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Economic Impact Of Western Michigan University Homer Stryker M.D. School Of Medicine, Jim Robey, Kathleen Bolter, W.E. Upjohn Institute For Employment Research

Reports

No abstract provided.

Technological Efforts, Firm Ownership And Productivity: A Study Of Information Technology Service Firms In India, Asmita Goswami, K. Narayanan

Articles

The article presents differences in firm-level total factor productivity in the information technology (IT) service firms in India over the period 2000–2016. It is an attempt to study whether technological efforts contribute to productivity differences in the firms in conjunction with several other firm specific characteristics. Controlling for endogeneity in inputs, the estimation of productivity through semi-parametric techniques indicates considerable heterogeneity in productivity across firm types. Technological efforts of firms have a significant impact on the productivity of IT firms. Both embodied technology imports and in-house R&D contribute to higher productivity. While the Indian firms are observed to be more …

War Over Measure: Latin American Cultural Policy And The Pedagogy Of Neoliberal States, D. Bret Leraul

Faculty Journal Articles

This article recovers the link between cultural and educational policy in Latin America to understand the neoliberal state’s discursive institution of culture as capital. It does so by studying the form and function of Mexican and Chilean cultural bureaucracies. The calculability and accountability of culture in Chilean cultural policy and the incalculability of Mexico’s culture of favor cultural policy are but two sides of one coin issued by the same neoliberal state form. Both depend on the discursive institution (from above) of culture as cultural capital and labor as human capital reflected (from below) in the formation of Latin American …

The Shirt Of Nessus: International Debt As A Tool Of Hegemonic Control, Omar Hamed Ghannam

Theses and Dissertations

International debt has been a fixture of the global economy and state financing for centuries. The economic logic of accruing international debt and its management is rarely questioned in the literature, even as sovereign debt crises abound. These crises offer a point of examination, re-assessment, and negotiations concerning allocating the burdens. This paper aims to study these debt crises to interrogate the issue of international debt, the depoliticized economic mantras that govern it, their validity, sincerity, and the political and social implications on the indebted polity. This is done by looking at the origins of debt crises, and examining how …

Patience As A Predictor For Environmental Attitudes, Carolina Missura

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper aims to show the relationship between an individual’s value of patience and the degree to which they exhibit pro-environmental attitudes. My hypothesis is that country-wide patience has a strong impact on an individual’s attitudes towards protecting the environment. I present two methods to address this relationship, each method employs a different variable used to measure environmental attitudes. Given some discrepancies in the results from the first method, the second was the one utilized to reach the conclusion. The paper concludes that there is a positive and significant correlation between patience and environmental attitudes.

A Guide To Creating Core Ocean Gdp Accounts, Charles S. Colgan

Publications

Start with a simple question. What does the ocean contribute to the national economy? This might seem like a trivial question. After all, the contributions of other major natural resources such as agriculture or forest products are regularly counted as the output of farming, food, and fibre industries along with lumber and other forest products. But in most countries, there is no identifiable “ocean economy”. Industries like marine transportation or fishing are accounted for, but nothing that ties all the varied ocean-related economic activity together. Without a deliberate effort to identify and measure all relevant economic activity related to the …

College Street Journal (March 2022), College Of The Holy Cross

College Street Journal

College Street Journal serves as a student platform for business-related news, opportunities and resources at Holy Cross. Readers will discover a broad range of important topics from relevant news and economic issues, career development opportunities and advice, as well as Ciocca center and campus-wide opportunities to grow outside of the classroom.

Highlights of this issue include the Women in Business Club, economic impacts on culture, Easter, an alumni interview with Jim Nolan and a faculty editorial.

Lasso For Stochastic Frontier Models With Many Efficient Firms, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Yoonseok Lee

Center for Policy Research

We apply the adaptive LASSO (Zou, 2006) to select a set of maximally efficient firms in the panel fixed-effect stochastic frontier model. The adaptively weighted L1 penalty with sign restrictions for firm-level inefficiencies allows simultaneous estimation of the maximal efficiency and firm-level inefficiency parameters, which results in a faster rate of convergence of the corresponding estimators than the least-squares dummy variable approach. We show that the estimator possesses the oracle property and selection consistency still holds with our proposed tuning parameter selection criterion. We also propose an efficient optimization algorithm based on coordinate descent. We apply the method to estimate …

Big Data And Inflation Forecasting In Nigeria: A Text Mining Application., M. A. Adebiyi, A. O. Adenuga, T. S. Olusegun, O. O. Mbutor

Economic and Financial Review

The success of monetary policy is substantially predicated on the availability of reliable forecast of inflation. However, the shocks arising from COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war have brought about significant economic uncertainties; thus, necessitating the fine-tuning of existing forecasting models of the Central Bank of Nigeria. This study explores the usefulness of public sentiments obtained using machine learning methods to improve the predictive power of the existing short-term inflation forecasting model (STIF) in Nigeria. Findings indicate that, for all components of inflation, models that include the computed sentiment index perform better in both in-sample and out-sample forecasts than those excluding …

Twin Deficits In Nigeria: Where Does The Exchange Rate Fit?, G. K. Sanni, B. A. Gaiya, V. O. Aliyu, S. N. Okafor

Economic and Financial Review

This study investigates the twin deficits hypothesis for Nigeria while accounting for the role of exchange rate. The study utilises annual data series spanning 1981 to 2019 and the ARDL modelling technique for the estimations. Among other findings, the study reveals the existence of a bi-directional causation between current account deficit and fiscal deficit. Similarly, a positive relationship was seen to exist between current account balance and fiscal balance in both the short-run and long-run during periods of exchange rate appreciation and depreciation, thus confirming the role of exchange rate in the twin deficit hypothesis in Nigeria. The study recommends …

Implications Of The African Continental Free Trade Area For Nigeria’S Economic Growth, O. S. Aigheyisi, M. A. Iyoha

Economic and Financial Review

The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of intra-African Trade on Nigeria’s economic growth from 1981 to 2019. To achieve this, the ARDL modeling technique is employed to investigate the short-run and long-run effects of intra-African trade on Nigeria’s economic growth. The study finds that though the short-run effect is positive but not significant; the long-run effect is significantly positive, and robust to alternative estimation techniques. This suggests that expansion of trade among African countries, which is expected to result from the full implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), would have positive growth effect …

Ethical Ai Development: Evidence From Ai Startups, James Bessen, Stephen Michael Impink, Lydia Reichensperger, Robert Seamans

Faculty Scholarship

Artificial Intelligence startups use training data as direct inputs in product development. These firms must balance numerous trade-offs between ethical issues and data access without substantive guidance from regulators or existing judicial precedence. We survey these startups to determine what actions they have taken to address these ethical issues and the consequences of those actions. We find that 58% of these startups have established a set of AI principles. Startups with data-sharing relationships with high-technology firms; that were impacted by privacy regulations; or with prior (non-seed) funding from institutional investors are more likely to establish ethical AI principles. Lastly, startups …

Post Covid-19 Exit Strategies And Emerging Markets Economic Challenges, Joshua Aizenman, Hiro Ito

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We study emerging markets’ 1980s lost growth decade, triggered by the massive reversal of the snowball effect in the US during 1974–1984, finding that higher flow costs of servicing debt overhang explain the dramatic decline in growth rates of exposed emerging markets. We also show how lowering the US cost of servicing its public debt has been associated with higher US, Japan, and Western Europe real output growth rates during the post WWII recovery decades, 1946–1956, and validate that fiscal adjustments of large countries have strong growth and volatility spillovers effects on exposed emerging markets and developing countries.

A Requiem For “Blame It On Beijing” Interpreting Rotating Global Current Account Surpluses, Menzie David Chinn, Hiro Ito

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Global current account imbalances have reappeared, although the extent and distribution of these imbalances are noticeably different from those experienced in the middle of the last decade. What does that recurrence mean for our understanding of the origin and nature of such imbalances? Will imbalances persist over time? Informed by empirical estimates of the determinants of current account imbalances encompassing the period after the global recession, we find that – as before – the observable manifestations of the factors driving the global saving glut have limited explanatory power for the time series variation in imbalances. Fiscal factors determine imbalances, and …

Financial Intermediaries And Contagion In Market Efficiency: The Case Of Etfs, Claire Yurong Hong, Frank Weikai Li, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Capital constraints of financial intermediaries can affect liquidity provision. We investigate whether these constraints spillover and consequently cause contagion in the degree of market efficiency across assets managed by a common intermediary. Specifically, we provide evidence of strong comovement in pricing gaps between ETFs and their constituents for ETFs served by the same lead market maker (LMM). The effects are stronger for ETFs that are more illiquid and volatile, when the underlying constituents of the ETFs are more costly to arbitrage, and for LMMs with more constrained capital. Using extreme disruptions in debt markets during COVID-19 as an experiment, we …

How Do Firms Respond To Reduced Private Equity Buyout Activity?, Yi-Hsin Lo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper presents new evidence on the economic role of private equity buyouts by exploiting the staggered adoption of the constructive fraud provision by U.S. state courts. The law unintentionally shifts the credit default risk borne by existing unsecured creditors of the buyout target to the selling shareholders and lenders in the form of ex-post litigation risk, thereby discouraging buyout activity. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that firms raise less capital, reduce payouts and investments, and form alliances with employees. Firms also avoid positive NPV projects that carry too much risk. These findings are consistent with managers enjoying a …

Occupation Density Estimation For Noisy High-Frequency Data, Congshan Zhang, Jia Li, Tim Bollerslev

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the nonparametric estimation of occupation densities for semimartingale processes observed with noise. As leading examples we consider the stochastic volatility of a latent efficient price process, the volatility of the latent noise that separates the efficient price from the actually observed price, and nonlinear transformations of these processes. Our estimation methods are decidedly nonparametric and consist of two steps: the estimation of the spot price and noise volatility processes based on pre-averaging techniques and in-fill asymptotic arguments, followed by a kernel-type estimation of the occupation densities. Our spot volatility estimates attain the optimal rate of convergence, and …

Bank, Stock Market Efficiency And Economic Growth: Panel Data Evidence From Asean-5, Asia-5 And Oecd-7 Countries, Swee Liang Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper estimates bank and stock market efficiency associations with real per capita GDP growth by examining panel-data across three different regions using Beck-Katz Panel-Corrected Standard Errors (PCSE) regression. It allows heteroskedastic and/or contemporaneously correlated disturbances across panels, with to specify a common first-order autocorrelation within the panel. The results suggest efficiency effects on growth is not unambiguous. The results suggest a threshold beyond which increase in bank overhead cost hurts economic growth, for developing countries. Likewise, there is a threshold beyond which increase in stock market turnover ratio hurts economic growth, for developed countries. One policy implication of the …

A Posterior-Based Wald-Type Statistic For Hypothesis Testing, Yong Li, Xiaobin Liu, Tao Zeng, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

A new Wald-type statistic is proposed for hypothesis testing based on Bayesian posterior distributions under the correct model specification. The new statistic can be explained as a posterior version of the Wald statistic and has several nice properties. First, it is well-defined under improper prior distributions. Second, it avoids Jeffreys–Lindley–Bartlett’s paradox. Third, under the null hypothesis and repeated sampling, it follows a χ2" role="presentation" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; display: inline-block; line-height: normal; font-size: 16.2px; word-spacing: normal; overflow-wrap: normal; white-space: nowrap; float: none; direction: ltr; max-width: none; max-height: none; min-width: 0px; min-height: 0px; border: 0px; position: relative;">χ2 …

An Exploratory Analysis Of Time Series Econometric Data For Retention Forecasting Using Deep Learning, John C. O'Donnell

Theses and Dissertations

Officer retention in the Air Force has been researched many times in an attempt to better predict the personnel needs of the Air Force for the future. There has been previous work done in regards to specific AFSCs and how their retention compares to specific yet similar private sector jobs. This study considers different econometric time series statistics as a feature space and an average Air Force officer separation rate as the response variable for the multivariate time series analysis deep learning techniques. The econometric indicators used in this study are New Business Formations, New Durable Good Orders, and the …

Declining Discount Rates In Singapore's Market For Privately Developed Apartments, Eric Fesselmeyer, Haoming Liu, Alberto Salvo

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Singapore's market for new privately developed apartments exhibits wide quasi-experimental variation in ownership tenure. We develop an empirical model in which prices are decomposed into the utility of housing services and a factor that shifts with asset tenure and the discount rate schedule, which we discipline to vary smoothly over time. We estimate discount rates that decline over time and, to accommodate the observed price differences, fall to 0.5-1.5% p.a. by year 400. The finding that households making sizable transactions do not entirely discount benefits accruing centuries from today is relevant, with the appropriate risk adjustment, for evaluating climate-change investments.

A Risk-Based Approach To Cybersecurity: A Case Study Of Financial Messaging Networks Data Breaches, Xiang Michelle Liu

The Coastal Business Journal

With banking becoming increasingly global and largely digital, a magnitude of data breach incidents resulted from cyberattacks have been observed and can be frequently traced to ineffective security practices and procedures. Cyberattacks do not require physical proximity, nor are they deterred by national borders. Cybercriminals can remain undetected for a long period of time. Such breaches inevitably result in losses of reputation, customer confidence, and in some instances, productivity. The purpose of this study is to take a deeper look into various breaches of the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) messaging network to illuminate vulnerabilities inherent in the …

The Role Of Forensic Accounting In U.S. Counterterrorism Efforts, Amie L. Haun, Madison Gaither, Joanie Sompayrac

The Coastal Business Journal

The September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center directed international attention to the financial component of terrorist operations. The demand for forensic accounts has continued to increase because of a growing intolerance for fraud and terrorist activity. Forensic accountants have and will continue to have a vital role in United States' counterterrorism efforts in the post-9/11 era by detecting acts of fraud and money laundering. Comprehensive review of relevant literature including books, peer-reviewed articles, government databases, court records and news media confirms that forensic accountants are equipped with special skills and analytical tools that make them valuable members of …

Extraordinary Item Classification Eliminated From The Income Statement: Some Supportive Evidence, Mark G. Mccarthy, Dennis O'Reilly, Douglas K. Schneider

The Coastal Business Journal

Accounting Standards Update 2015-01 formally eliminated the reporting of "extraordinary items" in the income statement for fiscal years beginning after December 15, 2015. Gains and losses previously reported as extraordinary items and presented separately below income from continuing operations, are now reported as other gains and losses and included in income from continuing operations. The use of the extraordinary item classification fell sharply after 2002 when gains and losses from the early extinguishment of debt were no longer required to be reported as extraordinary items. By 2003 less than 100 publicly traded firms reported extraordinary items and in 2011 the …

The Impact Of The Carrollton Greenbelt On Residential Housing Prices: A Spatial Approach, Heather R. Bono, Lisa L. Gezon, William J. Smith, Macy D. Walker

The Coastal Business Journal

The Carrollton GreenBelt is a linear park encircling the City of Carrollton Georgia. The GreenBelt differs from other linear parks in that it is an entirely new construction and was not built upon existing rail lines, as was the Atlanta Beltline and the nearby Silver Comet Trail. Using GIS, data from the Carroll County Tax Assessor's office and spatial econometric techniques, we estimate local fair-market housing values within the hedonic framework to measure the relationship between home prices and access to the GreenBelt. We find the expected positive effects from the number of bedrooms, bathrooms and square footage, but access …

Teaching Aggregate Planning In Operations Management, Johnny C. Ho, Francisco J. López, David Ang

The Coastal Business Journal

This paper describes some unique characteristics of Aggregate Production Planning, which make the teaching of this topic in Operations Management courses somewhat different than other topics. A challenge when teaching Aggregate Planning is to make students understand the need to apply trial-and-error approaches to test, evaluate, and improve Aggregate Plans. In other words, do not just learn how to do the computations needed to develop an Aggregate Plan under certain conditions, but to actually analyze it and try to modify it with the objective of producing an improved plan. We recommend that in operations management courses, Aggregate Planning is taught …

Finishing Or Winning? The Variables That Impacted The Nascar Championship In The Chase I Format (2004-2013), Tracy D. Rishel, Elizabeth W. Baker, C. Barry Pfitzner

The Coastal Business Journal

Since 2004 NASCAR has evolved its championship format in an effort to put more emphasis on wins, thus encouraging drivers to take more risk to get the race win. Past research has shown that drivers taking a conservative approach, by completing laps rather than going for wins, results in championships. This research attempts to determine if previous models are robust in predicting factors that influence individual points accumulation towards winning the championship and if driver consistency, rather than winning, remains the dominant factor in predicting NASCAR's championship standings.

Assessment Of Essays In A Management Science Course, Julie Ann Stuart Williams, Claudia J. Stanny, Randall Reid, Christopher Hill, Maxwell Rankin, Katie Martin Rosa

The Coastal Business Journal

The ability to communicate a problem statement and an appropriate quantitative business method are important professional skills. This paper presents an analysis of student skill in writing a final exam essay that describes how a specific organization can improve decision making using mathematical programming, the business modeling approach that was the focus of the course. Although performance on assessments of professional writing and the description of a mathematical programming model averaged less than 80% across all essays written, improved writing when students received formative feedback in 2013 suggests that teaching students to identify and articulate the development and use of …

Distribution And Movements Of Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus) Along The Northern South Carolina Coast: A Research Partnership With Ecotourism, Courtney N. Dunn, Dani C. Silva, Emily P. Deborde, Robert F. Young

The Coastal Business Journal

Assessments of bottlenose dolphin stocks rely on current information about the distribution and abundance of specific populations. We partnered with two ecotourism dolphin watch businesses to investigate bottlenose dolphins along the northern South Carolina coast. The temporal and spatial distribution of dolphins was examined by comparing dorsal fin images from research-based surveys with photo-identification efforts from commercial dolphin watch groups. Matches between survey locations and times revealed patterns of seasonal residency, potential migratory dispersal between seasons, and variable patterns for home range size. An enhanced understanding of the structure of local populations will contribute to the management of local fisheries, …

Economic Convergence: Evidence From Counties In The Carolinas, C. Barry Pfitzner, Steven D. Lang

The Coastal Business Journal

This paper applies a common empirical methodology in testing for convergence of per capita incomes across the counties in North and South Carolina. Decennial census data on per capita income for the 46 counties of South Carolina and the 100 counties of North Carolina are used to test for two types of income convergence over the 1959-2010 time span. The results indicate that both beta and sigma convergence occurred across the counties for the full period, but there were sub-periods (the 1980s, and the 2000s) over which neither measure of convergence was evident. In fact, measured by the beta method, …