Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Do Major League Baseball Hitters Engage In Opportunistic Behavior?, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

This study focuses on 256 Major League Baseball free agent hitters playing under the 2006–2011 collective bargaining agreement to determine whether players engage in opportunistic behavior in their contract year, i.e., the last year of their current guaranteed contracts. Past studies of professional baseball yield conflicting results depending on the econometric technique applied and choice of performance measure. When testing whether players’ offensive performances increase during their contract year, the omitted variable bias associated with OLS and pooled OLS estimation leads to contrary results compared to fixed effects modeling. Fixed effects regression results suggest players increase their offensive performance subject …

Essays In Macroeconomics Of Development, Douwere Eric Grekou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis consists of three chapters on macroeconomics of development. The first chapter discusses the impact of educational corruption on economic development. Its main contribution lies in quantifying two channels of educational corruption: a direct channel, whereby incompetent workers affect production due to a misallocation of talent, and a dynamic indirect channel, which can be referred to as a teacher’s effect on the availability of competent agents for production. The results suggest that, for the countries with the highest levels of educational corruption, the losses in output per capita induced by the indirect channel are ten times as large as …

An Index Of Macroeconomic Performance, Leo L. Liyeung

Senior Theses and Projects

There exists an abundance of economic indicators and ways to interpret macroeconomic data. While the rates of unemployment, inflation, GDP growth, etc all give important insights into the performance of an economy, all these indicators are, at best, incomplete ones that fail to look at the bigger picture of the economy as a whole.

Several macroeconomists have looked into the development of an Index of Macroeconomic Performance (IMP) that provides a comprehensive account of economic performance, the formulation of which allows for straightforward comparisons of macroeconomic performance internationally and intertemporally. Conventional indicators like unemployment, inflation, and GDP growth are taken …