviews. Within this framework, debates over issues like global warming and acid rain become veiled theological disputes between these two “secular religions.” Nelson paints with a broad, aggressive brush. This is both the strength and weakness of his book, as he conjures a world of epic battles between the economic faithful, who worship material progress, and the environmentally pious, who bemoan the corruption visited by humans upon the natural world. …

Generic Wish-Lists For State-Centric Policies, Edzia Carvalho

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The Central America depicted in the article under review resembles a region visited by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—colonial Conquest, civil War, Famine and other natural disasters, and poverty, disease and Death. Added to this list of woes are the recent drug-fueled conflict, democratic instability, weak state capacity, and the socio-economic fallout of the economic recession in the United States. While the first half of the article records these problems, the author shifts gears in the second half and provides an array of responses to these challenges, with a forceful recommendation that states in the region focus their efforts …

Middle Class Political Competition And Economic Growth, Jorge A. Enriquez Murillo

Honors Theses

Middle class individuals play a fundamental role in countries’ political and economic spheres. Their political demands for a fair tax system and public goods provisions enhance positive economic performance and development. A large share of income held by the middle class, according to Easterly (2001), is positively related to economic growth and political stability. Similarly, Alesina and Rodrik (1994) –among other political economic studies- highlight that a well-endowed median voter population influences the implementation of growth-enhancing economic policies. This study examines the interplay between political competition and a politically active middle-class and its subsequent effect on economic growth. The dependant …

Let’S Get Serious: Communicating Commitment In Romantic Relationship Formation, Joshua M. Ackerman, Vladas Griskevicius, Norman P. Li

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Are men or women more likely to confess love first in romantic relationships? And how do men and women feel when their partners say “I love you”? An evolutionary– economics perspective contends that women and men incur different potential costs and gain different potential benefits from confessing love. Across 6 studies testing current and former romantic relationships, we found that although people think that women are the first to confess love and feel happier when they receive such confessions, it is actually men who confess love first and feel happier when receiving confessions. Consistent with predictions from our model, additional …

Slides: Introduction To Large-Scale Planning And The Intermountain Bmp Project, Kathryn Mutz

Best Management Practices (BMPs): What? How? And Why? (May 26)

Presenter: Kathryn Mutz, Natural Resources Law Center, University of Colorado School of Law

18 slides

In Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, Could Commerce Foster Trust, Tolerance, And Peace?, Nathan B. Oman

Popular Media

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Surface Coal Mining On Residential Property Values: A Hedonic Price Analysis, Austin Merrell Williams

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

Echoes From Geneva: Finding John Calvin’S Socio-Economic Interests In The Modern World, Brenda K. Savage

Master of Liberal Studies Theses

Through an examination of John Calvin’s intentions in ending the prohibition on usury and the practical application of his teachings in sixteenth-century Geneva, and a consideration of the elements of poverty, social outcasts, and exploitation common to both Geneva and the modern world, it can be argued that the Reformer has much to offer of continued relevancy for those seeking to engage their contemporary world by finding alternatives that can help the financially disenfranchised. Calvin is often referred to as the “Father of Modern Interest,” and as such many people have directly blamed him for the exploitation associated with capitalism. …