Economics Commons^™

Ode Models Of Wealth Concentration And Taxation, Bruce Boghosian, Christoph Borgers

CODEE Journal

We refer to an individual holding a non-negligible fraction of the country’s total wealth as an oligarch. We explain how a model due to Boghosian et al. can be used to explore the effects of taxation on the emergence of oligarchs. The model suggests that oligarchs will emerge when wealth taxation is below a certain threshold, not when it is above the threshold. The underlying mechanism is a transcritical bifurcation. The model also suggests that taxation of income and capital gains alone cannot prevent the emergence of oligarchs. We suggest several opportunities for students to explore modifications of the model.

Revolutionizing Lithium Extraction: Analysis Of Factors Affecting Commercialization Timelines With Insights From The Shale Gas Boom, Bilge Tayyar

CMC Senior Theses

This study draws parallels between Direct Lithium Extraction (DLE) and hydraulic fracturing to highlight the transformative potential of DLE technology in the lithium industry. The comparative analysis supports the hypothesis that DLE might expedite commercialization timelines, similar to the effect hydraulic fracturing has had on traditional shale gas extraction. The study includes a regression analysis to determine the factors affecting the commercialization of conventional lithium brine extraction methods, thereby better understanding the potential changes DLE will create. The regression model, based on data from 11 projects, examines the impact of variables such as temperature range, tax rates, royalty rates, regulatory …

Capturing Value In Emerging Markets: A Real Options Perspective On Resilience And Risk, Alexander Castillo

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the evaluation of investment opportunities in emerging markets (EMs) through real options analysis, against the backdrop of their unique risk profiles and the recent trend of EMs exhibiting resilience in economic performance. While EMs are associated with high growth rates and infrastructure gaps, they have shown adaptability, particularly in monetary policy responses to inflation. This paper explores the sensitivity of net present value (NPV) and real options (RO) to changes in the capital asset pricing model, adapting the yield spread to capture default risk and local risk-free rates. Utilizing oil benchmark price data, the paper constructs a …

Analysis Of Government Stimulus During Covid-19 And The Bank Distress Of 2023, Kara Hagler

CMC Senior Theses

Due to the hardships that small businesses were facing from the onset of COVID-19 in March 2020, the government created the Payment Protection Program (PPP). This program used banks as the initial lenders for small business loans to facilitate loans from the government to small businesses. In this article, I study how participation in the PPP lending program contributes to the Bank Distress of 2023 by using a bank-level quarterly panel data set from 2019-2023. Estimation of difference-in-difference specifications reveals banks that opted into the PPP program experienced an increase in held-to-maturity securities relative to non PPP banks. The mechanism …

Is Green The New Gold? Esg’S Influence On The Financial Performance Of The Energy And Mining Industries, Alexa De Vegvar

CMC Senior Theses

The demand for Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting has increased in recent years. As the concern for climate change has moved to the forefront of the investment process, companies have needed to prioritize ESG in their operations. Previous literature addresses how ESG has benefited companies’ financial performance and increased shareholder value. The pandemic has proven to have positively impacted ESG reporting as social priorities shifted. However, studies have also shown that ESG reporting is too ambiguous to concretely display any relationship with financial performance. This thesis will analyze the impact of ESG and environmental data reporting on the Return …

More Than A Feeling: Exploring The Drivers Of Music Catalog Values, Emily Nutting

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines which characteristics of songs affect transaction price in the sale of artist’s music catalogs. My analysis tests many variables, including the number of years between the song’s release its catalog’s sale (age); the natural log of the number of Spotify streams the song has (popularity); the genre of the song; themes in the song, such as dating, violence, romance, obscenity, sadness, and feelings; and elements of the song like danceability, energy, loudness, instrumentalness (the prevalence of instrumentals relative to vocals in a song), and acousticness (the measure of sound made using instruments as opposed to electronic means). …

Driven By Change: The Impact Of Macroeconomic Shifts And Covid-19 On New Vehicle Sales, Jackson Aldrich

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the impact of macroeconomic factors and the COVID-19 pandemic on new vehicle sales. In order to address these two topics, a two-pronged approach was used with separate regression models. The macroeconomic variables include monthly supply of new homes, CPI for urban public transportation, unemployment rate, disposable personal income, inflation expectation, consumer sentiment, average gas prices, and total vehicle miles traveled which were regressed on total vehicle sales from 1978-2022. The regression results confirmed and supported current literature and highlighted the importance of the housing market and unemployment rate on new vehicle sales. The COVID-19 pandemic model variables …

Determinants And Effects Of Offset Usage Within The California Cap-And-Trade System – A Firm-Level Analysis, Adarsh Srinivasan

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the determinants of the usage of carbon offsets within the California cap-and-trade program for greenhouse gas emissions. It also investigates the relationship between a firm’s investment in offsets and its financials for publicly traded companies. Entity-level data from 2013 to 2020 was used, which was sourced from the California Air Resources Board. Multiple regression analysis was used to investigate factors that correlated with offset usage and whether offset usage correlated with EBITDA. Dummy variables indicating geographic location and economic sector of each entity were used as controls. The analysis found that total covered emissions and privately owned …

Mobile Food Displacement And Formalization: A Case Study Of Portland’S Block 216, Marcello Ursic

Pomona Senior Theses

Portland has been on the cutting edge of American mobile food for over fifteen years, becoming a critical darling in the popular and academic press for its role in trailblazing progressive mobile food policy buttressed by broad-based civic engagement. In recent years, Portland’s mobile food landscape has begun shifting as downtown development has picked up post-recession, displacing some of the oldest and most prominent city center food cart pods with others likely to follow. Meanwhile, a new breed of formalized, purpose-built food cart pods has gained ascendancy. Called “food courtyards,” their armored, insulated, and bourgeois character is distinct from traditional …

Local Competition, Multimarket Contact, And Product Quality: Evidence From Internet Service Provision, Kyle Wilson

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

I investigate the effect of competition on quality in the internet service provision industry: I examine both local competition within markets and multimarket contact among firms across markets. This industry offers an ideal setting, as quality is both objective and measurable. I use data from speedtest.net from 2008 to 2014 to estimate a reduced-form model of the effects of local competition and multimarket contact on realized consumer download speeds. I find that increased multimarket contact leads to decreased download speeds, which is consistent with the mutual forbearance hypothesis. I also find that duopolies lead to faster download speeds than do …

Endogenous Preferences: A Challenge To Constitutional Political Economy's Normative Foundation?, Malte Dold

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

This paper starts with the observation from behavioral economics that preferences are endogenous, i.e., they are unstable, context-dependent, and open to processes of adaptation. It then asks whether welfare analysis and normative economics are still possible in a world populated by people with endogenous preferences. In particular, it looks at recent proposals by Viktor Vanberg and Carl Christian von Weizsacker. In highlighting an institutional perspective, both can be seen as proponents of modern ordoliberalism and both claim that their approaches can deal with the issue of endogenous preferences in a more coherent way than approaches that remain within the mind …

Behavioural Normative Economics: Foundations, Approaches And Trends, Malte Dold

Pomona Faculty Publications and Research

This article summarises the theoretical foundations, main approaches and current trends in the field of behavioural normative economics. It identifies bounded rationality and bounded willpower as the two core concepts that have motivated the field. Since the concepts allow for individual preferences to be context-dependent and time-inconsistent, they pose an intricate problem for standard welfare analysis. The article discusses the ways in which two prominent approaches - the preference purification approach and the opportunity approach - have tackled the problem. It argues that shortcomings in each of these approaches motivate an agency-centric perspective. The article presents two concrete policy proposals …

L’Économie Solidaire De Kabylie : Une Perspective Critique, Mohamed-Amokrane Zoreli

Journal of Amazigh Studies

Résumé :

Dans cet article, l’auteur réalise, pour le contexte de la Kabylie, une étude d’ensemble de l’évolution des pratiques d’économie sociale, du modèle originel jusqu’à la période actuelle, en passant par les différentes phases de colonisation puis d’indépendance. L’objectif est triple. Voir d’abord quels sont les ressorts, les mécanismes et les finalités des solidarités locales originelles et comment elles se mobilisent pour répondre à des besoins socio-économiques et politiques. Voir ensuite comment l’Etat-nation et la mondialisation ont impacté dans le temps long ces solidarités locales, en les démobilisant et immobilisant par différents moyens, juridiques, économiques et politiques. Voir enfin …

Heaven? Is It Worth It?: The Effect Of Belief On Religious Participation And Signaling, Claudia R. Chin

Scripps Senior Theses

Religion has long been a subject that baffles economists because of its seemingly inefficient requirements. It is hard to get one's mind around why an individual would be willing to give up secular commodities for religion, or face the strict entry costs and stigma society associates with the religion. Although many reasons have been suggested, the most widely accepted solution to why we engage in these behaviors is Religious Signaling Theory (RST). RST argues that people engage in these ineffective costs as a way to signal their commitment to the religion, and religions were utilized by society to enforce these …

Optimal Portfolio Construction For Oil-Based Sovereign Wealth Funds, Mohammed Saeed Alshowaikhat

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Chapter 1 of this dissertation delves into the economic challenges faced by oil-exporting countries that rely heavily on a single income source, with a particular focus on Saudi Arabia as a case study. The primary objective is to examine the efforts of Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund in diversifying revenue streams and mitigating risks associated with an excessive dependence on oil. To achieve this, the study proposes an adaptation of the subset-optimization algorithm within the mean-variance model, aiming to enhance portfolio construction in sovereign wealth funds. Chapter 2 of the dissertation conducts a comparative analysis between portfolios constructed using the …

The Scope For Monetary Autonomy In Hong Kong And Singapore, Shan Xue

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The monetary trilemma autonomy has been at the heart of a great deal of international monetary analysis. It implies that countries with fixed exchange rates and no capital controls will lose monetary autonomy. What is often not recognized, however, is that the trilemma need not hold in the short run. If capital mobility is less than perfect, then countries can sterilize reserve flows and maintain a degree of monetary autonomy in the short run. Hong Kong is a natural case to test this possibility since it has a credibly fixed exchange rate against the dollar and no major capital controls. …

Factors That Enable Or Hinder The Transition Of Some Gulf Cooperation Council (Gcc) Countries To Green Energy, Verkine Keukpanossian

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries continue to play a strategic role in the global energy system. They account for a fifth of the global oil production and enjoy relatively high GDP per Capita, and their economies heavily rely on oil-producing and exporting at a time when the West is pushing towards net-zero, low-carbon emissions by 2050. This study focuses on the energy sector and takes a transdisciplinary look at Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and tries to understand how these rentier monarchies that have built a solid global comparative advantage in producing and exporting oil and …

Neo-Whorfian Examination Of Cross-Linguistic Temporal Discounting Behavior, Piper Connelly

Scripps Senior Theses

This study examines differences in temporal discounting tendencies in German and French participants (recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk) through the lens of Neo-Whorfian cognition and the Linguistic Savings Hypothesis (Chen 2013). The LSH proposes that tendencies towards future-oriented economic decisions can be cognitively explained by literal morphosyntactic conventions of one’s native language. Our experiments (sooner-smaller/larger-later choices, endowment-investment task) failed to produce results aligning with the LSH, but uncovered the importance of controlling for risk appetite when specifically investigating intertemporal choice. There are several fruitful improvements to consider for the future, such as stricter sampling, taking richer detail of time preferences, …

Counties As Catalysts For Change_ Exploring The Economic Costs Of Child Maltreatment Through Its Connection To Incarceration, Kayla Solomon

Scripps Senior Theses

This study posits the question, what is the relationship between child maltreatment and adult incarceration at the county-level, and how can we utilize an understanding of it to inform child welfare strategies? Child maltreatment is a public health crisis and an obstacle to the United States Economy. Inspired by my high school capstone project on the connection between the foster care and criminal justice systems, I entered this project hoping to add to the myriad of literature that influences child welfare policy throughout California and the broader United States. This project serves to culminate my college career and exemplifies my …

The Impact Of Development Aid On Human Development, Lauren Candia Shaffer

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines the relationship between development aid and human development in recipient countries. The primary function of this research is to determine which types of aid are most effective in improving human development. To accomplish this goal, I use a fixed effects regression analysis to examine the following aid types in individual chapters of the dissertation: Total Aid, Donor-specific aid, Sectoral Aid, Conditional Aid, and aid flowing from Multilateral, Bilateral, and Private sources. This analysis produced mixed results, indicating that some types of aid have a positive and significant impact on human development, some have a negative and significant …

Opportunity Cost Of Student Loan Debt Forgiveness: Testing The Impact Of Four Policy Options On United States’ Economy, Emelia Akhlaghi

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Nearly 45 million Americans are trapped in a student loan debt. In total they owe more than $1.75 trillion. Research shows that such a high amount of debt harms the U.S. economy in several ways, preventing anything from small business development to new house purchases, and even weddings and procreation. It is an issue that stakeholders have tried to address by offering different relief measures ranging from re-financing to debt cancellation. Debt cancellation has remained high on the agenda of the Democrat political leadership. This is the reason that student loan debt cancellation was on the agenda of each democrat …

Three Essays In Behavioral Economics And Macroeconomics: Unraveling Celebrity Influence On Philanthropy, Racial Disparities In Donation Decisions During The Covid-19 Pandemic, And The Impact Of Foreign Direct Investment On Economic Growth In Saudi Arabia, Rawan Khalid Alothaim

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation encompasses three chapters. Two delve into behavioral aspects of charitable donations during the COVID-19 pandemic, investigating celebrity influence and racial disparities, as well as risk preferences. The third chapter shifts to macroeconomics, examining the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and economic growth in Saudi Arabia over a long-term horizon. The first chapter investigates the effectiveness of celebrity endorsements on charitable giving during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants' donation decisions were compared after exposure to celebrity and non-profit expert endorsements. Logistic regression and Ordinary Least Squares regression were used to analyze the impact of independent variables on the likelihood …

An Empirical Study: Evaluating The Impact Of Economic, Human Resource, And Governance Factors To Foreign Direct Investment, Yuan-Yuan Lee

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The economic crisis in 2008 prompted the restructuring of the world economic and trade patterns. The global supply chain began to restructure, and international investment presented more diversified features. The COVID-19 Pandemic brings a new global economic crisis. which is likely to negatively impact many businesses that rely heavily on the Chinese market. Quarantine policies have forced people to stay at home, reducing public connectivity and leading to a slowdown in economic growth. The outbreak has also caused companies and factories to pause operations, affecting trade, travel, and consumption. International investors are increasingly concerned about economic uncertainties, which highlights the …

The External Influences On Korea's Monetary Policy, Seh-Beom Koo

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The main purpose of this study was to investigate the external influences on Korea’s monetary policy over the period from 1990 to 2020. The focus was on the effects of US interest rates, payments imbalances and exchange rate changes on Korean monetary policy.Two types of measures of Korean monetary policy were considered. These are the effects on Korean interest rates and the effects on the domestic money supply and monetary base. The purpose in estimating the basic Taylor rules was to go beyond unconditional estimates of pass through from US to Korean interest rates and to attempt to control for …

Capital Controls And Banking Crises In Emerging Markets, Xizhen Huang

CGU Theses & Dissertations

There is limited research studying the relationship between capital controls and banking crises and the existing research has mixed results. We argue that the results may depend on the measurement of capital controls. Previous research used a broad index of capital controls, but this may lead to imprecise results due to their inability to account for the possible differences in the effects of different types of capital controls and capital flows. We also argue that the relationship may depend on political and institutional factors, such as institutional quality and other economic policies like macroprudential policies and exchange rate regimes. In …

Impact Of Demand For H1b Visas In The Us On The Performance Of Listed Indian Firms, Jayaditya Shekhar Maliye

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the relationship between Indian firm performance and the demand for H1B visas in the US. To test this relationship, a fixed effects model has been used on a panel dataset of 104 Indian firms listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) and National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) over the period 2009 to 2021. The results show that an increase in H1B visa demand is negatively and significantly associated with Indian firm performance. These findings suggest that the US’s demand for high skilled labor overseas has consequences for firms in the home country.

Balancing Trade And Security During The Us-China Trade War: A Gravity Model Approach To South Korea’S Relations With The United States And China, Nathalie Chavez

CMC Senior Theses

In analyzing monthly trade and gross domestic product (GDP) data for South Korea, China, and the United States from January 2016 to December 2019, this paper attempts to quantify the effects of the US-China Trade War on Korea’s security and economic considerations. By using a three-country gravity model with both monthly and HS Code (harmonized system) fixed effects, it finds the following. First, increases in both real GDP for the United States and China, as well as real GDP for Korea, are positively associated with increases in Korean exports at statistically significant levels. Thus, the general predictions of the gravity …

Application Of Sentiment Analysis And Machine Learning Techniques To Predict Daily Cryptocurrency Price Returns, Edward Wu

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the effects of social media sentiment relating to Bitcoin on the daily price returns of Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies by utilizing sentiment analysis and machine learning techniques to predict daily price returns. Many investors think that social media sentiment affects cryptocurrency prices. However, the results of this paper find that social media sentiment relating to Bitcoin does not add significant predictive value to forecasting daily price returns for each of the six cryptocurrencies used for analysis and that machine learning models that do not assume linearity between the current day price return and previous daily price …

A Comparative Analysis Of 14 Central Banks’ Monetary Responses Before And After The Covid-19 Pandemic In Relation To Central Bank Independence, Emelle Stottele

CMC Senior Theses

In theory, during periods of economic downturn, economic policy should follow a countercyclical pattern. In this light, following the recent COVID-19 pandemic, monetary policy is expected to be contractionary. However, prior research shows that the cyclical nature of monetary policy can vary significantly across different countries. Research also suggests that these monetary responses differ based on the level of independence a central bank has for decision-making from government influence. This thesis studies the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the monetary responses across a panel of 14 countries from January 2018 to August 2022, capturing the impacts of the pandemic. …

The Paycheck Protection Program's Effect On Real Estate Prices, Someswar Amujala

CMC Senior Theses

This paper investigates the relationship between the Paycheck Protec- tion Program (PPP) and real estate price increases. The Paycheck Protection Program was established by the Small Business Association in 2020 to pro- vide forgivable loans to businesses to aid with potential losses from COVID- 19 impacts. I leverage zip code level data across the United States and a fixed effects panel data model to quantitatively measure the PPP’s influence on housing and rental prices. I find a positive and significant relationship between the number of PPP loans disbursed and housing and rental rates. Specifically, a 1% change in the number …