Economics Commons^™

Incentives To Improve Economic Conditions: A Field Experiment In Medellin, Colombia, Lauren Skora

Master Theses

The motivation for this research is to replicate the Oakland based Family Independence Initiative (FII) and to test the components of this model. The FII program claims its success stems from a bottom-up approach structured around setting life-improving goals, mutual support groups, and small monetary incentives to achieve results. As the popularity of this program continues to gain momentum in the United States, we designed a field experiment to measure the impact of incentives on goal achievement and economic conditions as well as the overall impact of the FII model. We enrolled close to 200 small business owners in four ...

The Pigou-Dalton Principle And The Structure Of Distributive Justice, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

The Pigou-Dalton (PD) principle recommends a non-leaky, non-rank-switching transfer of goods from someone with more goods to someone with less. This Article defends the PD principle as an aspect of distributive justice --- enabling the comparison of two distributions, neither completely equal, as more or less just. It shows how the PD principle flows from a particular view, adumbrated by Thomas Nagel, about the grounding of distributive justice in individuals' "claims." And it criticizes two competing frameworks for thinking about justice that less clearly support the principle: the veil-of-ignorance framework, and Larry Temkin's proposal that fairer distributions are those concerning ...

Equity By The Numbers: Measuring Poverty, Inequality, And Injustice, Matthew D. Adler

Faculty Scholarship

Can we measure inequity? Can we arrive at a number or numbers capturing the extent to which a given society is equitable or inequitable? Sometimes such questions are answered with a “no”: equity is a qualitative, non-numerical consideration.

This Article offers a different perspective. The difficulty with equity measurement is not the impossibility of quantification, but the overabundance of possible metrics. There currently exist at least four families of equity-measurement frameworks, used by scholars and, to some extent, governments: inequality metrics (such as the Gini coefficient), poverty metrics, social-gradient metrics (such as the concentration index), and equity-regarding social welfare functions ...

Europe’S Little Tiger?: Reassessing Economic Transition In Slovakia Under The Mečiar Government 1993-1998, David A. Wemer '14

The Gettysburg Historical Journal

Vladimir Mečiar, the first Prime Minister of independent Slovakia, is often criticized for his suppression of free media, political repression, and the widespread corruption of his government from 1993-1998. Mečiar has also been attacked for his economic policies, which critics suggest slowed down privatization and left Slovakia in a huge debt crisis. A closer look at macroeconomic data, however, demonstrates an impressive economic record for Mečiar, who oversaw several years of strong GDP growth, and relatively low levels of unemployment and inflation. By slowing down the privatization process, retaining control of key industries, and maintaining the social safety net, Mečiar ...

Inclusive Business: Using For-Profit Business Models To Address Global Poverty, Samuel James Conner

Senior Honors Papers

Due to the rise of globalization, modernization, and the Internet revolution, awareness of global poverty has expanded, making its eradication a chief goal of the global development community for the twenty-first century. Though corporations are often expected to participate in social and community development initiatives without regard for profits, this paper presents inclusive business as a way for businesses to profitably engage impoverished segments of society. Inclusive businesses seek to expand their consumer bases or strengthen their supply chains by moving into new markets among the poor that have limited access to global markets and remain largely untapped. The research ...

Radical Student Activism In The 1930s And Its Comparison To Student Activism During Occupy Wall Street, Andrew J. Pierce

Senior Honors Projects

In order to understand the present we must first understand the past. The United States may be a country founded on principles of democracy and republicanism, but students in universities across the nation have aligned themselves, historically, with some heterodox philosophies over the years. Whether it was Communism or Socialism in the 1930’s, or left libertarianism and direct democracy during the recent Occupy protests, students have long considered whether the policies of the United States government were really working in their best interests.

On campus in Depression-era America, Leftist student groups began to rise up and attempted to change ...

Demographic Changes And Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence From Asia, Sijia Song

Honors Projects

Asia has witnessed robust economic growth since the 1960s and the so-called “East Asian economic miracle”. Even till today when the world’s largest economies are suffering from debt and banking crises, emerging markets in Asia have managed to maintain rapid growth. In the meantime, significant demographic changes are taking place in Asian countries. Using an economic growth model, this article further examines the effects of demographic changes on economic growth in thirteen Asian countries during the period from 1965 to 2009. The results indicate negative effects of growth in the total population and the young population on economic growth ...

Bias In The Mean Reversion Estimator In Continuous-Time Gaussian And Lévy Processes, Yong Bao, Aman Ullah, Yun Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

Continuous-time L evy processes have become increasingly popular in the asset pricing literature and estimation of the mean reversion parameter has attracted attention recently. This paper develops the approximate nite-sample bias of the ordinary least squares or quasi maximum likelihood estimator of the mean reversion parameter in continuous-time L evy processes. Simulations show that in general the approximate bias works well in capturing the true bias of the mean reversion estimator under difference scenarios. However, when the time span is small and the mean reversion parameter is approaching its lower bound, we find it more difficult to approximate well the ...

Wage, Income And Consumption Inequality In Japan, 1981-2008: From Boom To Lost Decades, Ken Yamada, Jeremy Lise, Nao Sudo, Michio Suzuki, Tomoaki Yamada

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

In this paper we document the main features of the distributions of wages, earnings, consumption and wealth in Japan since the early 1980s using four main data sources: the Basic Survey on Wage Structure (BSWS), the Family Income and Expenditure Survey (FIES), the National Survey of Family Income and Expenditure (NSFIE) and the Japanese Panel Survey of Consumers (JPSC). We present an empirical analysis of inequality that specifically considers the path from individual wages and earnings, to household earnings, after-tax income, and finally consumption. We find that household earnings inequality rose substantially over this period. Inequality in disposable income and ...

Demography, Development And The Origin Of Democracy: A Model With Case Studies Of Arachic Athens And Maritime England, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

No abstract provided.

Variable Selection In Nonparametric And Semiparametric Regression Models, Liangjun Su, Y. Zhang

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

This chapter reviews the literature on variable selection in nonparametric and semiparametric regression models via shrinkage. We highlight recent developments on simultaneous variable selection and estimation through the methods of least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso), smoothly clipped absolute deviation (SCAD) or their variants, but restrict our attention to nonparametric and semiparametric regression models. In particular, we consider variable selection in additive models, partially linear models, functional/varying coefficient models, single index models, general nonparametric regression models, and semiparametric/nonparametric quantile regression models.

A Linear Regression Analysis For Understanding High School Grade Point Average (Gpa), Christine Warner

Celebration of Undergraduate Scholarship

This project analyzes different aspects that may contribute to the grade point average (GPA) of high school students. GPA is important because it is one of the fundamental measures of student success. I gathered data on 206 individuals from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997-2010. I selected variables for the regression analysis from categories including general motivation for success and optimism; use of time; other academic measures; and health habits and lifestyle. Using SPSS to run the regressions, I found that variables that I believed most related to GPA – such as amount of sleep, time ...

China's 80后 And 90后: The Next Generation Of Leaders In The World's Next Superpower, A Students-Teaching-Students Course, Patrick Slavin

Senior Honors Projects

In light of China’s recent reemergence as a global superpower, it is becoming increasingly important for westerners to understand its history and culture. For current college students, the culture of China’s youth is particularly pertinent.

In this project, a course, HPR 107: Chinese Youth Culture, was designed and taught through the Students-Teaching-Students program, which provides senior Honor’s Program students the opportunity to design and teach their own Honor’s Program course. The HPR 107 course focuses on China’s 80后 and 90后 generations, those born in the 1980s and 1990s, respectively.

This multi-faceted project includes: subject matter ...

Next Generation Public Health Delivery: Optimizing Health And Economic Impact, Glen P. Mays

Glen Mays

Improving population health in the context of significant policy and economic change will require governmental public health agencies to rethink their roles within the U.S. health and social services systems, giving much greater attention to "catalytic" functions intended to mobilize, direct, and coordinate the actions of others. A growing body of evidence and experience suggests that such changes are likely to be feasible, effective, and efficient.

Information And Communication Technologies Implications For Social And Economic Development, Wilson Halder

Master's Level Graduate Research Conference

This presentation examines issues surrounding broadband based ICTs (Information and Communication Technologies) and the implications for the role of the government, the private sector, the community and academia in supporting the utilization of broadband (internet connectivity) for social and economic development. The study being presented aims to identify key topic areas and questions for further collaborative research and to inform government policy development for an accessible and ubiquitous broadband infrastructure across both urban and rural regions. Living in the society of the Information Age, connectivity has become as vital as hydro, electricity and the roads and bridges that we move ...

(Wp 2013-05) Future Implications Of Debt And Deleveraging In The United States Economy, Abdur Chowdhury, Patrick Brown

Economics Working Papers

This paper will take a broad based approach in analyzing the structure of the U.S. economy with a particular emphasis on the disruptive U.S. recession and financial crisis which began circa 2008. The role of the U.S. government and the implications high levels of fiscal debt have on the projected growth path of the U.S. economy will be the primary focus of the paper. The discussion will show that the U.S. has likely entered a new, much more difficult stage in its history of economic growth. The short to medium term growth potential of the ...

(Wp 2013-04) Securitization Of Credit Card Debt And Its Determinants, Farrokh Nourzad, Katherine Szczesniak, William Hunter

Economics Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Cash-In-Hand, Wives-In-Power: An Exploratory Analysis Of Microfinance In Jordan, Lauren Pugh

Master Theses

Microfinance is an economic policy complimentary to advancing female empowerment. Empowerment is particularly relevant in patriarchic Islamic contexts in the Middle East, however little research exists. Due to counterfactual creation and inconsistent empowerment measurement, the true impact is debated. This research proposes intra-spousal decision-making outcomes as the appropriate proxy to empowerment and uses a nuanced approach of counterfactual creation by utilizing responses from previous microfinance borrowers. Survey data from a Jordanian MFI is used to examine the endogeneity story and cash-in-hand effects on intra-spousal decision-making outcomes. An instrumental variable estimation technique finds a weak link between microfinance and empowerment.

Renewable Resource Extraction: Experimental Analysis Of Resource Management Policies Under Assumptions Of Resource Migration, Kevin Lugo '13

Student Publications

This paper presents research using a spatially explicit and dynamic common pool resource experiment to compare renewable resource extraction behavior between four treatments combining (1) open access and sole ownership institutions with (2) mobility and non-mobility of the renewable resource. The primary purpose of this research is to test the theory that introducing resource mobility into a sole ownership regime will remove the incentive for subjects to maximize the resource, instead causing them to revert to the myopic strategy predicted for the open access regime. I also test the hypothesis that open access firms are indifferent to resource dispersal. The ...

Sana Competencia, Jose Luis Sardon

Jose Luis Sardon

Sana competencia entre el Perú y Chile debe ayudar a ambos países en su camino al desarrollo.