Digital Commons Network^™

Nobel And Novice: Author Prominence Affects Peer Review, Jürgen Huber, Sabiou M. Inoua, Rudolf Kerschbamer, Christian König-Kersting, Stefan Palan, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Working Papers

Peer-review is a well-established cornerstone of the scientific process, yet it is not immune to status bias. Merton identified the problem as one in which prominent researchers get disproportionately great credit for their contribution while relatively unknown researchers get disproportionately little credit.¹ We measure the extent of this effect in the peer-review process through a pre-registered field experiment. We invite more than 3,300 researchers to review a paper jointly written by a prominent author – a Nobel laureate – and by a relatively unknown author – an early-career research associate –, varying whether reviewers see the prominent author’s name, …

Corruption And Assortative Matching Of Partners In International Trade, Arusha Cooray, Chandan Kumar Jha, Bibhudutta Panda

Economics & Management Publications

Although the effects of corruption on bilateral trade are well-documented, its impact on the composition of trading partners remains unexplored. In this paper, we argue that corruption in a country imposes asymmetric costs on its trading partners depending on their characteristics. Consequently, as the level of corruption in a country changes, its trade flows from some of its trading partners change more than others, depending on their characteristics, changing the composition of its trading partners. We focus on two characteristics of trading partners: (1) the level of corruption and (2) membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Convention …

The Impact Of Carbon Taxes On The Value Of Fossil-Fuel Reserves And The Efficiency Of Climate Policy, William D. Nordhaus

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The present study analyzes the impact of carbon pricing along with other policies on the value of fossil fuel resources, CO₂ emissions, and economic welfare. It employs a model based on the Hotelling analysis of resource values and calibrates this approach to data on fossil resources, costs, demands, and CO₂ emissions. Total fossil-fuel resource rents are today estimated to be $17 trillion (2021 US$) without carbon pricing. Oil and gas rents are unchanged for low carbon taxes but would decline by 40% with a $100/tCO₂ price. The losses in producer values would be only about 10% of …

Taxing Externalities Without Hurting The Poor, Mallesh Pai, Philipp Strack

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We consider the optimal taxation of a good which exhibits a negative externality, in a setting where agents differ in their value for the good, their disutility from the externality, and their value for money, while the planner observes neither. Pigouvian taxation is the unique Pareto efficient mechanism, yet it is only optimal if the planner puts higher Pareto weights on richer agents. We derive the optimal tax schedule for both a narrow allocative objective and a utilitarian objective for the planner. The optimal tax is generically nonlinear, and Pareto inefficient. The optimal mechanism might take a “non-market” form and …

The Doors Of Perception: Theory And Evidence Of Frame-Dependent Rationalizability, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso

ESI Working Papers

We investigate how strategic behavior is affected by the set of notions (frames) used when thinking about the game. In our games, the action set consists of visual objects: each player must privately choose one, trying to match the counterpart’s choice. We propose a model where different player-types are aware of different attributes of the action set (hence, different frames). One of the novelties is an epistemic structure that allows players to think about new frames, after initial unawareness of some attributes. To test the model, our experimental design brings about multiple frames by varying subjects’ awareness of several attributes.

U.S. Financial Literacy: Does Urban-Rural Residency Matter?, Mckenzie Leanne Carvalho

Theses and Dissertations

Financial illiteracy broadly affects people’s financial and economic well-being. The purpose of this thesis is to identify how the magnitudes of financial literacy determinants change under different residency settings. A county-level calculation of financial literacy is created, and logit and negative binomial regressions are employed to compare the relationship between demographic variables and financial literacy in metro/non-metro and urban/rural counties. Data on individual’s financial knowledge and personal characteristics is obtained from the FINRA National Financial Capability Study. Urban and rural residency is determined using USDA ERS Rural-Urban Continuum Codes and the Index of Relative Rurality. These results provide an improved …

The Great Resignation, Unemployment, And Underemployment In The Us: A Study Of Labor Market Segmentation, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

During 2021 and 2022 many news media outlets have been reporting that millions of workers in the US have been quitting their jobs in record numbers. In a global economy rebounding from the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 outbreak and demanding more workers, a high rate of resignations has exacerbated labor shortages and may be aggravating underemployment rates if many workers are choosing not to be part of the labor force or only to work part time. Many reasons have been offered to explain this “Great Resignation” including high day care costs for working parents which may in turn …

Keep Me In, Coach: The Short- And Long-Term Effects Of Targeted Academic Coaching, Serena Canaan, Stefanie Fischer, Pierre Mouganie, Geoffrey C. Schnorr

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

To boost college graduation rates, policymakers often advocate for academic supports such as coaching or mentoring. Proactive and intensive coaching interventions are effective, but are costly and difficult to scale. We evaluate a relatively lower-cost group coaching program targeted at first-year college students placed on academic probation. Participants attend a workshop where coaches aim to normalize failure and improve self-confidence. Coaches also facilitate a process whereby participants reflect on their academic difficulties, devise solutions to address their challenges, and create an action plan. Participants then hold a one-time follow-up meeting with their coach or visit a campus resource. Using a …

Coverage Impacts Of Work Requirements From The Arkansas Medicaid Program, Brett D. Huettner

ETD Archive

I examine changes in Medicaid coverage and insurance status surrounding a work requirement policy implemented within the Arkansas Medicaid demonstration waiver. The policy applied to able-bodied, childless adults, aged 30 to 49, not enrolled as students, and was effective from 2018 to 2019. Eligibility was conditional on policy compliance. Taking a sample from the IPUMS American Community Survey database, I use triple-differences modeling to compare Arkansans subject to the policy with unaffected Arkansans and individuals from a set of control states. I find that the policy pilot group in Arkansas was less likely to be insured or have Medicaid coverage …

How Federal Pollution Discharge Permits Affect U.S. Water Quality: A Study On Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, Cloe C. Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses difference-in-difference regression models to examine how state-level pollution discharge permits on concentrated animal feeding operations affect U.S. water quality. I ultimately deem the permitting to be ineffective at improving water quality, calling attention to the need to re-evaluate the ``socially optimal level of pollution."

Systematic And Idiosyncratic Risks Of The U.S. Airline Industry, Rafiqul Bhuyan, André Varella Mollick, Md Ruhul Amin

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

Understanding the risky nature of the airline industry has received attention in the tourism literature from separate angles. Although the systematic risk of the airline industry has been examined before, idiosyncratic risk has largely been ignored. This study fills this gap in the tourism literature by investigating the effect of passengers’ air travel on systematic and idiosyncratic risks of the U.S. airline industry. Using historical air travel data and utilizing both OLS and fixed-effect models, this paper documents negative relationships between the occupancy of airline seats and idiosyncratic risks for 21 U.S. airline companies. This negative effect of occupancy is …

Data, Competition, And Digital Platforms, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose a model of intermediated digital markets where data and heterogeneity in tastes and products are deÖning features. A monopolist platform uses superior data to match consumers and multiproduct advertisers. Consumers have heterogenous preferences for the advertisers' product lines and shop on- or o§-platform. The platform monetizes its data by selling targeted advertising space that allows advertisers to tailor their products to each consumer's preferences. We derive the equilibrium product lines and advertising prices. We identify search costs and informational advantages as two sources of the platform's bargaining power. We show that privacy-enhancing data-governance rules, such as those corresponding …

Skbi Big 5 Survey 2022 August, Singapore Management University

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

The latest survey results on the largest five economies (Big5) were revised markedly relative to the prior release (pre-Russia-Ukraine conflict), generally indicating weaker growth and higher inflation coupled with incremental ambiguity on the policy front.

International Asset Pricing With Strategic Business Groups, Massimo Massa, Hong Zhang, Hong Zhang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Firms in global markets often belong to business groups. We argue that this feature can have a profound influence on international asset pricing. In bad times, business groups may strategically reallocate risk across affiliated firms to protect core “central firms.” This strategic behavior induces co-movement among central firms, creating a new intertemporal risk factor. Based on a novel data set of worldwide ownership for 2002–2012, we find that central firms are better protected in bad times and that they earn relatively lower expected returns. Moreover, a centrality factor augments traditional models in explaining the cross section of international stock returns.

Vertical Integration And Competitive Balance In Professional Sports: Evidence From Minor League Baseball, Qi Ge, Brad R. Humphreys, Alexander Eisert

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Major League Baseball (MLB) teams regularly call up players from their Minor League Baseball (MiLB) affliates to fulfill roster needs. This paper utilizes a manually collected panel of player call-ups between 1946 and 2019 and studies their impact on competitive balance in the minor leagues. Our results indicate an overall positive relationship between call-ups and competitive balance in the MiLB, with the pro-competitive effect primarily driven by the AA leagues and not AAA leagues. We also  find suggestive evidence of the effect being likely explained by the promotion of MiLB players to MLB, rather than the demotion of MLB players …

How Groupy Is A Group?, Rohit J. Parikh

Publications and Research

Various Cooperating Groups

Why and how do they cooperate

Bees

Chinese troops

BLM demonstrators

The reasons are different in the three cases.

1) Bees cooperate because they are all sisters who have thesame DNA. From a purely evolutionary point of view the survival of one is the survival of all.

2) Chinese troops cooperate because they are obeying a single commander.

3) Black lives people cooperate because they have a single goal, and they have communicated to be together at one time and place.

The purpose of this work is to provide a definition of the "amount" of groupiness, revealed …

Three Essays In Health Economics, Mir Nahid Mahmud

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation comprises three empirical essays. The first essay estimates the long-term health and socioeconomic impact of early life nutritional deficit using the Bangladesh Famine from 1974-1975 as a natural experiment. The second essay investigates if pubic health insurance coverage of “ immigrant children¬” changed as a result of the lift of the “five-year-ban” in the Children Health Insurance Reauthorization Act-2009. The final chapter estimates the relationship between child health conditions and maternal employment using conventional econometric models. To expand the analysis and contribute to the literature, I estimate the relationship by implementing a Multiple Indicator Multiple Causes Model (MIMIC).

Three Essays In Health Economics, Savita Ramaprasad

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation includes three essays in applied econometrics. Each essay involves using econometric and statistical techniques to draw inferences from observational data on the effect of policies and quasi-experiments on various outcomes of social importance.

The Conditional Mode In Parametric Frontier Models, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Yi Yang

Center for Policy Research

We survey formulations of the conditional mode estimator for technical inefficiency in parametric stochastic frontier models with normal errors and introduce new formulations for models with Laplace errors. We prove the conditional mode estimator converges pointwise to the true inefficiency value as the noise variance goes to zero. We also prove that the conditional mode estimator in the normal-exponential model achieves near-minimax optimality. Our minimax theorem implies that the worst-case risk occurs when many firms are nearly efficient, and the conditional mode estimator minimizes estimation risk in this case by estimating these small inefficiency firms as efficient. Unlike the conditional …

The Effects Of Consumer Loan Application Formats And Advertised Terms On Consumer Borrowing Decisions, Alicia M. Johnson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Consumers continue to demonstrate a willingness to accrue more debt. They are also more accepting of increased repayment risk via the acceptance of longer loan terms. Extant research on consumer borrowing consists primarily of experiments designed to assess consumer choices and understand how consumers evaluate loan attributes in relation to one another within consumer borrowing contexts (Kamleitner, Hoelzl, and Kirchler 2012; Ranyard et al., 2006). Thus, prior research examines consumer responses to loan information rather than the generation of loan parameters at the time of financing. With important implications for consumers, marketers of financial products, academic researchers, and federal regulators, …

Full Disclosure: Model Uncertainty In Adjusting For Confounders, Dieudonne Dusenge

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study examines the role of knowledge about underlying causal relationships in classifying controls in order to mitigate omitted- and included-variable biases. Using simulations and accounting examples, the study shows that the researcher may not distinguish good and bad controls because the underlying causal relationships are unobservable, and remedying strategies (such as the relative timing of measurement) may not remove the uncertainty in the classification. Because of the uncertainty about which controls to use, two or more models will be credible as will the distinct estimates derived from them. Next, the study shows that the current standard practice of singling …

The 1-2-3 Of Market Research For Business Startups: A Case Study In Library Instruction, Daniel Le, Marie-Louise Watson

Georgia Library Quarterly

This article describes a practical way to teach student entrepreneurs to search and use market data for business startup plans. The conventional way of teaching students to find articles and business intelligence based on a class assignment can be challenging for many students without an academic business background. This library instruction approach sequentially uses three databases enriched with business data and infographics to support the development of critical thinking for student entrepreneurs. It teaches entrepreneurial personality support, analysis, visualization, and market mapping.

Three Chapters On Investments And Financial Institutions, Cao Fang

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Only the stock selection (“alpha”) decisions of fund managers who trade on firm-specific information should have predictive return content. Faced with the same information, skilled fund managers make similar stock selection decisions. In Chapter one, we introduce a new measure - stock investment quality - which uses fund quality to weight asymmetries in private information reflected in deviations of fund from peer group ownership on stocks in a style segment. We show stocks ranked high on investment quality generate significantly higher excess returns that persist through the ensuing year. The positive investment quality–future return relationship is robust to alternative fund …

The Effect Of Right-To-Work Laws On Subjective Well-Being: A Case Study Of Oklahoma, Tyler Qualls

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Using Oklahoma as a case study, this thesis applies a synthetic controls model to investigate the causal effect of right-to-work (RTW) laws on the well-being of the total population with a particular focus on the most affected subset, blue-collar workers and the less educated. The effect of RTW laws leads to a significant decrease in the happiness of blue-collar workers. To be specific, while results show a possible increase in unhappiness in the total population immediately following the adoption of the RTW law, for the more vulnerable blue-collar workers, the statistically significant negative effect of the law on happiness is …

(Wp 2022-06) Sheila Dow's Open Systems Methodology, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

This paper reviews Sheila Dow’s contributions to open systems thinking as a form of methodological argument and as an important foundation for pluralism in economics. It reviews the origins of her thinking in connection with her distinction between Cartesian/Euclidian and Babylonian thinking in the history of economics, discusses the further development of her views regarding open and closed systems in her 2002 Economic Methodology book and in connection with her ‘structured pluralism’ concept, discusses the 2005 paper co-authored with Victoria Chick, “The Meaning of Open Systems” examines Dow’s and Chick’s view and critique of critical realism in regard to the …

Three Essays On Consumption Smoothing, Logan James Miller

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Macroeconomic theory has established that consumption smoothing leads to higher standards of living. A stable consumption path can lead to more stability and less uncertainty between periods of high and low income. However, there is a wide body of literature that shows people do not consistently smooth their consumption when exposed to adverse income shocks. This dissertation uses experimental and empirical methods to better understand the obstacles people face when trying to smooth their consumption over time. It looks to understand the differences in pairs and individuals’ ability to smooth consumption. It also explores how the household’s level of income …

A Theory Of Crime And Vigilance, Jorge Vásquez

Economics: Faculty Publications

This paper develops a theory of crime in which potential victims elect their vigilance levels. When vigilance expenses are greater than expected property losses, an increase in penalties raises crime, namely, a criminal Laffer curve emerges. This curve is higher and peaks earlier when victims face higher costs. Thus, the government may wish to subsidize vigilance rather than increase penalties. Indeed, an increase in penalties may shift the vigilance levels further away from their socially optimal ones. Finally, the crime rate first rises and then falls in the property value at stake, which is consistent with the empirical evidence.

The Exchange Rate System Reform In China: Some Important Results, Paul S. L. Yip, Yiu Kuen Tse, Yingjie Dong

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide a review and empirical study on the exchange rate system reform in China. In the initial stage of the reform the Chinese central bank PBoC's implicit promise of gradual appreciation helped to contain the appreciation rate and volatility of the renminbi. Subsequently, under US pressure for faster appreciation and hence the PBoC's moderate violation of the implicit promise, there was a significant rise in the appreciation rate and the volatility of the renminbi. The moderate violation deteriorated further, forming a vicious cycle of speculative flows and faster exchange rate changes. Upon the onset of the global financial crisis …

Crime Reduction And Reformation In South Carolina: An Analysis Of Sb 1154, Matthew Torres

All Theses

This thesis evaluates the policy response to the criminal justice crisis of South Carolina, Senate Bill (SB) 1154, dubbed the Omnibus Crime Reduction and Sentencing Reform Act of 2010. SB 1154 adopted a series of “common sense” reforms, including new charges constituting as violent crimes, redefined sentences in the form of reduced penalties and harsher penalties for nonviolent and violent crimes respectively, mandated supervision of individuals on probation or parole, and credit programs for early release of inmates among other provisions intended to reduce inmate population, recidivism and violent crime rates.

I examine three key factors: inmate, imprisonment and violent …

The Economic Returns To Bilingualism In The U.S Labor Market, Mara Macdonald

All Theses

This paper uses pooled cross-sectional data from the General Social Survey to analyze the economic returns of bilingualism to adults in the U.S labor market. Bilingualism in the US is defined as English proficient individuals who also report speaking a foreign language “very well” or “well”. Using OLS Least Squares regression estimation where the dependent variable is the logarithm of earnings, I modify the Mincer earnings function to include foreign language skill variables and controls for observed demographic characteristics. Holding all levels of human capital constant, bilinguals earn 7.7% less than English monolinguals in the U.S labor market; however, this …