Economic Policy Commons^™

Statedata: The National Report On Employment Services And Outcomes Through 2016, Jean Winsor, Jaimie Ciulla Timmons, John Butterworth, Alberto Migliore, Daria Domin, Agnes Zalewska, John Shepard

John Butterworth

Recent legislation and regulation governing Medicaid Home and Community-Based Services (HCBS), the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014 (WIOA), and settlement agreements between states and the U.S. Department of Justice are clarifying federal intent and paving the way to supporting opportunities for people with disabilities to have meaningful jobs in their communities. With an increasing emphasis on integrated employment and an Employment First philosophy, the nation is poised for transformation that could put Americans with disabilities on a path out of poverty and towards self-sufficiency. However, there remains a significant gap in employment rates between people with and ...

Platforms And The Rule Of Reason: The American Express Case, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

In Ohio v. American Express Co., the Supreme Court applied antitrust’s rule of reason to a two-sided platform. The challenge was to an “anti-steering” rule, a vertical restraint preventing merchants from shifting customers who offered an AmEx card from to a less costly alternative such as Visa or Mastercard.

A two-sided platform is a business that depends on relationships between two different, noncompeting groups of transaction partners. For example, a printed periodical such as a newspaper earns revenue by selling both advertising and subscriptions to the paper itself. Success depends on a platform’s ability to maintain the appropriate ...

Is Authoritarianism Bad For The Economy? Ask Venezuela – Or Hungary Or Turkey, Nisha Bellinger, Byunghwan Son

Political Science Faculty Publications and Presentations

Democracy is at risk worldwide. And the economy may be, too.

Seventy-one out of the world’s 195 countries saw their democratic institutions erode in recent years, according to the 2018 year-end report by democracy watchdog Freedom House, a phenomenon known as “democratic backsliding.” Signs of backsliding include elected leaders who expand their executive powers while weakening the legislature and judiciary, elections that have become less competitive and shrinking press freedom.

Shining A Light On The Federal Reserve’S Foreign Affairs, Peter Conti-Brown, David T. Zaring

Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative

Throughout its history, the U.S. Federal Reserve has engaged in international diplomacy, outside the bounds of (and sometimes in conflict with) the priorities of the White House and U.S. State Department. In directing monetary policy, the Fed’s primary concern is to benefit the U.S. economy. In the process, the Fed at times acts in concert with foreign central banks, as was the case in setting new bank regulations after the 2008 financial crisis. At other times, the Fed acts in ways that other countries view as detrimental to their economic interests. Either way, the Fed operates ...

The Impact Of The Durbin Amendment On Banks, Merchants, And Consumers, Vladimir Mukharlyamov, Natasha Sarin

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

After the Great Recession, new regulatory interventions were introduced to protect consumers and reduce the costs of financial products. Some voiced concern that direct price regulation was unlikely to help consumers, because banks offset losses in one domain by increasing the prices that they charge consumers for other products. This paper studies this issue using the Durbin Amendment, which decreased the interchange fees that banks are allowed to charge merchants for processing debit transactions. Merchant interchange fees, previously averaging 2 percent of transaction value, were capped at $0.22, decreasing bank revenue by $6.5 billion annually. The objective of ...

Rethinking Retirement For The 21st Century, Stephen C. Russo

Major Papers

Canada’s labour force has been gradually growing older in recent decades. An aging labour force creates significant problems for the country and the future growth of our economy. With an aging labour force, comes the need to start rethinking how Canadians look at retirement in the 21^st century and how both the government and private sector can contribute solutions to adapting to an older workforce. This problem is not unique to Canada, most of the industrialized west has been or will begin to experience the same demographic shift as we are in Canada. The main challenge this paper ...

Slogans Appropriate To The Legacy Of Martin Luther King Jr., Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

For printing signs, banners, posters, tee shirts, and bumper stickers (and for preaching sermons) that are appropriate to the legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., please consider the following slogans: ABOLISH WAR, ABOLISH POVERTY, AMEND THE CONSTITUTION, SUPPORT AN ECONOMIC BILL OF RIGHTS, JOBS FOR ALL, GUARANTEED INCOME FOR ALL, SUPPORT UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME, and GOOD NEWS TO THE POOR - Luke 4:14-19.

The Power Of Ranking: The Ease Of Doing Business Indicator And Global Regulatory Behavior, Rush Doshi, Judith G. Kelley, Beth A. Simmons

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

The proliferation of Global Performance Indicators (GPIs), especially those that rate and rank states against one another, shapes decisions of states, investors, bureaucrats, and voters. This power has not been lost on the World Bank, which has marshaled the Ease of Doing Business (EDB) index to amass surprising influence over global regulatory policies – a domain over which it has no explicit mandate and for which there is ideological contestation. This paper demonstrates how the World Bank’s EDB ranking system affects policy through bureaucratic, transnational, and domestic-political channels. We use observational and experimental data to show that states respond to ...

Sanitation, Ek Prem Katha: The Impact Of Sanitation On Education In Indian Government Schools, Romanshi Gupta

Scripps Senior Theses

The Total Sanitation Campaign is an initiative launched by the Government of India in 1999 to accelerate sanitation coverage throughout the country. This thesis measures the impact of the Total Sanitation Campaign on education in Indian government schools. I assess whether access to toilets, access to water or access to both toilets and water impact the following parameters of education: literacy, current enrollment in school or completed years of education. Data is sourced from the Indian Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005, sorted for the nineteen major states in India and aggregated at a district level for each state. The analysis ...

One Step At A Time: Does Gradualism Build Coordination?, Maoliang Ye, Jie Zheng, Plamen Nikolov, Sam Asher

Economics Faculty Scholarship

This study investigates a potential mechanism to promote coordination. With theoretical guidance using a belief-based learning model, we conduct a multi-period, binary-choice, and weakest-link laboratory coordination experiment to study the effect of gradualism – increasing the required levels (stakes) of contributions slowly over time rather than requiring a high level of contribution immediately – on group coordination performance. We randomly assign subjects to three treatments: starting and continuing at a high stake, starting at a low stake but jumping to a high stake after a few periods, and starting at a low stake while gradually increasing the stakes over time (the Gradualism ...

Summary, Initial Observations, And Getting To A Tentative Theory Of Public Investment Behavior, Arwiphawee Srithongrung, Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

This chapter evaluates the 12 countries' capital management practices according to the systematic public capital management and budgeting process described in Chapter 1. The chapter characterizes and classifies the management practices of the twelve countries based on the authors' evaluation using the case study descriptions. The authors offer some initial observations based on comparisons across the case study countries and analysis of relationships between capital management and budgeting practices and political, economic, and public sector variables. The chapter proposes a tentative theory of public investment behavior and offers five propositions regarding the factors driving different practices across the case study ...

A Systematic Public Capital Management And Budgeting Process, Arwiphawee Srithongrung, Juita-Elena (Wie) Yusuf, Kenneth A. Kritz

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

This chapter introduces the readers to a public capital management and budgeting process and its role in generating public infrastructure networks. The main purpose of the chapter is to describe the normative public capital management and budgeting practices that are recommended by the public finance literature. These normative practices are segregated into four main components: (1) long-term capital planning, (2) capital budgeting and financial management, (3) capital project execution and project management, and (4) infrastructure maintenance. Given that the literature recommends specific practices to maximize efficiency in public capital spending, the four main components, combined, are referred to as the ...

Is Antitrust's Consumer Welfare Principle Imperiled?, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

Antitrust’s consumer welfare principle stands for the proposition that antitrust policy should encourage markets to produce output as high as is consistent with sustainable competition, and prices that are accordingly as low. Such a policy does not protect every interest group. For example, it opposes the interests of cartels or other competition-limiting associations who profit from lower output and higher prices. It also runs counter to the interest of less competitive firms that need higher prices in order to survive. Market structure is relevant to antitrust policy, but its importance is contingent rather than absolute – that is, market structure ...

The Spirit Is Willing, But The Flesh Is Weak: Contemporary Pan-Africanism And The Challenges To A United States Of Africa, Adesola Adeyemo

Master's Theses

Establishing a ‘United States of Africa’ to the average individual is deemed as a mythical idea in contemporary Africa, irrespective of the popularity of this idea several years ago. Today, the idea is idealized as overambitious – considering the balkanized state of the continent post-colonialization. Because of this, attempts made since then have favored enforcing regional integration over continental integration. Undeniably, this idea would not have come into being if it wasn’t for the concept of Pan-Africanism - which has for long guided the political and socio-economic policies created on the continent. The goal of this research is to explore the ...

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review Fall 2018

Gettysburg Social Sciences Review

No abstract provided.

Prophylactic Merger Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

An important purpose of the antitrust merger law is to arrest certain anticompetitive practices or outcomes in their “incipiency.” Many Clayton Act decisions involving both mergers and other practices had recognized the idea as early as the 1920s. In Brown Shoe the Supreme Court doubled down on the idea, attributing to Congress a concern about a “rising tide of economic concentration” that must be halted “at its outset and before it gathered momentum.” The Supreme Court did not explain why an incipiency test was needed to address this particular problem. Once structural thresholds for identifying problematic mergers are identified there ...

The Pain In Spain: Examining Andalusia's Youth Unemployment Crisis, Bianca D. Lennon

Pell Scholars and Senior Theses

This paper examines the youth unemployment crisis in the autonomous community of Andalusia by assessing employment policies that are currently in place. Since the economic crisis nearly a decade ago, there has been very little change in the high rates of Andalusian youth unemployment, which as a whole, has left the region, the country and the European Union at risk due to a lack of inefficient policies. By utilizing anecdotal evidence paired with facts and figures released by the European Union, recommendations to adjust employment policies such as the Youth Guarantee and PRAEM are given in order to shine a ...

Three Essays On The Impacts Of China’S Monetary Policy, Shen Chen

Dissertations

China has experienced high speed of economic growth, trying to catch up with the developed countries. Monetary policy has played a more and more important role in China. This dissertation studies the impacts of China's monetary policy on China's housing market, stock market, and China's economic growth.

The first essay examines macroeconomic determinants of China's housing price by constructing a VAR model. Granger Causality tests, impulse response functions and variance decompositions are used to analyze the impacts of macroeconomic factors on the housing price. By using the monthly data from 2005 to 2015, the results show ...

Assessing Rice Consumers’ Preferences And Willingness To Pay In Haiti, Cleeford Pavilus

Theses and Dissertations

In the last 30 years, rice has become the number one food staple in Haiti, and rice imports have outpaced domestic production to supply the country’s increasing rice demand. Policy makers support the claim that increasing local rice supply will not only reduce the dependency on imported rice but also upheave the national economy. However, there is a lack of information on Haitian consumers’ preferences for rice to aid the development of the local rice supply chain. This research aims to bridge that gap by assessing Haitian consumer preferences and willingness to pay for selected rice quality characteristics. The ...

State Foreclosure Law: A Neglected Element Of The Housing Finance Debate, Brian D. Feinstein

Penn Wharton Public Policy Initiative

Proponents of robust mortgage finance regulation would do well to look to the states, and specifically to the regulatory effects of state-mandated judicial foreclosure. Judicial foreclosure, which is authorized in almost half of U.S. states, requires that lenders seeking to foreclose on a mortgage file an action in state court. This not only provides borrowers with a forum for holding lenders accountable for their behavior and obligations, but puts the onus on the lender to show that the requirements for foreclosure have been met. It also aids borrowers by delaying the foreclosure process and allowing them to remain in ...