Digital Commons Network^™

Effective Community Development In Informal Settlements Through Analysis Of The Kibera Slum In Kenya, Chloe Powell

Undergraduate Theses

Many people have a heart for those living in poverty, but very few have a mind for how to fight poverty well, according to Harvard University Professor Michael Fairbanks. The Kibera slums in Kenya is no exception to the plethora of challenges informal settlements face concerning development, including a lack of security of tenure, corruption, an unhealthy business environment, and a lack of jobs. Kibera has been the subject of numerous studies and development efforts throughout the years and has faced a long history of failed government interventions. In 2020, Kenya received almost $4 billion from the U.S. in official …

Contingent Payments In Procurement Interactions - Experimental Evidence, Matthew J. Walker, Jason Shachat, Lijia Wei

ESI Working Papers

A primary objective of creating competition among suppliers is the procurement of higher quality goods and services at lower prices. When procuring non-standard goods, it is often difficult to write a complete specification of desired quality in the contract. Thus, payments to suppliers cannot be perfectly conditioned on the quality provided. We propose a correlated contingent payment contract to mitigate the supplier moral hazard problem while retaining competitive supplier selection based on price. We treat the probability of implementing contingent payments as probabilistic. The selected supplier’s payment is, according to a fixed probability, either the amount of their bid or …

Are Retirement Planning Tools Substitutes Or Complements To Financial Capability?, Gopi Shah Goda, Matthew R. Levy, Colleen Flaherty Manchester, Aaron Sojourner, Joshua Tasoff, Jiusi Xiao

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to understand how a web-based retirement saving calculator affects workers’ retirement-savings decisions. In both conditions, the calculator projects workers’ retirement income goals. In the treatment condition, it also projects retirement income based on defined-contribution savings, prominently displays the gap between projected goal and actual retirement income, and allows users to interactively explore how alternative, future contribution choices would affect the gap. The treatment increased average annual retirement contributions by $174 (2.3 percent). However, effects were larger for those with greater financial knowledge, suggesting this type of tool complements, rather than substitutes for, underlying financial …

A Review And Critique Of The Harrod-Domar Aggregate Growth Model, Chris C. Le Bourgeois

Augsburg Honors Review

The purpose of this paper will be three-fold: first, to review the Harrod-Domar "Long-Run Aggregate Growth Model," second, to examine the importance of investment in human beings, and third, to critique the Harrod-Domar model.

The Effects Of An Ellis Act Eviction On Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status, Brian J. Asquith

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Rent-control advocates argue that its strongest feature is offering tenants strong protections from economic displacement. Nonetheless, rent control may have negative effects on tenants, as previous research has shown that these tenants have longer commutes and higher unemployment rates because they are incentivized to stay in place even after their location is no longer optimal. I study what happens to tenants when they are displaced from their rent-controlled apartments by exploiting a California law called the Ellis Act that allows landlords in Los Angeles and San Francisco to evict tenants even if they are lease-compliant, under the condition that all …

The Limits Of Financial Equity: The Federal Reserve, The Depression Of 1921, And The End Of Wilsonian Progressivism, Terril Hebert

LSU Master's Theses

The Limits of Financial Equity: The Federal Reserve, the Depression of 1921, and the End of Wilsonian Progressivism is an examination of monetary policy and centralized macroeconomic planning in the American economy during the inflationary spiral of the 1910s that culminated in the Depression of 1921. Put forward for consideration is the successful populist campaign for agricultural credit equity by the burgeoning Federal Reserve System; set against a backdrop of intentional inflation, world and domestic citizens competed against as the price and supply chain distortions perpetuated by the policing of American commerce by the Food Administration, A. Mitchell Palmer’s Department …

The Keynesian Stimulus Model: Stimulating Economic Activities With Stimulus Payments, Christopher Osuoha

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Governments use cash transfers as a fiscal measure to stimulate economic activities during shocks. As COVID-19 continues to ravage economies globally, governments worldwide have responded with fiscal and monetary policies to manage its economic impact. In addition, the U.S government has intervened with direct transfers to provide liquidity to prevent a prolonged shock. However, opinions are divided on the efficacy of the Keynesian stimulus policy to generate enough of a multiplier to stimulate economic activities compared to the monetarist approach. This study analyzes the classical Keynesian model and compares it with the monetarist model to provide insight for policymakers into …

Competing Visions Of Fundamental Global Change: Comparative Book Review Of Rethinking Humanity By Seba & Arbib, Cristian Ziliberberg

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

No abstract provided.

Trade Books, Comics, And Local History: Exploring Fred Shuttleworth’S Fight For Civil Rights, Jeremiah Clabough, Caroline Sheffield

The Councilor: A National Journal of the Social Studies

This one-week project utilized the trade book Black and White: The Confrontation between Reverend Fred L. Shuttlesworth and Eugene Bull Connor (Brimner, 2011) to explore non-violent advocacies during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement. Students read selected excerpts from the trade book and created a comic narrative to convey their understanding of the civil rights advocacies of Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, Alabama. The students were able to accurately portray Rev. Shuttlesworth’s actions in a cohesive narrative using evidence from the trade book within their comics. The students demonstrated a solid understanding of non-violent advocacies, and why these methods …

The Impact Of Critical Illness Insurance Among Older Adults In China, Jiaosi Li

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Although China has made considerable progress towards universal health insurance coverage, high out-of-pocket medical expenditures due to catastrophic illnesses (e.g., cancer, heart attack, or stroke) remain a concern. To address this concern, the Critical Illness Insurance (CII) program providing additional coverage for high medical expenditures was introduced in 2012. We combine data on the timing of CII implementation across prefecture cities in China with the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS) to examine its impact on medical expenditures, inpatient utilization, health outcomes, household consumption and savings. To account for the staggered implementation across regions, we employ the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) …

Bridging Research And Practice To Achieve Community Prosperity, Kathleen Bolter, Michelle Miller-Adams, Timothy J. Bartik, Brad J. Hershbein, Kyle Huisman, Bridget Timmeney, Brian J. Asquith, Gabrielle Pepin, Lee Adams, Jessica Brown, Gerrit Anderson, Allison Colosky

Reports

No abstract provided.

Long Social Distancing, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Steven J. Davis

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Many working-age Americans say they will continue some forms of social distancing after the COVID-19 pandemic ends. We uncover this long social distancing phenomenon in our monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes. It is stronger among older persons, the less educated, and those who live with or care for persons at high risk from infectious diseases. Regression models fit to individual-level data suggest that social distancing lowered labor force participation by 2.4 percentage points in 2022, 1.2 points on an earnings-weighted basis. Daily interactions with at-risk persons and long COVID experiences lead to larger drags on participation. When combined …

Prolegomena To A Buddhist(Ic) Critique Of Capitalism, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

Not even three decades removed from Francis Fukuyama’s post-Cold War proclamation of the “End of History,” the Western world is now undergoing a crisis of conscience – at the very least – with respect to both capitalism as an economic system and neoliberalism as its less-recognized but ever-present ideological foundation. The financial crisis of 2008, the subsequent Great Recession, the Occupy movement(s) of 2011, the 2016 challenge of self-styled Democratic Socialist Senator Bernie Sanders for the Democratic nomination, and growing anxiety about the fate of the planet, particularly among the young, have opened up new avenues of critique, and brought …

Innovation In Futures Markets: Event Contracts, Speculation, And Hedging, Fabio Mattos

Cornhusker Economics

The CME Group has recently launched a new type of contract whose payoffs are based on specific events. These contracts are called event contracts but are also known as prediction contracts or information contracts. They are short-term contracts that expire at the end of each trading day. Traders can take positions in these contracts as they predict whether the price of a given asset will finish the trading day above or below a set value.

Discusses: How are they traded? Main characteristics of event contracts. Event contracts offered by CME group and event examples on October 21, 2022. Why were …

Personalised Pricing, Vijay Victor

Management Collection

With the advent of big data analytics, online prices can now be tailor made for each individual or a group of individuals exhibiting similar characteristics such as taste, preferences, income etc. With the availability of more and more reliable information about the willingness and ability to pay of the existing and prospective customers, the sellers are able to classify them into more refined groups. This highly customised pricing technique is popularly termed as personalised pricing. With the current pace of technological progress, although it is technically possible to estimate the willingness to pay of a consumer in real time, whether …

Logic, Co-Ordination And The Envelope Of Our Beliefs, Rohit J. Parikh

Publications and Research

Each of us has a story which we can think of as a set of beliefs, hopefully consistent. We make our decisions in view of our beliefs which may be probabilistic, in the general case, but simple yes or no as in this paper. Our beliefs are our envelope just as the shell of a tortoise is its envelope.

Decision theory - or single agent game theory tells us when to make the best choice in a game of us against nature. But nature has no desire to further or frustrate our efforts. Nature is mysterious but not malign.

Things …

While Waiting For Rain: Community, Economy, And Law In A Time Of Change, John Henry Schlegel

Books

What might a sensible community choose to do if its economy has fallen apart and becoming a ghost town is not an acceptable option? Unfortunately, answers to this question have long been measured against an implicit standard: the postwar economy of the 1950s. After showing why that economy provides an implausible standard—made possible by the lack of economic competition from the European and Asian countries, winners or losers, touched by the war—John Henry Schlegel attempts to answer the question of what to do.

While Waiting for Rain first examines the economic history of the United States as well as that …

Bitcoin Adoption And Beliefs In Canada, Daniela Balutel, Christopher Henry, Jorge Vásquez, Marcel Voia

Economics: Faculty Publications

We develop a tractable model of Bitcoin adoption with network effects and social learning, which we then connect to unique data from the Bank of Canada’s Bitcoin Omnibus Survey for the years 2017 and 2018. The model determines how the probability of Bitcoin adoption depends on (1) network effects; (2) individual learning effects; and (3) social learning effects. After accounting for the endogeneity of beliefs, we find that both network effects and individual learning effects have a positive and significant direct impact on Bitcoin adoption, whereas the role of social learning is to ameliorate the marginal effect of the network …

Analysis Of The Relationship Between International Trade And Economic Growth Of Jordan, Mohammed Ali Salem Shubeilat

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Unified Factor Model Estimation And Inference Under Short And Long Memory, Shuyao Ke, Peter C. B. Phillips, Liangjun Su

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper studies a linear panel data model with interactive fixed effects wherein regressors, factors and idiosyncratic error terms are all stationary but with potential long memory. The setup involves a new factor model formulation for which weakly dependent regressors, factors and innovations are embedded as a special case. Standard methods based on principal component decomposition and least squares estimation, as in Bai (2009), are found to suffer bias correction failure because the order of magnitude of the bias is determined in a complex manner by the memory parameters. To cope with this failure and to provide a simple implementable …

Event-Related Potentials Of Individuals With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder Performing The Attention Network Task, P. Dennis Rodriguez, Justin E. Stauffacher

Midwest Social Sciences Journal

The current study sought to investigate the neural basis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) by examining the performance of individuals with ADHD on the Attentional Networks Test (ANT) by Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, and Posner (2002), while recording electroencephalography (EEG) utilizing event-related potentials (ERP) methodology. Fifty-seven university students were divided into three groups: control, ADHD-inattentive subtype (ADHD-IA), and ADHD-combined/hyperactive impulsive subtype (ADHD-C/HI). The average peak amplitudes of the P300 waveform for each group were compared and analyzed for performance on each attention network measured by the ANT: the alerting network, the orienting network, and the executive control network. The average P3 …

G3 Cpec Summit ‘21 - Cpec: Emerging Geo-Political And Geo-Economic Landscape Opportunities And Challenges, China Study Centre, Institute Of Business Administration, Nasir A. Afghan, Huma Naz Baqai, Ans Dahr

China Study Centre - Research and Reports

In the wake of recent developments in the region, specifically US withdrawal from Afghanistan and the role of new Afghan government in regional connectivity and economic integration, IBA China Study Centre commenced one-day day hybrid summit on “CPEC: Emerging Geo-political & Geo-economic Landscape Opportunities and Challenges”

The aim of this one day summit was to explore and identify the future opportunities and challenges for China Pakistan, and Afghanistan’s economic, information, and trade corridor. Our objective was first to understand the challenges faced by the Afghan government in Afghanistan. Also, to brainstorm and find the common and shared areas for future …

Staying Out Of Trouble? Effect Of High School Career Counseling On Crime, Stephen Barnes, Louis-Philippe Beland, Swarup Joshi, Barton Willage

Economics Faculty Works

Human capital-based models of crime imply that increasing educational attainment will decrease crime. A growing body of empirical work has supported this hypothesis, however the evidence is still limited. We investigate if a high school career coaching program, Career Compass of Louisiana, decreases youth crime during and after high school. Career Compass provides students counseling services regarding college admissions, financial aid, and career exploration. We use student-level administrative education and crime convictions data and a difference-in-differences empirical strategy to test for an education-crime relationship among high school seniors. While existing research shows the Career Compass program increases post-secondary enrollment, we …

Resetting Foreign Economic Relations : Part I, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

The 2021 National Security Policy has made geo-economics its main pivot. It is therefore essential to look in a coherent and comprehensive manner how Pakistan’s economic relations with other nations should evolve to meet this objective. In designing foreign economic policy we should always keep in mind that such a policy would be a by-product of the country’s larger foreign and domestic economic policies. For example, if foreign policy with one particular country or group of countries is silent, ambivalent or agnostic then a foreign economic policy cannot be built upon strong economic cooperation with that country or group. Similarly, …

Robust Testing For Explosive Behavior With Strongly Dependent Errors, Yiu Lim Lui, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A heteroskedasticity-autocorrelation robust (HAR) test statistic is proposed to test for the presence of explosive roots in financial or real asset prices when the equation errors are strongly dependent. Limit theory for the test statistic is developed and extended to heteroskedastic models. The new test has stable size properties unlike conventional test statistics that typically lead to size distortion and inconsistency in the presence of strongly dependent equation errors. The new procedure can be used to consistently time-stamp the origination and termination of an explosive episode under similar conditions of long memory errors. Simulations are conducted to assess the finite …

The Poverty Impacts Of Labor Heat Stress In West Africa Under A Warming Climate, W. Saeed, I. Haqiqi, Q. Kong, M. Huber, J. R. Buzan, S. Chonabayashi, K. Motohashi, T. W. Hertel

Department of Agricultural Economics Faculty Publications

This paper assesses the poverty implications of heat stress-related labor capacity losses based on simulations using a global general equilibrium economic model. Compared with past studies, we use a more precise measurement of heat stress, assign labor capacity losses to specific labor types by sector, and employ an economic model that contains highly disaggregated economic sectors and regions. This model allows us to determine global and regional economic impacts that account for international dependencies. We focus attention on seven West African countries for which we determine the implied changes in real incomes of households near the poverty line. For these …

Nevada Workforce Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion Study 2022, Jan Jones Blackhurst, Becky Harris

International Gaming Institute Faculty Research

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) metrics enable organizations to set concrete goals and self-monitor their performance. In 2021, Nevada’s legislature passed Senate Bill No. 267 (SB267), authorizing the University Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV) to study DEI benchmarks in the State. The study is designed to produce actionable results capable of informing policy and employer best practices in Nevada. This study was piloted in 2021, with study participation taking place between January 3-April 30, 2022.

The questions in the study were crafted based on DEI public policy considerations as well as metrics for gauging the scope of offerings available to women …

Unfair Commercial Practices In A Pit Market: Evidence From An Artefactual Field Experiment, Francesco Bogliacino, Rafael Charris, Cristiano Codagnone, Frans Folkvord, Felipe Montealegre, Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva

ESI Publications

Commercial practices such as drip pricing, reference pricing and best-price guarantee can be used to set higher prices and mislead consumers, but protective measures can restore efficiency. In a placebo-controlled market experiment, we examined a treatment allowing for the use and misuse of commercial practices. Three additional treatments tested the effects of formal sanctions, informal sanctions and a regret nudge. We found that commercial practices led to higher prices, cheating was systematic and regret nudging was ineffective. Furthermore, formal and informal sanctions reduced both the likelihood of using commercial practices and the likelihood of cheating, leading to welfare increases.

In Favor Of Bringing Game Theory Into Urban Studies And Planning Curriculum: Reintroducing An Underused Method For The Next Generation Of Urban Scholars, Brian Mcdonald Gardner

Dissertations and Theses

By looking at some historical examples of Urban Studies literature and theory (and a detailed dive into Neil Smith's "Toward a theory of gentrification…") this thesis makes the case that Game Theory has valid insights to add to the foundation of Urban Studies and Planning and should be included in Masters and Doctorate level curriculums. As a discipline Game Theory has revolutionized multiple other fields, and can be used both mathematically and/or non-mathematically. It is postulated below that the inclusion of Game Theory would help scholars and practitioners arrive at better outcomes. This case is made by reviewing various areas …

The Economic Crisis Index Quarterly Newsletter, Darrol J. Stanley, Donald M. Atwater

Graziadio Working Paper Series

This is the first issue of a quarterly newsletter publication that will update the Economic Crisis Index ™. This issue explains in detail the methodology of the Economic Crisis Index (ECI) and its comparison to other similar indices. Future newsletters will center on the ECI number and its implication to the American economy. These newsletters will be posted on the Pepperdine University Digital Commons.