Digital Commons Network^™

Close To Home? Five Key Facts About Child Care Customer And Worker Commutes, Gabrielle Pepin, Jonathan Borowsky, Elizabeth E. Davis, Aaron Sojourner

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Parents often cite location and convenience as important factors in choosing a child care provider. We use data on individual mobility from GPS in cell phones to study commutes to each licensed early childhood care and education (ECE) provider in 14 states separately for center customers, center workers, and customers of home-based child care providers. We document five key facts about ECE customer and worker commutes. One, center customers and workers commute farther than home-based customers to ECE providers. Two, substantial shares of customers and workers commute 10+ miles to their ECE provider. Three, commute distances to ECE providers vary …

Neural Networks In Economics: A Selective Review, Xiaohong Chen, Luis Hoderlein, Jonas Lieber

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The "deep learning revolution" has led to remarkable success of neural networks in applications across a wide range of fields, such as computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, code generation, protein structure prediction, image and video generation, and dynamic control. This review introduces neural networks to economists. Recent advances and challenges in approximation theory, neural network architecture, computation, econometric theory and practice are presented. Finally, we survey the rapidly evolving applications of modern neural networks and Large Language Models in economic research.

Passed Through Or Pushed Back? Exchange Rate Effects On Manufacturing Trade Prices In Indonesia And The Asean Plus Three, Fatikha Rizky Kurnia, Miguel Angel Esquivias, Wee-Yeap Lau, Unggul Heriqbaldi

Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking

This study analyzes the Exchange Rate Pass-Through (ERPT) on export and import prices in Indonesia’s manufacturing trade with ASEAN Plus-three countries (China, Japan, and South Korea) using monthly data from 2016 to 2022. Employing the Nonlinear (NARDL) models, we examine the degree and asymmetry of ERPT across five key manufacturing sectors for each partner. The NARDL model confirms asymmetric price responses to currency appreciation and depreciation in several sectors. The findings reveal significant sectoral and country-specific variations. Some export sectors experience complete pass-through in the short term but shift to negative complete passthrough in the long run. Meanwhile, imports from …

Does Green Electricity Mitigate Carbon Emission Externalities? Industry-Specific Effects On Firm Profitability, Operational Efficiency, Valuation, And Market Risk In Taiwan Listed Companies, Mutiara Eka Puspita, Wei Hwa Pan, Bon Long Hsia, Huynh Phu Tan

Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking

his study explores the relationship between carbon emissions and firm financial performance across industries and how green electricity adoption moderates this effect. Using 9,925 firm-year observations from the Taiwan Economic Journal, we estimate panel regressions and compare Fixed Effects robust and Driscoll-Kraay (1998) standard errors to ensure robustness. Two-way and three-way interaction models reveal a green electricity paradox: biotech firms benefit, while financial and high-tech sectors decline. These findings highlight the need for sector-specific ESG investment models and tailored policy support to ensure an equitable green transition. The study contributes by integrating environmental-financial dynamics with industry heterogeneity in emerging markets

The Other Side Of Peruvian Private Pension System, Paolo Daniel Jara

Journal of New Finance

Between 2020 and 2025, Peru's Congress authorized eight extraordinary withdrawal rounds from the Private Pension System (SPP), liquidating USD 38 billion. This paper argues that the trajectory is the empirical convergence of two analytically distinct failures. The first, from below, reflects the mismatch between the system's behavioral assumptions and a heterogeneous, predominantly informal workforce. The second, from above, reflects short-cycle electoral incentives, institutional asymmetry between Congress and the regulator, and slippery-slope dynamics. The paper proposes a reform combining free disposal of pension funds with individual fiscal responsibility, mediated by a binding waiver of the state-funded solidarity pension.

[Review Of] The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete For Wealth, Power And People, Steven Pfaff

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

A review of Paul Seabright's The Divine Economy: How Religions Compete for Wealth, Power, and People.

The Road To Gerontocracy, Juan David Bohorquez Pacateque, Alonso Morales Sánchez Mejorada, Paul Alexander Villegas Muñoz

Journal of New Finance

The purpose of this article is to develop a reform proposal for current pension systems based on a robust political economy approach. The research is documentary, conducting critical analysis of texts and evidence collection from various pension schemes from a public choice perspective to elaborate a comparative institutional analysis. Pension schemes, being influenced by political processes, are susceptible to adopting institutions that are inefficient, so a politically and economically robust reform is proposed. In conclusion, taking into account that pension systems can be co-opted by the political process, it is not sufficient to propose financially sustainable schemes but also ones …

Retirement At Risk: The Political Economy Of Public Pension Governance, Allen Mendenhall, Dan Sutter

Journal of New Finance

State public pension systems manage over $6 trillion in assets while facing approximately $1.3 trillion in unfunded liabilities, raising fundamental questions about governance effectiveness and fiduciary accountability. This Article examines these challenges through the analytical framework of governance, applying insights from public choice, principal-agent models, and corporate governance to argue that details in implementation significantly impact outcomes.  We offer Ohio’s State Teachers Retirement System (STRS) as a case study. Recent governance reforms in Ohio—including legislative restructuring of the STRS board and enactment of fiduciary standards legislation modeled on the American Legislative Exchange Council’s framework—suggest the potential for earlier governance problems. …

Analyzing Retirement Systems Through A Triad Framework: Lessons For U.S. Reform, Romina Boccia, Ivane Nachkebia

Journal of New Finance

As U.S. Social Security approaches insolvency, this paper analyzes the program’s challenges through a political economy lens and makes two new contributions. First, it introduces a normative triad framework for evaluating retirement systems based on individual autonomy, fiscal sustainability, and poverty alleviation. Second, it applies this framework to five advanced economies—Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Sweden, and the U.S.—to identify institutional features associated with differences in outcomes. Deriving implications for U.S. reform, we propose four recommendations: transition Social Security to a flat-benefit system, slow benefit growth, adopt automatic stabilizers, and expand flexible savings options.

The Interplay Between Deficit Spending And Financial Instability: An Examination Of Fiscal And Monetary Policy Interactions, Heidie Jean George

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study investigates the impact of fiscal and monetary policy on financial stability and fragility, focusing on how government spending and deficits contribute to the economic and financial system. Drawing on Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) and Financial Fragility Hypothesis (FFH), the research examines the dynamic relationship between fiscal policy, financial stability, and economic stability. The study focuses on understanding how government spending and deficits affect the economic and financial system in context of private and public debt and policy interactions and the role of system risk factors. The study uses Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Vector Autoregression (VAR), Impulse Response …

From Innovation To Speculation: Ai And The Magnificent Seven, Rerotlhe B. Basele, Peter C. B. Phillips, Shuping Shi

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The AI boom has driven the Nasdaq and the Magnificent Seven tech stocks to record highs. But how much do these new records reflect underlying value, how much is speculation, and how vulnerable are these stocks and the wider market to a major downturn? Our evidence and analyses show clear signs of bubble exuberance in most of these stocks, concentrated in a few names like Nvidia, leading to latent risks for investors who assume their index funds are safely diversified and supported by wider economic fundamentals.

Congestion Pricing: A Comprehensive Look At International Congestion Pricing Models And Applying Them To The United States, Ian Ertel

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Urban traffic congestion imposes large costs through wasted time, excess fuel consumption, air pollution, and lost productivity. Although congestion pricing has been recognized as the economically efficient remedy since Pigou and Vickrey, implementation has been rare. This thesis examines the conditions under which congestion pricing succeeds by analyzing three pioneering cases: London, Singapore, and New York City. Across all three, charges reduced traffic volumes and improved speeds within the priced zones. Benefits extended beyond cordon boundaries, with measurable improvements on untolled suburban roads. The distributional effects depended on how revenues were recycled rather than on the charge itself. Political viability, …

The Dictatorial Public Goods Game, Gabriele Camera, Gary Charness, Nir Chemeya, Ro'i Zultan

ESI Working Papers

We propose a novel game, the Dictatorial Public Goods Game, to study the interplay between collective resource generation and centralized provision of public goods. After making choices in a standard Voluntary Contribution Mechanism (VCM), one player is selected from the group to administrate the contributions: either provide the public good or expropriate the collected resources for personal gain. We find that adding this centralized mechanism reduces efficiency compared to the standard VCM. Although higher contributions increase the material incentive to expropriate, they lead to more provision. Thus, pro-social choices in the contribution and in the provision stages act as …

Neoliberalism & The Care Economy: Exploring The Gendered Impacts Of Social Protection Systems, Rachel Carruthers

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how neoliberal transformation of social protection policy influences gender dynamics within the care economy. Care is necessary for well-being, but traditionally excluded from economic thinking. This thesis completes a historical overview of how care has been incorporated or excluded by different economic paradigms and is anchored in feminist political economy that emphasizes care as a central consideration. A comparative analysis across California, Texas, and Sweden demonstrates how social protection, specifically access to paid parental leave, varies across regimes and results in inconsistent care outcomes. The findings suggest that social protections can reduce some inequalities, but inadequately address …

Testing Potential Correlations Between Childhood Lead Exposure And Authoritarianism In Adulthood, Kragen Anderson

University Honors Theses

A significant body of research links lead exposure during childhood to negative effects ranging from increased impulsivity to societal level effects such as an increased likelihood of committing violent crime in adulthood. Due to exposure vectors such as lead water pipes, lead solder, lead based paints, and leaded gasoline there was significant lead exposure during childhood for large portions of the American population. This paper tested and found a statistically significant association between average population level lead exposure in childhood and likelihood of voting for candidate Trump later in life.

Determinants Of Corporal Punishment And Severe Physical Punishment In Egypt: A Mixed-Methods Analysis For Child Protection Policy, Marwa Moustafa Nassef

Theses and Dissertations

Corporal punishment (CP) and severe physical punishment (SPP) remain a major public health, child rights, and child protection policy concern. In Egypt, despite legislative reforms, survey-weighted analysis of the 2021 Egypt Family Health Survey (EFHS) 2021 (CAPMAS, 2022) reveals prevalence rates of 60.5% for CP and 27.4% for SPP among children aged 1–14 (author’s calculations using EFHS-2021, n=7623), yet evidence distinguishing the determinants of routine corporal punishment from escalation to severe physical punishment remains limited in low- and middle-income contexts. Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework, this mixed-methods study identifies key drivers of CP and its escalation to SPP among Egyptian …

Determinants Of Public-To-Private Transitions: Evidence From Firm-Level Selection Patterns, Joshua S. Wolfson

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

This paper considers which publicly traded firms are most likely to exit public markets through acquisition, and how those patterns differ between financial sponsors and strategic acquirers. Using a panel of 3,320 U.S. public firms from 2000 to 2024, I estimate discrete-time hazard models and find that lower valuation multiples, higher leverage, and stronger free cash flow predict going private. These characteristics vary for financial sponsors and strategic acquirers who select on different criteria. Strategic selection is driven mainly by leverage and valuation while private equity is also driven by free cash flow. These criteria are not stable over time, …

Transmission Of Firm-Level Demand Shocks To Stock Returns: Evidence From 10-K Text Analysis, Dylan Gunjan Parikh

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

Industrial organization and corporate finance papers that measure firm-level demand characteristics employ price, quantity, and product characteristic data that is unavailable in public financial disclosures. As a result, cross-sectional asset pricing literature attention to demand-side factors is limited. This paper constructs a demand shock measure from natural language processing of 28,263 publicly disclosed 10-K filings from 2001 to 2020. I find that a 1SD demand shock increases contemporaneously predicts a 1.8% increase (SE = 0.4%) in returns. Long-short portfolio sorted on demand shock generates 8.5% alpha (SE = 1.9%) against combined Fama-French and Q-factor models and a 0.91 sharpe ratio …

Offsetting Carbon With Lemons: Adverse Selection And Certification In The Voluntary Carbon Market, Vahideh Manshadi, Faidra Monachou, Ilan Morgenstern

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

To meet voluntary climate targets, firms often complement internal decarbonization efforts by purchasing carbon credits in the voluntary carbon market (VCM), which finance projects that reduce emissions elsewhere. However, these emissions reductions are difficult to verify, and growing evidence of overcrediting has cast doubt on the VCM's potential to genuinely offset emissions. We investigate how the VCM's defining features shape its climate effectiveness. Our model captures three central elements: adverse selection, as high-quality projects that truly reduce emissions are costlier yet difficult to distinguish from low-quality ones; imperfect third-party certification, as projects are screened based on a noisy signal of …

Individualism And Momentum Revisited: Evidence On The Persistence Of Cultural Drivers In Stock Market Returns, Hayley S. Sciubba

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

This paper reexamines the relationship between cultural differences and momentum strategy returns over the period March 2007 through March 2026, building on the Chui, Titman and Wei (2010) finding that higher individualism is associated with greater trading volume, volatility, and momentum profits. Cross-country cultural differences are measured using an individualism index developed by Minkov et al. (2017), which is related to overconfidence and self-attribution bias. Using monthly stock price data, I construct cleaned monthly returns and sort stocks into six-month momentum portfolios. Although many of the 41 countries common to the original and current samples have experienced changes in their …

Selective Contagion: Sovereign Credit Integration And Heterogeneous Shock Transmission In Emerging Equity And Derivative Markets, Fabiana Araujo Rincón

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

Contagion in Latin America is real but selective: the direction of spillover depends on whether a country is integrated more strongly into global or regional markets. Using a stacked event study across 90 manually identified shocks from 2001 to 2026, I estimate regional contagion and its determinants across credit, currency, equity, and derivative markets. Contagion travels through sovereign credit, not currency, and through economic, not political, shocks. Political shocks, despite their larger domestic impact, stay locally contained. The direction of spillover turns on shock origin: shocks from large, globally integrated economies depress their peers, while shocks from smaller, regionally focused …

Implied Variance Asymmetry As A Predictor Of Stock Returns Around Quarterly Earnings Dates, Matthew J. Sebastian

Economics Undergraduate Senior Theses

This paper investigates whether option-implied variance asymmetry, defined as the difference between upside and downside risk-neutral semivariances measured shortly before scheduled quarterly earnings announcements pre- dicts the cumulative abnormal return realized over the announcement win- dow. We find implied variance asymmetry positively and significantly pre- dicts announcement-window returns in S&P 500 companies: the high-minus- low quintile sort portfolio earns 45 basis points over a five-day window with a Fama-French four-factor alpha of 60 basis points, both statistically signif- icant. The results suggest a temporary break in market efficiency and are consistent with an informed-trading interpretation in which earnings specific information …

The Nexus Between Economic Growth, Energy Consumption, Technology Innovation, And Co2 Emissions In Vietnam, Ha Thi Thu Nguyen

Economic and Business Review

Vietnam's rapid economic growth has intensified environmental pressures, heightening concerns about the country's ability to decouple growth from rising CO₂ emissions. Although green policies and initiatives have been introduced, questions remain regarding their effectiveness and the extent to which technological innovation and renewable energy can mitigate environmental degradation. This study applies the stochastic impacts by regression on population, affluence, and technology (STIRPAT) framework and autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to investigate the short- and long-run impacts of economic growth, foreign direct investment (FDI), technological innovation, renewable energy consumption, and forest area on CO₂ emissions in Vietnam, using annual …

Incentives, Evidence, And Reminders For Bureaucrats: Overcoming Barriers To Policy Scale Up, Patrick Agte, Daniel R. Morales, Christopher Neilson, Sebastian Otero, Guatam Rao

Discussion Papers

Scaling up effective policies often requires the attention of frontline bureaucrats with many competing responsibilities. Even when policymakers adopt effective programs, implementation may not follow. In a nationwide experiment in the Dominican Republic, we test interventions to increase school principals' implementation of an educational program proven effective in a previous RCT. Only 37% of control schools verifiably implemented the intervention when ordered to by the Ministry of Education, compared with 83% in the original trial. Implementation was no higher among schools that previously implemented the program in the RCT, suggesting that fixed costs of adoption do not explain non-adoption. We …

From Unstructured Data To Demand Counterfactuals: Theory And Practice, Timothy Christensen, Giovanni Compiani

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Empirical models of multi-product demand rely on low-dimensional product representations to capture substitution patterns, increasingly using proxies built from unstructured data. When proxies are imperfect, standard workflows yield biased counterfactuals and invalid inference. We develop a practical toolkit to address these issues. Our methods apply to market-level and/or individual data, require minimal additional computation, provide simple standard-error formulas, and accommodate proxies from fine-tuned models. Further, we propose diagnostics to assess proxy quality. Our methods yield meaningful improvements in predicting substitution in empirically calibrated simulations and in an application where we assess counterfactual prediction performance against a ground truth.

“Megadeal” Subsidies, Local Spillovers And Corporate Innovation, Yoojin Lee, Shaphan Ng, Aruhn Venkat

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

We examine whether the largest place-based, firm-specific corporate subsidies (“Megadeals”) awarded by state and local governments affect local firms’ innovation. First, we document that 1) subsidy firms innovate in the subsidized county and 2) subsidy firms bring inventors from other counties into the subsidized county, consistent with subsidy firms generating new knowledge locally. In our main test, we use a stacked cohort design with stringent fixed effects to document that local firms increase patenting following a Megadeal. Cross-sectionally, effects are increasing 1) in subsidy firm innovativeness, 2) in the technological closeness of subsidy firms and local firms, 3) when subsidy …

From Trade War To Green Transition: Optimal Electric Vehicle Tariffs With Revenue-Funded Subsidies, Panle Jia Barwick, Jack Collison, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Shanjun Li, Yucheng Wang

Discussion Papers

We study the optimal design of trade and industrial policy when governments pursue environmental objectives alongside traditional national welfare. Motivated by the global transition to electric vehicles (EVs) and growing concerns about competitiveness, resilience, and the environment, we develop a framework in which policymakers choose tariffs and domestic production subsidies to maximize national welfare, defined as the sum of consumer surplus, domestic profits, environmental benefits, and tariff revenue net of subsidies. We combine a theoretical model of differentiated-product oligopoly with a structural demand model estimated using vehicle-level data from 13 countries during 2004-2023 that together account for the vast majority …

Essays On Health And Immigration Policy, Selen Ozdogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two essays in applied microeconomics, each examining how individuals and institutions respond to policy changes. Both essays leverage natural experiments and recent advances in difference-in-differences estimation to identify causal effects. Both also speak to a common theme in public policy: the gap between intended and actual consequences of government intervention, and the role that policy design plays in shaping those consequences.

The first essay examines the impact of state-level e-cigarette excise taxes on nicotine and tobacco exposure among adults aged 18 and older. A central contribution is its use of individual-level panel biomarker data from urine …

Cooling Deserts For Renters: Heat Equity Inside The Nyc Housing System, Tahreem Ashraf

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study introduces the Cooling Desert Index (CDI), a composite spatial measure designed to identify census tracts in New York City where extreme heat vulnerability and structural barriers to adaptive cooling converge. Drawing on five publicly available datasets and a seven phase statistical pipeline, the CDI scores all 2,231 NYC census tracts on a continuous 0 to 100 scale by integrating heat exposure, severe rent burden, household income, racial composition, language access, disability status, and housing crowding. The analysis identifies 557 cooling deserts, defined as tracts where environmental heat risk is high and financial constraints make effective cooling structurally inaccessible, …

The Impact Of Corruption On Private Investment In The Mena Region: An Empirical Study On The Period Of 1996-2023, Mohamed A. El Regdawy

Theses and Dissertations

This study aims to examine and understand empirically the impact of corruption on private investment in the MENA region during the period of 1996-2023, as private investment is a key enabler for sustainable economic growth. To better understand such a relationship, a Pooled Mean Group estimator was implemented to figure out this relationship in both the short run and long run. The findings confirm that in the long run, within the context of MENA, corruption was used as a tool to overcome the lack of quality in the regulations that were supposed to enable the role of the private sector. …