Economic Theory Commons^™

Confronting The New Reality: Globalisation, The Global Financial Crisis And The State, John H. Farrar, David Mayes

Business papers

Globalisation and the financial crisis have presented major challenges to orthodoxy. This article discusses the implications of these challenges for the role of the state across the globe and argues that it is high time to confront our theory with reality.

Inflation Targeting And Growth: The Role Of The Tradable Sector, Luis Monroy Gómez Franco

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper provides an analytical explanation to the empirical association between monetary policy conducted according to the inflation targeting (IT) framework and the appreciation of the exchange rate, relating it to the literature on the effects of the exchange rate on growth. A two sector small open economy model is developed in which the behavior of the non tradable inflation and the nominal exchange rate are analyzed. The results indicate that the response to inflation variance under the IT regime causes the appreciation trend. Since this trend is not reversed immediately, increasing returns in the tradable sector affect capital accumulation.

Corporate Humanitarian Partnerships, Rebecca C. Keyes

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Mountain Monitor-4th Quarter 2012, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor

Indicators of economic recovery depicted continued progress in the major metropolitan areas of the Mountain West in the fourth quarter of 2012. The region’s employment recovery gained momentum, and solid home-price increases in the region contributed to the nation‘s broader housing recovery. Such inroads bode well for further advances in 2013. At the same time, the region’s output recovery slowed and unemployment refused to budge.

The Business Of Coupons--Do Coupons Lead To Repeat Purchases?, Margaret Peacher Ross

EURēCA: Exhibition of Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement

Abstract:

In recent years, couponing has emerged as a pop-culture phenomenon. Businesses of all types are taking advantage of this resource by revamping their out-dated programs and turning them into something fresh to excite customers. However, many questions remain unanswered concerning the viability, profitability, and usefulness of coupons. This study is an analysis of the effectiveness of coupons in enticing return purchases in the soft-drink category. The dataset is comprised of household level grocery store transactions complied by dunnhumby for 2,500 households over a period of two years. An ordinary least squares regression technique is employed to analyze the ...

Moral Markets And The Problematic Proprietor: How Neoliberal Values Shape Lottery Debates In Nevada, Christopher Wetzel

Occasional Papers

All but seven states have legalized lotteries since New Hampshire ushered in the modern lottery era in 1964. Although casino gaming has been permitted since 1931, Nevada has rejected multiple legislative proposals amend the State Constitution and create a state-run lottery. This paper theorizes the lottery’s absence in Nevada, focusing in particular on the role of the state. Lotteries are distinct from other forms of gaming because states act simultaneously as the operation’s regulator and proprietor. In this case, Nevada’s lottery legalization debates over the last half century reflect the profound moral valence of markets. The state ...

The Impact On The U.S. Economy Of Changes In Wait Times At Ports Of Entry, Bryan Roberts, Nathaniel Heatwole, Dan Wei, Misak Avetisyan, Oswin Chan, Adam Rose, Isaac Maya

Non-published Research Reports

This study estimates the impacts on the U.S. economy of changes in wait times at major Ports of Entry (POEs) due to changes in Customs and Border Protection (CBP) staffing, both increases and decreases. The impacts begin with changes in tourist and business travel expenditures and with changes in freight transportation costs. These changes, in turn, translate into ripple, or multiplier, effects in port regions and the overall U.S. economy. The total impacts of these changes are measured in terms of:

• Gross Domestic Product (GDP)
• Value of time (opportunity costs), and
• Employment, at both regional and national levels ...

Econometric Analysis Of Continuous Time Models: A Survey Of Peter Phillips' Work And Some New Results, Jun Yu

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

Econometric analysis of continuous time models has drawn the attention of Peter Phillips for 40 years, resulting in many important publications by him. In these publications he has dealt with a wide range of continuous time models and the associated econometric problems. He has investigated problems from univariate equations to systems of equations, from asymptotic theory to finite sample issues, from parametric models to nonparametric models, from identification problems to estimation and inference problems, from stationary models to nonstationary and nearly nonstationary models. This paper provides an overview of Peter Phillips' contributions in the continuous time econometrics literature. We review ...

Overfishing: Economic Policies In Finite Resource Biological Pools, Abdullah Nasser

Undergraduate Economic Review

Common-property fishing is a classic example of the tragedy of the commons. Driven by competition, rational fishermen are forced to overfish to maintain marketplace viability. This shortsighted strategy will lead to the depletion of the common resource pool, and ultimately the destruction of the local fishing industry. In this paper, we present a dynamic differential system of a finite-resource fishing pool to model choices faced by average fishermen. We show that the situation mirrors a Prisonor’s Dilemma on the short- and long-terms, where overfishing is always the dominant Nash equilibrium strategy. Additionally, we use the model to analyze a ...

Price Competition With Optimal Product Demonstrations, Raphael Boleslavsky, Christopher Cotton, Haresh Gurnani

Raphael Boleslavsky

We develop a game theoretic model of price competition in which an innovating firm can offer product demonstrations. Placing minimal restriction on the firm's ability to design demonstrations, we show that the equilibrium demonstration resolves some but not all customer valuation uncertainty and allows the innovating firm to attract customers while maintaining a high price. Consumer surplus may be lower with endogenous demonstrations than without demonstrations. Regulation requiring firms to provide fully-informative demonstrations (e.g., generous return policies or inspection periods) can further reduce consumer surplus. The ability to design demonstrations also creates incentives for innovating firms to limit ...

Essays On Industrial Organization And Environmental Economics, Cristina Marie Reiser

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine how regulation by a central authority motivates changes in behavior.

Chapter 1 identifies the role of a tolerance policy as a manager’s regulatory mechanism which can deter worker misconduct in rank-order tournaments. When contestants’ actions cannot be perfectly monitored or doing so is prohibitively costly, misconduct takes place. This chapter develops a theoretical model in which contestants compete for a prize in a symmetric tournament and in which the organizer tolerates some level of misconduct. In addition to showing that zero tolerance does not minimize equilibrium misconduct, it also shows there ...

Social Structure, Non-Market Valuation, And Bargaining, Bruno Moreira Wichmann

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters that explore the effects of social utility on non-market values and bargaining.

Chapter 1 considers the role of social networks in the valuation of public goods. In the model individuals derive utility from both their own direct enjoyment of the public good as well as from the enjoyment of those in their social network. We find that the network increases an individual's valuation for the public good when members of her network have a higher weighted average valuation than she does. The network increases aggregate valuation when it assigns higher importance, that is ...

Blood, Organs And Other Tissues For Sale: Diamela Eltit's Impuesto A La Carne And The Afterwards Of The Neoliberal Development In Latin America., Wanda I. Ocasio- Rivera

Hispanic Studies Publications

Abstract

Blood, organs and other tissues for sale: Diamela Eltit's Impuesto a la carne and the afterwards of the neoliberal development in Latin America.

As Marx elaborated in Capital: Volume I at the moment human labour is sold, the subject participates in an ominous plot where she/he becomes a commodity. In a capitalist mode of production, the subject’s alienation from his/her humanity occurs because the individuals can only express labor through a privately-owned system of production in which he/she is an instrument, an object. This dehumanization process submits the subject under the exchange transactions of ...

A Household Model Of Careers And Education Investment, Jessica F. Young

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper develops a two-stage non-cooperative household game, in which parents make career decisions and an investment into their child’s human capital. The model is solved for Nash equilibrium outcomes and extended for a cooperative solution. In non-cooperative pure strategies, both parents choosing to work is a Nash equilibrium, though there are alternative outcomes when the conditions underlying the career decision are varied. The investment behaviour of agents is analysed. We find that choices are critically affected by the magnitude of the cost (and reflected quality) of a high education investment relative to a low investment, and the intrinsic ...

Interpretation And Construction In Altering Rules, Gregory Klass

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This essay is a response to Ian Ayres's, "Regulating Opt-Out: An Economic Theory of Altering Rules," 121 Yale L.J. 2032 (2012). Ayres identifies an important question: How does the law decide when parties have opted-out of a contractual default? Unfortunately, his article tells only half of the story about such altering rules. Ayres cares about rules designed to instruct parties on how to get the terms that they want. By focusing on such rules he ignores altering rules designed instead to interpret the nonlegal meaning of the parties' acts or agreement. This limited vision is characteristic of economic ...

Gambling On Genes: Ambiguity Aversion Explains Investment In Sisters’ Children, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

Many men invest in their sisters’ children instead of their wives’. Existing theories addressing such behavior depend on the level of paternity probability in such men’s societies being implausibly low. I link this anthropologically observed investment behavior with the experimentally observed phenomenon that some individuals are ambiguity averse. Arguing that men’s decisions are made under ambiguity, I show that an increase in ambiguity aversion results in investment in sisters’, rather than wives’, children. I show that this can happen even under risk neutrality. I also consider the special cases of a SEU maximizer and of extreme ambiguity aversion ...

Robust Deviance Information Criterion For Latent Variable Models, Yong Li, Tao Zeng, Jun Yu

Research Collection School of Economics (Open Access)

It is shown in this paper that the data augmentation technique undermines the theoretical underpinnings of the deviance information criterion (DIC), a widely used information criterion for Bayesian model comparison, although it facilitates parameter estimation for latent variable models via Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation. Data augmentation makes the likelihood function non-regular and hence invalidates the standard asymptotic arguments. A new information criterion, robust DIC (RDIC), is proposed for Bayesian comparison of latent variable models. RDIC is shown to be a good approximation to DIC without data augmentation. While the later quantity is difficult to compute, the expectation { maximization ...

An Introduction To Game Theory: Applications In Environmental Economics And Public Choice With Mathematical Appendix, Matt Bogard

Matt Bogard

Game Theory is a mathematical technique developed to study choice under conditions of strategic interaction (Zupan, 1998). In the sections that follow the concept of a game is defined. The Nash Equilibrium is introduced and several applications are given in the areas of agriculture and public choice. Other topics in game theory are introduced in the context of the work of Elinor Ostrom, including repeated games, grim trigger, and trembling hand trigger strategies. A mathematical appendix follows which introduces notation for games and motivation for the proof of the existence of the Nash Equilibrium.