Behavioral Economics Commons^™

The Effects Of Cost, Level Of Safety, And Severity Of Injury On Manager Decisions To Implement A Safety Solution, Jonathan M. Hochmuth

Dissertations

Workplace injuries continue to be a source of substantial human and financial costs each year. Behavioral safety processes have been effective in reducing workplace injuries by increasing safety-related behaviors. In recent years, the focus in behavioral safety has shifted towards the role of managers in establishing and maintaining safe behaviors and conditions in the workplace. Understanding how managers make decisions to allocate resources is critical to improving safety. The field of behavioral economics has developed methods for studying decision-making. While there have been calls to apply these methods to occupational safety, there are only two empirical studies which have done …

The Asymmetric Effect Of Sentiment On Equity Returns, Mishal Ahmed

Dissertations

In the first chapter titled “The Asymmetric Effect of Sentiment on U.S. Equity Returns”, we test the asymmetric impact of investor sentiment, proxied by the Baker-Wurgler (2007) investor sentiment index, on expected stock returns in the U.S. We regress sentiment on market and economy-wide fundamentals, use the residuals as a measure of excess sentiment and estimate long-horizon return regressions using positive and negative components of excess sentiment as predictors. We hypothesize that excessive optimism leads investors to make significant portfolio changes whereas excessive pessimism makes investors more cautious about investing, due to loss aversion. Primary results confirm our hypothesis with …

Analysis Of Demand Under Time And Quantity Restriction Frames, Haily K. Traxler

Dissertations

For decades, behavioral economists and behavior analysts have borrowed techniques from one another to investigate human decision making. While there has been little overlap in their work, the union of the two may help to answer important questions about behavior. An emerging behavioral economic topic of interest in the behavior analytic literature is the analysis of how framing affects demand. The purpose of the present studies is to investigate some conditions under which demand is affected by framing and provide a behavior analytic interpretation of those effects. To assess the effects of framing, demand for marketplace items was assessed under …

Increasing College Opportunity: School Counselors And Fafsa Completion, Laura Owen, Erik Westlund

Journal of College Access

Closing postsecondary opportunity gaps has become a national, state and local educational priority. To help eliminate these gaps, the US Department of Education initiated a project that provided real time student level Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) completion status to large urban school districts. Leveraging this information, school counselors identified and supported students and families as they navigated the financial aid process, resulting in statistically significant impacts on FAFSA completion and college attendance.

Three Essays On Gender Differences On Risk Preferences And Credit Market Constraints, Jyoti Rai

Dissertations

The disadvantages that women face in the financial market hamper their social and economic well-being. These disadvantages may arise from their own risk preferences or from financial market. The aim of this dissertation is to examine different aspects of the disadvantages that women face in the U.S Financial Market. In that light, I present three essays that analyze gender differences in risk preferences and credit market constraints. I use the Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) data for all my empirical analysis.

In the first essay, I examine whether women exhibit greater financial risk aversion than men using attitudinal and behavioral …

Effects Of Health Expenditures On Population Age Distribution And Labor Force Participation Rates: Empirical And Comparative Analysis, Jassim M. H. Al-Jebory

Masters Theses

Baby boom and population aging are the main features of the world population that are leading to child and elderly people in the labor force. Categorizing the world into low and high-income countries, the baby boom and child labor can be found in low-income countries, while population aging and elderly people in the labor force can be found in high-income countries. The cause of these features is declining rates of population and labor force ages 15-64, which is the most productive and active proportion. Health expenditures is one of the main factors that is associated with undesired trends of population …

Credit Card System In Ghana: An Investigation Of Why Credit Cardsare Not Widely Used In Ghana And How Widespread Use May Be Implemented, Emmanuel Andoh

Masters Theses

Credit card systems offer economic advantages to many families and individuals across the globe. In economically developed countries and most emerging ones, the credit card system helps individuals, businesses, and even government agencies, speed up business transactions and access to short term loans. However in developing countries such as Ghana this is not the case. The result is that many people find it very difficult to buy goods and services without having cash at hand. Moreover a vast majority of people have to carry bags of money to travel across cities, towns and villages in the country to trade and …

Traditional And Market-Based Financial Intermediaries: Three Essays Examining Their Risk Behavior, Delisting Behavior, And Reactions To Economic Policy Uncertainty, Marc S. Schaffer

Dissertations

In the wake of our country’s greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, the need to better understand the risks and behaviors associated with financial intermediaries has become apparent. In particular, the literature distinguishes between traditional or depository-based financial intermediaries and their market-based or non-depository counterparts. This dissertation focuses on understanding the behavioral differences across these two groups by examining their equity-based risk differences, their stock market delisting differences, and lastly how these firms react to economic policy uncertainty.

The first essay uses an equity-based approach to quantify the average firm-level risk that is associated with these intermediary groups. While …

The Allocation Of Time And Goods: Three Essays On American Household Shopping Behavior, Jing Cai

Dissertations

Consumers’ shopping behavior connects market goods expenditure with the out of- market time allocation in their daily time use. This study is composed of three essays. In the first essay, data are collected from the American Time Use Survey and it is found that an individual’s time devoted to shopping is positively determined by opportunity cost of time. Grocery shopping and other shopping, as two distinct types of shopping, react differently to a series of individual and household characteristics as well as by seasons. The corresponding marginal effects also differentiate between shopping time, leisure time, and home production time. In …

Three Essays On Computer And Internet Use At Home, Tadesse Biru Wodajo

Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on computer and Internet (CI) use in the United States households. Surveys show that the adoption and use of these two technologies at home have been steadily increasing over time. In addition to providing information regarding the use of CI at home, the essays seek to address a number of issues.

The first essay investigates the factors that determine the probability of owning a home CI and those influencing the intensity of use by employing the double-hurdle model. The double-hurdle estimation reveals that the use of a home CI is governed by two distinct …

State Regulations Of Smoking In Public Places: Determinants And Implications On The Demand For Smoking And Consumers' Behavior, Ioana Raluca Mazare

Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Economic Cost Of Depressive Disorders: Evidence From A Large Midwest Public University, Alketa Hysenbegasi

Dissertations

This dissertation aims to estimate the total cost of depression and the benefits of its treatment per diagnosed depressed student in Western Michigan University. To accomplish this, first, I measure the overall impact of depression and the effectiveness of its treatment on the student school performance. The empirical evidence show that diagnosed depression decreases student GPA by 0.48 points (almost a half grade), but this impairment is reduced by treatment about 0.43 points. Further, I develop and validate different measurements of student school performance and I observe that the negative effect of diagnosed depression and the positive effect of treatment …

Underdevelopment As Meta-Axiological Dilemma: The Socioeconomic Implications Of African Axiology For Rational Choice Determinants Of Microeconomic Agency, Sundiata Keita Ibn-Hyman

Dissertations

The intergenerational problems of indigence, poverty and social dysfunction that plague African societies are inextricably grounded in the broader issue of ethnocentrism in neoclassical microeconomics. Economic anthropology provides a methodological critique of the conceptual limitations of neoclassical micro-behavioral assumptions narrowly imposed on non-westem economic organization. While recognizing non-westem economic praxes, the sociological implications of strict neoclassical microeconomic agency for non-westem socioeconomic development is conspicuously ignored. The critique fails to specifically consider the impact of neoclassical ethnocentrism to non-westem sociocultural organization and improvement.

This research utilizes an African-centered, social psychological approach to examine the paradigmatic implications of rational choice criteria for …