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Education, Inclusive Growth And Development In Nigeria: Empirical Examination, Emmanuel Onwioduokit

Bullion

Fundamental changes in the intellectual and social stance of any society have always been preceded by educational renaissance. This paper investigates the role of education in achieving and sustaining economic development in Nigeria. Abstracting from the theory, the paper examines education in Nigeria, its enhancing, including comparative analysis with selected African countries and its connection with economic development. The ARDL model was adopted to examine both the short run and long run relationships between education and development proxied by HDI and education and economic growth within the context of inclusive growth model. Evidence from the estimated long run ARDL model …

The Impact Of External Debt On Agricultural Production In Nigeria (1980-2016): Autoregressive Distributed Lag Modelling, Aishatu U. Yerima, Hussaini M. Tahir

Bullion

The study analyzed the impact of external debt on Nigeria's agricultural production from 1980 to 2016 using secondary data obtained from Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin and the World Development Indicators (WDI). Augmented DickeyFuller unit root test and the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound testing approach to co-integration were utilized, to achieve the objectives of the study. Empirical results revealed that the variables were cointegrated, indicating that they exhibited long run relationship, both in the short and the long run. External debt stock (EDS) had a significant positive impact on agricultural production (AGP), indicating that EDS positively impacted …

Food Insecurity: A Closer Look At How Households Cope With Food Insecurity And How This Phenomenon Affects Their Overall Health, Burak O. Tan

Dissertations

This study focused on the lived experiences of low-income households who coped with food insecurity and explored their worldview on the health impacts of battling with this phenomenon in the Grand Rapids Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). While the main research question focused on how low-income households coped with food insecurity, the following were the focus of the research analysis and served as the empirically testable framework: a) addressing the impact of poverty on affordability of nutritious food, b) addressing the impact of food deserts on accessibility and availability of nutritious food, c) addressing the coping strategies used to battle food …

Density Deconvolution With Laplace Errors And Unknown Variance, Jun Cai, William C. Horrace, Christopher Parmeter

Center for Policy Research

We consider density deconvolution with zero-mean Laplace noise in the context of an error component regression model. We adapt the minimax deconvolution methods of Meister (2006) to allow estimation of the unknown noise variance. We propose a semi-uniformly consistent estimator for an ordinary-smooth target density and a modified “variance truncation device" for the unknown noise variance. We provide a simulation study and practical guidance for the choice of smoothness parameters of the ordinary-smooth target density. We apply restricted versions of our estimator to a stochastic frontier model of US banks and to a measurement error model of daily saturated fat …

Estimating A Fiscal Reaction Function For Nigeria, Patrick Ogiji, Kayode J. Ajayi

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

The study examines the determinants of fiscal balance and the impact of the selected macroeconomic variables on the primary balance of government. It aims to estimate the fiscal reaction function for Nigeria and determine whether the implementation of fiscal policy is sustainable in the long-run. A Fiscal Reaction model was developed and ARDL technique was used to establish the relationships and interactions among the variables. The study investigated whether the fiscal measures pursued by the government from 2000:Q1 to 2018:Q4 was adequate in addressing the accumulation of huge debt. The analysis of the stylized facts reveals that the government had …

Determination Of Optimal Level Of Foreign Reserves In Nigeria, Ishola W. Oyeniran, Solomon A. Alamu

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study adopts the ’buffer stock model’ advanced by Frenkel and Jovanovic (1981) to estimate the optimal level of foreign reserves for Nigeria. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag Approach (ARDL) was used to estimate the optimal foreign reserves function. The results show that the Nigeria’s optimal reserves level responses to adjustment cost of holding reserves and exchange rate volatility and that import and opportunity cost of reserves holding have insignificant impact on Nigeria’s optimal foreign reserves. The short run and long run estimates of the buffer stock model support the theory that foreign reserves holding in Nigeria is more sensitive to …

Portfolio Balance Approach To Asymmetries, Structural Breaks And Financial Crisis: Testing A Model For Nigeria, Portfolio Balance Theory, Oluwasegun B. Adekoya

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

This study tests the Portfolio Balance Theory (PBT) for Nigeria for the period starting from September 1997 to September 2018. It extends the hypothesized linear inverse relationship between exchange rate and stock price to include asymmetries and structural breaks. It further examines the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis on the PBT to determine its stability after the crisis. The full sample results show that the PBT holds for Nigeria and asymmetries and structural breaks matter in the nexus between stock price and exchange rate. However, the impact of stock price on exchange rate diminished in the long-run with …

Religion In Economic History: A Survey, Sascha O. Becker, Jared Rubin, Ludger Woessmann

ESI Working Papers

This chapter surveys the recent social science literature on religion in economic history, covering both socioeconomic causes and consequences of religion. Following the rapidly growing literature, it focuses on the three main monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and on the period up to WWII. Works on Judaism address Jewish occupational specialization, human capital, emancipation, and the causes and consequences of Jewish persecution. One set of papers on Christianity studies the role of the Catholic Church in European economic history since the medieval period. Taking advantage of newly digitized data and advanced econometric techniques, the voluminous literature on the Protestant Reformation studies its …

Do Oil Price Returns Impact Exchange Rates Fluctuations: Evidence From The Top Four Oil Importing Countries In Asia – China, India, Japan And South Korea, Alexander Nti

Doctoral Dissertations (DBA)

Using daily data obtained from Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis database, we convert oil price and exchange rates to first difference logarithm to examine the link between oil price and exchange rates. We apply Johansen Cointegration models to examine relationship between the series, and our results indicate the variables are not cointegrated. Augmented Dicky Fuller test indicates that the series are nonstationary at level, but stationary at first difference. Impulse response analysis based on unrestricted vector autoregressive (VAR) yields varying results for the relationship between oil price and exchange rates across the currencies of the four countries considered. Thus, …

Shareholder Litigation Rights And Capital Structure Decisions, Nam H. Nguyen, Hieu V. Phan, Eunju Lee

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

We exploit the staggered adoption of the universal demand (UD) laws across U.S. states, which impedes shareholder rights to initiate derivative lawsuits, as a quasi-natural experiment to examine the relation between shareholder litigation rights and firm capital structures. We find that weaker shareholder litigation rights due to the UD laws adoption lead to higher financial leverage, which enhances firm value. Furthermore, the positive relation between the UD laws adoption and financial leverage is more pronounced for firms exposed to higher shareholder litigation risk ex ante or financially constrained firms. Our evidence is consistent with lower shareholder litigation threats motivating firms …

The Accumulation Of It Capability And Its Long-Term Effect On Financial Performance, Jin Ho Kim

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

Many scholars have been studying information technology (IT) capability and its impact on business performance. However, it has been debated whether the IT capability influences firm performance because prior literature shows mixed results. To understand this phenomenon, I performed two studies in this research, placed in two parts. First, by deploying the new concept of accumulation of IT capability, I attempted to reinvestigate the relationship between IT capability and business performance. Next, I examined what factors influence the accumulation of IT capability. In the first part, I suggested two novel constructs that measure the extent of the accumulation of IT …

The Effect Of Endogenously-Determined Bullying On Test Scores, Hisham Bin Yacob Patel

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The problem of bullying is one of the main sources of adverse school environment. In this dissertation, I explore the effect of bullying on test scores, under the assumption that bullying is endogenously determined. Comparing my estimates with that from traditional OLS, I find that estimates from OLS grossly underestimates the effect of bullying on short-term student outcomes. I also find significant evidence of heterogeneity across various sub-groups; for example, male students are found to be less affected by bullying as compared to their female peers. Furthermore, male students are also found to be less affected by physical bullying while …

Examining The Impact Of It Investment On Insurer Productivity: A Bootstrapped Malmquist Frontier Analysis Approach, Jee Yuen Yew

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This paper attempts to examine productivity changes of insurance companies in Singapore as represented by bootstrapped Malmquist indices, generated from a data envelopment analysis (DEA)-based frontier analysis, and attribute these changes to an increasing investment in information technology infrastructure and equipment, and increasing investment in staff enhancement. Through this analysis, the author finds that there has been a general increase in productivity and efficiency from 2011 – 2017, as seen from changes in the kernel density functions of productivity change between the two periods. The author also finds, through running a panel tobit regression model, that there is a positive …

Estimating Selection Models Without Instrument With Stata, Xavier D’Haultfœuille, Arnaud Maurel, Xiaoyun Qiu, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article presents the eqregsel command for implementing the estimationand bootstrap inference of sample selection models via extremal quantile regression. The command estimates a semiparametric sample selection model withoutinstrument or large support regressor, and outputs the point estimates of the ho-mogenous linear coefficients, their bootstrap standard errors, as well as the p-valuefor a specification test.

Is Predicted Data A Viable Alternative To Real Data?, Tomoki Fujii, Roy Van Der Weide

Research Collection School Of Economics

It is costly to collect the household- and individual-level data that underlies official estimates of poverty and health. For this reason, developing countries often do not have the budget to update their estimates of poverty and health regularly, even though these estimates are most needed there. One way to reduce the financial burden is to substitute some of the real data with predicted data. An approach referred to as double sampling collects the expensive outcome variable for a sub-sample only while collecting the covariates used for prediction for the full sample. The objective of this study is to determine if …

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

Research Collection School Of Economics

Deviance information criterion (DIC) has been widely used for Bayesian model comparison, especially after Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) is used to estimate candidate models. This paper first studies the problem of using DIC to compare latent variable models when DIC is calculated from the conditional likelihood. In particular, it is shown that the conditional likelihood approach undermines theoretical underpinnings of DIC. A new version of DIC, namely DICL, is proposed to compare latent variable models. The large sample properties of DICL are studied. A frequentist justification of DICL is provided. Like AIC, DICL provides an asymptotically unbiased estimator to …

Identifying Latent Grouped Patterns In Conintegrated Panels, Wenxin Huang, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a panel cointegration model with latent group structures that allows for heterogeneous long-run relationships across groups. We extend Su, Shi, and Phillips (2016, Econometrica 84(6), 2215-2264) classifier-Lasso (C-Lasso) method to the nonstationary panels and allow for the presence of endogeneity in both the stationary and nonstationary regressors in the model. In addition, we allow the dimension of the stationary regressors to diverge with the sample size. We show that we can identify the individuals' group membership and estimate the group-specific long-run cointegrated relationships simultaneously. We demonstrate the desirable property of uniform classification consistency and the oracle properties of …

Efficiency, Quality Of Forecasts And Radner Equilibria, Shurojit Chatterji, Atsushi Kajii

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study a simple two period economy with no uncertainty and complete markets where agents trade based on forecasts about the second period spot price. We propose as our solution concept a set of forecasts with the following properties: there exist (heterogenous) forecasts contained in this set that lead to efficient allocations, the set contains only those forecasts that correspond to some efficient equilibrium, and Önally that the forecasts assign positive probability to the actual market clearing spot price. We call such a set of prices an efficient equilibrium with ambiguity, and interpret it as a generalization of Radner equilibrium …

Two Essays On The Microstructure Of The Housing Market: Agents' Diffused Effort And Sellers' Behavior Bias, Zhaohui Li

Theses and Dissertations in Business Administration

For the first essay, we generalize the classic Williams [1998 RFS] brokerage model by introducing the diffused effort. That is, the agent can cross-utilize effort spending on one listing to another one. Besides, the agent can manage heterogeneous housing assets. One counterintuitive finding in Williams’ paper is the absence of the agency problem. As a special case in our model, we recover the agency problem. We examine the positive externality due to the diffused effort and show that it depends on the agent’s inventory size. Hence there exists a trade-off between agents’ effort spending on existing listings and on finding …

Building For Culture: How Municipal Ownership Of Cultural Facilities Influences Annual Arts Funding In American Cities, Adam M. Sachs

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores how local government support for arts and culture varies across 24 American cities. It has proven to be challenging for researchers to accurately measure municipal arts support. Research on cultural policy has also often focused on the federal level, despite total city expenditures far exceeding national or state government support. This thesis attempts to take an accurate pulse of city expenditures in 2017 and correlates those spending levels to the variation in city ownership of arts facilities. Rooted in the historical perspectives of the ‘new institutionalism’ and path-dependency, this paper argues that past decisions about taking ownership …

Essays On The Education Production Function, Daniel Dench

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters which test interventions along several dimensions of the education production function. In chapter one, I run a field experiment comparing the effect of two interventions, (1) an email nudge telling students similar problems to their homework will be on the exam and (2) grading the homework, on attempting homework. I find both interventions increase homework attempts: nudging by 3 percentage points and grading by 72 percentage points. Instrumenting for the effect of attempting the homework using grading, I find that attempting problems from the homework leads to an increase in the probability of getting …

Essays In Financial Economics And Applied Macroeconomics, Marius Mihai

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters that cover topics in finance and macroeconomics.

Chapter 1 - Do Credit Booms Predict U.S. Recessions?

This paper investigates the role of bank credit in predicting U.S. recessions since the 1960s in the context of a bivariate probit model. A set of results emerge. First, credit booms are shown to have strong positive effects in predicting declines in the business cycle at horizons ranging from six to nine months. Second, by isolating the effect of credit booms, I identify their contributions to recession probabilities which range between three and four percentage points at a …

Red Sea, White Tides, And Blue Horizons, John P. Devine

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Eric Hobsbawm, in his effort to explain the fundamental divide which produced the Second World War, convincingly argues that “the crucial lines in this civil war were not drawn between capitalism as such and communist social revolution, but between ideological families: on the one hand the descendants of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the great revolutions including, obviously the Russian revolution’, on the other hand, its opponents.” This thesis argues that the American Civil War was a “great revolution” that represented a crucial transformative point in the formation of these two waring factions. The struggle was especially influential on the theory …

Original Gangsters: Genre, Crime, And The Violences Of Settler Democracy, Sean M. Kennedy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Building upon examinations of genericity, subalternity, and carcerality by Black, Indigenous, and women-of-color feminist scholars, my dissertation offers an account of how truth claims are produced and sustained to limit social change in representatively governed societies. Taking the gangster genre as my lens, I first resituate the form, assumed to depict white-ethnic conflict in the U.S. and Europe, as a type of resistance to race-based political economic policies imposed by imperial regimes. After linking the subaltern classes of pre-20th-century southern Europe, southern Africa, South Asia, and the U.S. South—all subjected to criminalization as a mode of colonial and capitalist control—I …

Essays In Macroeconomics Of Emerging Markets, Miguel Acosta Henao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Chapter 1. Law enforcement and the size of the informal sector.

I assemble new cross-country evidence showing that contrary to the standard view, the relationship between the size of the informal sector and tax rates is, at best, ambiguous. Law enforcement and informality also show no clear relation. Motivated by these findings, I augment a standard two-sector (formal and informal) small open economy model with endogenous law enforcement that depends on the size of the informal sector (measured by its assets) and government expenditure. I use a micro-dataset from Colombia to show that both taxes and law enforcement are necessary …

Identifying Latent Grouped Patterns In Cointegrated Panels, Wenxin Huang, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a panel cointegration model with latent group structures that allows for heterogeneous long-run relationships across groups. We extend Su, Shi, and Phillips (2016, Econometrica 84(6), 2215-2264) classifier-Lasso (C-Lasso) method to the nonstationary panels and allow for the presence of endogeneity in both the stationary and nonstationary regressors in the model. In addition, we allow the dimension of the stationary regressors to diverge with the sample size. We show that we can identify the individuals' group membership and estimate the group-specific long-run cointegrated relationships simultaneously. We demonstrate the desirable property of uniform classification consistency and the oracle properties of …

Anchorite Sacred Caves In Serbia: Balancing Between Pilgrimage And Religious Tourism Development, Aleksandar Antić

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

Serbia is a country with diverse karst terrain, full of various surface and underground karst formations. This terrain is one of the factors that influenced the development of cultures and civilizations in this area. Many archaeological findings indicate that prehistoric people found refuge, safety and peace in many caves in present-day Serbia. The natural environment has also influenced many spiritual endeavours, which have shaped cultural identities throughout history. In this study, Orthodox anchorite sacred caves in Serbia are explored, as well as their related pilgrimage activities and potential for religious tourism development. For the purpose of this research, three pilgrimage …

The Effect Of Piracy Website Blocking On Consumer Behavior, Brett Danaher, Jonathan Hersh, Michael D. Smith, Rahul Telang

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

In this study, we ask what drives the success or failure of various supply-side anti-piracy enforcement actions such as piracy website blocking. We do this in the context of three court-ordered events affecting consumers in the United Kingdom: We first study Internet Service Providers’ blocking of 53 video piracy sites in 2014 and of 19 piracy sites in 2013, and we then study the blocking of a single dominant site, “The Pirate Bay,” in 2012.

We show that blocking 53 sites in 2014 caused treated users to decrease piracy and to increase their usage of legal subscription sites between 7% …

The Impact Of Basic Education Reform On The Educational Participation Of 16 To 17-Year-Old Youth In The Philippines, Geoffrey Ducanes, Dina Joan S. Ocampo

Economics Department Faculty Publications

The study measures the impact on the school participation of 16 to 17-year-old learners in the Philippines of the implementation of the Senior High School program (SHS), which came into full effect in school year 2017–2018. The SHS program, which extended secondary education in the country from four to six years, was the most ambitious education reform action in the country in recent memory. The study found that the SHS program resulted in an increase in overall school participation rate of at least 13 percentage points among 16 to 17-year-olds. Perhaps more importantly, the increase in school participation rate was …

Disamenity Or A Signal Of Competence? The Empirical Political Economy Of Local Road Maintenance, Benjamin Blemings, Margaret Bock

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Empirical results find different conclusions than theoretical evidence of how electorates perceive road work. This paper uses a geographically smaller unit of analysis than prior work, political alignment, local election cycles, and difference-in-differences. It finds political distortions in invasive road maintenance timing and rules out maintenance seasonality. Spatial discontinuity plots leveraging ward boundary cutoffs confirm the shift. Results identify new public distortions to road maintenance, local election cycles, which are widespread and frequent. The estimates are used to calculate financial costs of local elections on road maintenance. Local elections have cost medium-large U.S. cities over $185.5 million from 1960- 2020.