Digital Commons Network^™

Choice Of Accounting Major Amongst Minority Students As A Function Of Socioeconomic Status, Sara Mohammed

Honors Undergraduate Theses

I tested the relationship between self-efficacy and socioeconomic status and how the combination can affect major choices in African American students. I used the social cognitive career theory and process mediation models to analyze the results of different variables. At the University of Central Florida, the participants were 1200 students in the introduction to financial accounting course. They completed a survey that measured various social barriers, social supports, and self-efficacy. Implications of future research in the context of accounting fields are discussed.

Determinants Of Bond Market Development In Emerging And Developing Economies, Mohanad Alsadoun

CGU Theses & Dissertations

A study of local currency bond market development determinants in Emerging Market Economies (EMEs) is considered important when most EMEs and developing countries are shifting from issuing long-term debt securities in foreign currency denominations to their respective local currencies. This dissertation discusses key factors that influence the development of the local currency bond market (LCBM) in emerging developing economies. This study uses three different models to examine the importance of various factors. A total of 26 countries have been examined, and their data revealed several interesting results. The results show that larger economic size, larger banking systems, greater trade openness, …

Physiological Synchrony Predicts Cooperative Behavior With High Stakes, Lena Arai

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Can subconscious bodily responses explain our natural tendency to be trusting and trustworthy towards a stranger? I address this question by conducting, to my knowledge, the first study of physiological synchrony (PS) between pairs of partners playing the trust game face-to-face. Participants were given the choice to send $0, $40, $80, or $120 to their partner; these choices were categorized as showing no, low, medium, and high trust, respectively. Participants were endowed with a more considerable sum of money ($120) than many other trust games (Johnson & Mislin, 2011) to encourage participants to perceive their decisions to have significant consequences, …

Essays On Crime And Law, Morgan Elaine Stockham

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Civil law and public policy often are related to crime in complex and interesting ways. The following dissertation explores the intersections of divorce law and public policy with criminal outcomes. Within my first chapter, we attempt to identify the causal effect of wages on a prosecutor’s effort by studying an exogenous salary increase in New York. We measure the performance by the likelihood that a conviction is upheld when appealed. If the efficiency wage theory explains behavior, then the exogenous wage shock should entice better performance. Alternatively, if individuals who hold office are motivated primarily by an intrinsic motivations rather …

Essays In Behavioral Economics And Neuroeconomics, Rana Sulaiman Alogaily

CGU Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three unrelated chapters on Behavioral Economics and Neuroeconomics, all of which are on different topics. Chapter 1: Willingness to Get Vaccinated Against COVID-19 and Reasons for Hesitancy Among U.S Residents. Chapter 2: Testosterone Administration Induces A Red Shift in Democrats. Chapter 3: Neurophysiologic Predictors of Mood in the Elderly.

Three Essays In Law And Economics: Consequences And Formation Of Legal Rules In Other Markets, Minjae Yun

CGU Theses & Dissertations

In this thesis, I study the consequences and formation of legal rules in the “non-traditional” markets to show that non-traditional markets are fundamental to a society’s functioning. The first chapter shows how legal participants strategically behave based on judicial disqualification. The second chapter examines the unintended consequence of a decarceration policy in the criminal-justice system by linking the ex-criminal re-entry issue and homelessness. Lastly, the third chapter concentrates on how the tenure of elected law enforcement agents contributes to the jail-crowding environment, leveraging term limits imposed on local county elected officials.

The first chapter examines the use and impact of …

An Exponential Formula For Random Variables Generated By Multiple Brownian Motions, Maximilian Lawrence Baroi

CGU Theses & Dissertations

The frozen operator has been used to develop Dyson-series like representations for random variables generated by classical Brownian motion, Lévy processes and fractional Brownian with Hurst index greater than 1/2.The relationship between the conditional expectation of a random variable (or fractional conditional expectation in the case of fractional Brownian motion)and that variable's Dyson-series like representation is the exponential formula. These results had not yet been extended to either fractional Brownian motion with Hurst index less than 1/2, or d-dimensional Brownian motion. The former is still out of reach, but we hope our review of stochastic integration for fractional Brownian motion …

Improving Targeting Of Farmers For Enrollment In Agri-Environmental Programs, Joshua M. Duke, Robert J. Johnston, Amy L. Shober, Zhongyuan Liu

Economics

Agricultural cost-share research and planning tend to focus on one program at a time, and hence overlook additional efficiencies that might be obtained by considering the possibility that enrollment decisions are related across different programs. Models of multiple-program participation decisions enable these relationships to be considered as part of conditional enrollment predictions, providing more complete and accurate understanding of enrollment behavior. Analysis of data from farmer surveys in Maryland and Ohio show complementary drivers across program participation. Results are consistent with economies of scale and/or scope among different agri-environmental programs. The data also show the gains in prediction accuracy when …

Opportunity Zones: A Program In Search Of A Purpose, Ofer Eldar, Chelsea Garber

Faculty Scholarship

In 2017, Congress created the Opportunity Zone (“OZ”) program to stimulate economic growth in low-income communities. The program was characterized by its unprecedented scale relative to previous place-based development efforts and was described as “perhaps the most ambitious economic development tool to come out of Congress in a generation.” However, the program was quickly criticized on numerous grounds, and its design flaws are so severe that several legislators have called for its reform or repeal.

This Essay argues that the root of the OZ program’s problems is a strong mismatch between its stated purpose and its actual terms. We discuss …

Learning Before Testing: A Selective Nonparametric Test For Conditional Moment Restrictions, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao, Wenyu Zhou

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops a new test for conditional moment restrictions via nonparametric series regression, with approximating series terms selected by Lasso. Machine-learning the main features of the unknown conditional expectation function beforehand enables the test to seek power in a targeted fashion. The data-driven selection, however, also tends to distort the test’s size nontrivially, because it restricts the (growing-dimensional) score vector in the series regression on a random polytope, and hence, effectively alters the score’s asymptotic normality. A novel critical value is proposed to account for this truncation effect. We establish the size and local power properties of the proposed …

Climate Change And Sustainability In Asean Countries, David K. Ding, Sarah E. Beh

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The ASEAN region is one of the most susceptible regions to climate change, with three of its countries—Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand—among those that have suffered the greatest fatalities and economic losses because of climate-related disasters. This paper reveals that the ASEAN’s environmental performance is sorely lagging other regions despite evidence of its cohesive and comprehensive efforts to mitigate emissions and build up adaptive capacity to climate-related disasters. Within the ASEAN, there exist gaps in environmental performance between each country. This suggests that increased cooperation between individual ASEAN countries is pertinent for the region to collectively combat climate change. In …

Chinese Neoglobalization In East Africa: Logics, Couplings And Impacts, Pádraig R. Carmody, James T. Murphy

Geography

The most significant case of transnational state capitalism today is China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) which seeks to expand/extend the country's geoeconomic and geopolitical integrations globally. We conceptualise the BRI as manifest principally through industrial offshoring, infrastructure investments and exports from China. These vectors articulate with particular places, forming transnational couplings that shape development outcomes. We examine the BRI's couplings and their development implications in the East African countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia and Kenya where China has engaged significantly. We demonstrate the contingent manner of BRI's variegations; its pragmatism, flexibility, and limitations as a hegemonic or developmental project.

Jue Insight: Migration, Transportation Infrastructure, And The Spatial Transmission Of Covid-19 In China, Bingjing Li, Lin Ma

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper evaluates the impacts of migration flows and transportation infrastructure on the spatial transmission of COVID-19 in China. Prefectures with larger bilateral migration flows and shorter travel distances with Hubei, the epicenter of the outbreak, experienced a wider spread of COVID-19. In addition, richer prefectures with higher incomes were better able to contain the virus at the early stages of community transmission. Using a spatial general equilibrium model, we show that around 28% of the infections outside Hubei province can be explained by the rapid development in transportation infrastructure and the liberalization of migration restrictions in the recent decade.

Mechanism Design By Observant And Informed Planners, Shurojit Chatterji, Arunava Sen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the mechanism design problem where the planner can observe ex-post the first-ranked alternatives or peaks of voter preferences. We contrast this with the design problem where the planner has ex-ante information regarding the peaks of voter preferences.

The Impact Of Covid-19 On Stock Market And Exchange Rate Uncertainty In Pakistan, Ateeb Akhter Shah Syed, Kaneez Fatima, Mannan Zaheer

Business Review

This paper examines the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19) on exchange rate (EXU) and stock market uncertainty (SMU) in Pakistan while controlling for the effects of interest rate and policy interventions by the Government and the Central bank to combat the pandemic. We employ the vector autoregressive (VAR) model over a sample period ranging from February 25, 2020 to May 6, 2021. We find that a shock to total daily coronavirus cases in Pakistan has a positive and significant impact on both the EXU and SMU. However, this impact is short-lived which may be attributed to a timely policy response and …

The Macroeconomic Impacts Of Government Debt In Pakistan, Ateeb Akhter Shah Syed, Kaneez Fatima, Junaid Kamal

Business Review

This paper examines the Ricardian equivalence hypothesis for Pakistan using a vector error-correction model. The sample period extends from June 2002 to January 2020. The results are reported using variance decompositions and impulse response functions. The base model contains six variables and is estimated with 4 lags. We find support for the idea that wealth does not increase as government debt increases; Hence, it proves the fact that economic agents are rational actors and foresee current expansionary actions of the government that result in accumulation of debt as the present value of future taxation that they have to pay and …

Taxation Of Agricultural Incomes In Pakistan: Conceptual Issues, Data Challenges And Empirical Estimates, Abdul Salam

Business Review

There is considerable diversity and variation in the land-based and agricultural income tax rates across the provinces in Pakistan. The annual land-based tax revenues from the cultivated land, including orchards, are estimated at Rs. 5 billion in Punjab, 2.5 billion in Sindh, one billion in KP, and less than half a billion in Baluchistan. Based on the 2017-18 GDP estimates from crops, two sets of income tax revenues were estimated: one at the provincial rates and the other at the FBR tax rates for non-salaried persons. Tax revenues from crop income, at the current provincial rates, work out to Rs. …

The Socio-Economic Factors Of Poverty: Empirical Evidence From District Lasbela, Balochistan, Fida Muhammad, Parvez Ahmed Shaikh, Hazrat Yousaf

Business Review

Poverty is defined as a lack of basic necessities for survival. The current study examines the socio-economic factors that contribute to poverty in five of the district of Lasbela's nine tehsils, namely (Bela, Dureji, Hub, Sonmiani, and Uthal. Lasbela is Balochistan's tenth most deprived district, located near Karachi. The data for this study is cross-sectional and contributed from the project's 2014 Base Line Survey (BLS, 2014). The Logit model was used to evaluate the variables under study in order to achieve the study goal. According to our empirical findings, the average daily income in this district was less than $1.50. …

Empirical Evidences On Pricing Mechanism In Pakistan: A Duration Analysis, Fauzia Sohail, Ambreen Fatima

Business Review

This study evaluates the price setting behavior across main cities of Pakistan by employing the micro data from retail price survey. The most contemporary research technique of Duration Analysis is employed where survivor functions are estimated by most illustrious nonparametric Kaplan-Meier and Nelson-Aalen Estimators. Hazard Functions for various product groups are also estimated by employing parametric Weibull Hazard Model. Results confirm that perishable food items have shortest duration of one week for most of the spells, where government regulation caused prices to change more frequently. It is found that on average small cities faced lower hazard and thus comparably lesser …

Strength In Numbers: A Field Experiment In Gender, Influence, And Group Dynamics, Olga B. Stoddard, Christopher F. Karpowitz, Jessica Preece

Faculty Publications

Policy interventions to increase women’s presence in the workforce and leadership positions vary in their intensity, with some including a lone or token woman and others setting higher quotas. However, little is known about how the resulting group gender compositions influence individuals’ experiences and broader workplace dynamics. In this paper, we investigate whether token women are disadvantaged compared to women on majority-women mixed-gender teams. We conducted a multi-year field experiment with a top-10 undergraduate accounting program that randomized the gender composition of semester-long teams. Using laboratory, survey, and administrative data, we find that even after accounting for their proportion of …

The Relationship Between Groom Price And Parents’ Investment In Their Daughters’ Human Capital, Mahjuja Taznin

Pennsylvania Economic Review

This paper analyzes the relationship between a daughter’s education and the price her family pays for a groom in India. I use an Indian national school-latrine-construction initiative as a policy instrument to address the problem of endogeneity between parental spending on education and groomprice. I find that a woman with an additional year of education marries a more educated groom and pays on average an extra 6 percent for her groomprice. A woman pays extra for each additional year of her groom’s education, resulting in the total effect of a woman with more education paying more groomprice. I do not …

A Profit-Based View Of Economic Granularity In The Perspective Of Market Competition, Jeffrey Yi-Lin Forrest

Pennsylvania Economic Review

This paper studies Gabaix’s granular hypothesis from an analytical angle in lights of profits and market competition. By establishing the profit pictures of the initial firms of an emerging market and the incumbent firms of a maturing market, it is shown that consumers’ evolving preference help intensify market competition and encourage new firms’ entry into an established oligopoly market. With this profit-based logic, among other results established are precise conditions under which Gabaix’s granular hypothesis is either surely true or definitely not true, followed by relevant empirical confirmations. At the end, several important open questions are posed for future research.

Missouri Soybean Exports And The Democratizing Market Force, David D. Hammons

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

A commonly held assumption of America’s post-Cold War place in the world is that prolonged contact with American capitalism and democracy will lead to the adoption of these systems in all nations that participate in international trade. This paper attempts to verify or disprove that assumption by examining a specific traded commodity between two specific nations, the institutions that support this trade, and the people actively participating in it. The growth of soybean exports from the state of Missouri provides this vehicle for examining the trade history between the United States of America and China, and provides evidence that disproves …

Implications For The Mainstreaming Of Fair Trade: Applying The Eras Of Fair Trade To The Product Life Cycle Theory, Kimberlee Josephson

Pennsylvania Economic Review

By drawing attention to the notion of trade-based development, Fair Trade has contributed to the awareness of how market transactions can intersect with social issues. Fair Trade serves as an innovative supply chain that engages the world’s ‘poor’ in the trading system and it can be thought of as a development project that has evolved from a social movement to a social enterprise. The commercialization of activist efforts, however, faces the same pressures as the commercialization of any product and despite Fair Trade being founded for a purpose rather than a profit, this sector is embedded within market-based systems and …

Exploring The Effect Of Three-Dimensional Television Advertising On Brand Attitudes: The Roles Of Human Factors, Involvement, Presence, And Flow, Young Bae, Michelle Gordon, Chang-Dae Ham, Jong Woo Jun

Pennsylvania Economic Review

This research explores how consumers process three-dimensional television advertising. It examines the hierarchical relationships among human factors, involvement, presence, flow, and attitudes toward the advertised brand by employing a quasi-experimental design incorporating a real three-dimensional television commercial. This study finds that human factors, i.e., physical fatigue and the inconvenience of wearing three-dimensional glasses, are negatively associated with situational involvement. Situational involvement is in turn positively related to attitudes toward the brand in the three-dimensional television advertisement. Interestingly, feelings of presence significantly mediate the relationship between involvement and attitudes toward the brand, but the flow state does not. Additionally, the physical …

Why Do Rich People Not Retire?, Xiya Li

Scripps Senior Theses

Work and leisure are central to the human condition. Scholars from many fields have tried to understand why Americans work so much. Many people believe that when they have enough money, they will retire. However, many people are not willing to retire even if they have enough money to do so. Most people who do not have enough money to retire do not even get any amount of leisure from their jobs. If the view that enough money directly leads to retirement is wrong, then it is time to reconsider using this logic to think of the possibility of retiring. …

Analyzing College On-Campus Residency Agglomeration Benefits And Their Impact On Student Outcomes, Emily Pedace

Scripps Senior Theses

Economies of agglomeration have been shown to increase productivity in part due to technological/ knowledge spillovers. I look at public colleges and universities in California and Texas to examine if students living on-campus can generate enough agglomeration to boost productivity in the students. I use a unique data set with information collected from Common Data Sets, self-reported by the schools. When using an OLS regression with the averages of these variables, higher averages of on-campus residence is correlated to higher average graduation and retention rates for Texas and California. When using a fixed effects panel regression, I find changes in …

County Walkability And Small Business Receipts, Talia Perluss

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis explores the correlation between county walkability and small business receipts, as well as other possible demographic variables that could explain the success of small businesses, by using a fixed-effect panel regression model. Using county-level data in the years 2012 and 2017, this paper finds that there is a significant correlation between an increase in walkability and an increase in receipts. When running the fixed-effect regressions, this paper found that there is a moderately high positive correlation between walkability and per capita income, suggesting that the effects of an increase in walkability may also capture the effects of an …

The Economic And Social Decline Of Women's Colleges Across The United States, Alexandra Isabelle Rivasplata

Scripps Senior Theses

Women have been attending college at a greater rate than men for several decades. However, women’s colleges have been shutting down or transitioning to coeducation at incredibly high rates. Literature demonstrates the importance of women’s colleges due to their benefits on students’ future career success and psychological wellbeing. However, there is less research concerning the decline of women's colleges, and none regarding the economic and quantitative factors influencing their closures. Using a newly constructed, completely original data set, I perform a logistic regression and analyze variables related to the survival of women’s colleges. I find a high statistical significance of …

Effect Of Health Aid On Life Expectancy In Sub-Saharan Africa, Sakiru Oladele Akinbode Dr., Isiaq O. Oseni

Journal for the Advancement of Developing Economies

No abstract provided.