Business Commons^™

Nebraska Monthly Economic Indicators: December 21, 2021, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

The LEI-N rose by 0.96% during November 2021. The increase in the leading indicator, which is designed to predict economic activity six months in the future, signals moderate economic growth in Nebraska during the second quarter of 2022. There were positive business expectations in November and an increase in manufacturing hours-worked and building permits for single-family homes. There also was a decline in initial claims for unemployment insurance. However, there was another increase in the value of the U.S. dollar during November. A higher dollar is challenging for Nebraska businesses that compete in international markets.

Understanding Real Estate Market Dynamics: The Covid-19 Effect, Faith Winslow

Honors Projects in Finance

The covid-19 pandemic has led to significant shifts in consumer trends, including in the real estate market. Through multivariable regression, this study investigates how covid-19 has impacted the demand as well as pricing for houses in the United States. The findings contribute to the literature in a few major ways. First, they provide a current look at the impact of covid-19 on the housing market by analyzing monthly, state-level data from before and during the pandemic. Secondly, they provide clarity and supplement journals and research currently in the works. This is the first national study that looks at the effect …

Undersea Cables: The Ultimate Geopolitical Chokepoint, Bert Chapman

FORCES Initiative: Strategy, Security, and Social Systems

This work provides historical and contemporary overviews of this critical geopolitical problem, describes the policy actors addressing this in the U.S. and selected other countries, and provides maps and information on many undersea cable work routes. These cables are chokepoints with one dictionary defining chokepoints as “a strategic narrow route providing passage through or to another region."

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report, Vol. 23, No. 4, King Banaian, Richard A. Macdonald

St. Cloud Area Quarterly Business Report

The economic recovery from the unrelenting COVID shock continues in the St. Cloud area as firms report an optimistic future outlook and employment grows. However, underlying this optimism are increases in wages, prices, capital expenditures, and worker shortages that may prove unsustainable in a post-COVID economy. Strong future optimism by surveyed firms is restrained by the reality that monetary and fiscal stimulus is abating perhaps faster than the pandemic.

Data released by the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development (DEED) indicate St. Cloud area employment increased 2% over the twelve months ending October 2021, but still 4,493 (4%) below …

Economic Forecast Of Grand Rapids, Mi, Zachary Fillmore

Honors Projects

The purpose of this report is to analyze the current state of the Grand Rapids, MI economy, as well as provide a ten-year forecast of the city’s economic condition. Economic forecasting is the process of predicting the future condition of an economy using the combination of several indicators. The indicators being used for this report will include population growth, economic production, wages, industry specific production trends, unemployment rates, home values, occupancy rates, rent forecasts, education, and tourism. From intensive research and data analysis, a snapshot of the economic condition of Grand Rapids in ten years will be displayed. Additionally, several …

Well-Being In Metropolitan Nebraska: 2021 Nebraska Metro Poll Results, Rebecca J. Vogt, Heather Akin, Cheryl A. Burkhart-Kriesel, Bradley Lubben, L. J. Mcelravy, Timothy L. Meyer, Steven A. Schulz

Nebraska Rural Poll

Most metropolitan Nebraskans believe they are better off than they were five years ago, are better off compared to their parents when they were their age and will be better off ten years from now. However, certain groups are more likely to be optimistic about their current situation and their expected future. Persons with higher household incomes are more likely than persons with lower incomes to think they are better off compared to five years ago, are better off compared to their parents when they were their age and will be better off ten years from now. And, persons with …

Harnessing Digitalization For Sustainable Economic Development: Insights For Asia, John Beirne, David Fernandez

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Digitalization has helped to transform economies by enhancing competitiveness and productivity across a wide range of sectors. The use of big data and the rise of online platforms have accelerated this process over the past decade. In addition, the adoption of digital solutions in the face of social distancing and lockdown measures introduced due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has been integral to the economic recovery process. The shift to a digitalized economy has also reduced barriers to market entry for firms, lowered inequality, and led to a promotion of social and economic inclusion. Advances in digital technology …

Subway, Collaborative Matching, And Innovation, Yumi Koh, Li Jing, Jianhuan Xu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Expansion of subway networks helps to enhance connectivity and matches of people by facilitating their mobility. Using rapid expansion of the Beijing subway from 2000 to 2018, we analyze its impact on collaborative matches in innovations. We find that an hour reduction in travel time between a pair of locations in Beijing brought a 15% to 38% increase in collaborated patents. Far-apart location pairs were more affected, and the local average treatment effect is approximately 35% to 82%. Such effect is mainly driven by increased matches among highly productive inventors due to complementarity between inventors’ productivity and travel time. At …

Corporate Crime And Punishment: An Empirical Study, Dorothy S. Lund, Natasha Sarin

All Faculty Scholarship

For many years, law and economics scholars, as well as politicians and regulators, have debated whether corporate criminal enforcement overdeters beneficial corporate activity or in the alternative, lets corporate criminals off too easily. This debate has recently expanded in its polarization: On the one hand, academics, judges, and politicians have excoriated enforcement agencies for failing to send guilty bankers to jail in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis; on the other, the U.S. Department of Justice has since relaxed policies that encouraged individual prosecutions and reduced the size of fines and number of prosecutions. A crucial and yet understudied …

Do Esg Funds Deliver On Their Promises?, Quinn Curtis, Jill E. Fisch, Adriana Z. Robertson

All Faculty Scholarship

Corporations have received growing criticism for their role in climate change, perpetuating racial and gender inequality, and other pressing social issues. In response to these concerns, shareholders are increasingly focusing on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) criteria in selecting investments, and asset managers are responding by offering a growing number of ESG mutual funds. The flow of assets into ESG is one of the most dramatic trends in asset management.

But are these funds giving investors what they promise? This question has attracted the attention of regulators, with the Department of Labor and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) …

Poultry Producer's Willingness To Invest In On-Farm Carcass Disposal, V. L. Campbell, J. M. Thompson, J. L. Apriesnig, D. L. Pendell, G. T. Tonsor

Michigan Tech Publications

Foreign animal diseases (FAD) can cause substantial economic losses in production, consumption, and the supply chain. These diseases are typically highly pathogenic and lead to disruptions in normal business practices and to demands for higher investment in biosecurity practices. For poultry producers this can lead to changes in bird pick-ups, chick placements, and length of out time on farms as well as changes in day-to-day operations. When an FAD is reported, poultry producers that rely on off-premises carcass disposal (e.g., renderers or landfills) may be required to develop on-farm disposal capacity (e.g., incinerators or burial) rapidly if their operation falls …

Vat Treatment Of The Financial Services: Implications For The Real Economy, Ismail Baydur, Fatih Yilmaz

Research Collection School Of Economics

Financial institutions are exempt from the value-added tax (VAT) in most countries. We develop a general equilibrium model with endogenous firm entry and a banking sector to accommodate three key distortions related to exempt treatment: (i) self-supply bias in the banking sector, (ii) under-taxation of payment services, and (iii) input distortions in the business sector and tax cascading. We calibrate our model to the average of Germany, France, and the UK data. Our results show that repealing exempt treatment always increases tax revenues. However, welfare gains occur only at low VAT rates due to the hump-shaped VAT Laffer curve.

Tech Innovation Capacity In Mountain West Metros, Ally M. Beckwith, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

This fact sheet highlights data on the tech innovation capacity in Mountain West metropolitan areas, as originally reported in 2019 by Robert D. Atkinson, Mark Muro, and Jacob Whiton from the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program. Tech innovation is defined as advanced industries that are America’s 50 high-R&D, high-STEM manufacturing, energy, and services industries ranging from aerospace and automobile manufacturing to solar electricity generation to internet publishing to bio-tech. Tech innovation is essential to the future of America’s economy. However, “superstar” metropolitan areas creating a regional imbalance within the innovation sector. The Brookings report examines metropolitan areas that are potential …

Housing Affordability Index: Mountain West Cities, November 2021, Olivia K. Cheche, Joshua Padilla, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This fact sheet highlights data on the median household income, median home price, estimated monthly mortgage and taxes, and share of income used for homeownership in fifteen Mountain West housing markets, as originally outlined in the “RealtyHop Housing Affordability Index: November 2021” report. The RealtyHop report analyzes the affordability of housing markets for the 100 most populous cities in the United States.

Nebraska Monthly Economic Indicators: November 24, 2021, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

The LEI-N rose by 0.61% during October 2021. The increase in the leading indicator, which is designed to predict economic activity six months in the future, signals moderate economic growth in Nebraska during the spring of 2022. There was an increase in building permits for single-family homes in October and positive business expectations. There also was a decline in initial claims for unemployment insurance. However, several indicator components worsened during October. Airline passenger counts and manufacturing hours worked both declined slightly. There also was a modest uptick in the value of the U.S. dollar. A higher dollar is challenging for …

Antitrust And Platform Monopoly, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

Are large digital platforms that deal directly with consumers “winner take all,” or natural monopoly, firms? That question is surprisingly complex and does not produce the same answer for every platform. The closer one looks at digital platforms the less they seem to be winner-take-all. As a result, competition can be made to work in most of them. Further, antitrust enforcement, with its accommodation of firm variety, is generally superior to any form of statutory regulation that generalizes over large numbers.

Assuming that an antitrust violation is found, what should be the remedy? Breaking up large firms subject to extensive …

Addressing The Divisions In Antitrust Policy, Herbert J. Hovenkamp

All Faculty Scholarship

This is the text of an interview conducted in writing by Professor A. Douglas Melamed, Stanford Law School.

Pandemic Hope For Chapter 11 Financing, David A. Skeel Jr.

All Faculty Scholarship

One of the biggest surprises of the recent pandemic from a bankruptcy perspective has been the ready availability of financing. A variety of factors—such as an estimated $2.5 trillion in available funding at the outset of the crisis and the buoyant stock market—may have contributed. In this Essay, I focus on a less widely appreciated factor, a striking shift in the capital structure of many corporate debtors. Rather than borrowing from one group of lenders, debtors now often borrow from multiple groups of diverse lenders. Although the new capital structure complexity has downsides, it also could counteract a longstanding problem …

Stock Return Prediction Using Financial News: A Unified Sequence Model Based On Hierarchical Attention And Long-Short Term Memory Networks, Haoling Chen, Peng Liu

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Stock return prediction has been a hot topic in both research and industry given its potential for large financial gain. The return signal, apart from its inherent volatility and complexity, is often accompanied by a multitude of noises, such as other stocks’ performance, macroeconomic factors and financial news, etc. To better characterize these factors, we propose a new model that consists of two levels of sequence: an NLP-based module to capture the sequential nature of words and sentences in the financial news, and a time-series-based module to exploit the sequential nature of adjacent observations in the stock price. In this …

“Lord, Mr. Ford!" The Overall Estimated Economic Impacts Of The New Blueovalsk Battery Park In Glendale, Kentucky, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Socially Responsible Corporate Customers, Rui Dai, Hao Liang, Lilian Ng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Corporate customers are an important stakeholder in global supply chains. We employ several unique international databases to test whether socially responsible corporate customers can infuse similar socially responsible business behavior in suppliers. Our findings suggest a unilateral effect on corporate social responsibility (CSR) only from customers to suppliers, an evidence further supported by exogenous variation in customers’ close-call CSR proposals and by product scandals. Customers exert influence on suppliers’ CSR through positive assortative matching and their decision-making process. Enhanced collaborative CSR efforts help improve operational efficiency and firm valuation of both customers and suppliers but increase only the customers’ future …

Volatility Timing Under Low-Volatility Strategy, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors show that the slope of the volatility decile portfolio’s return profile contains valuable information that can be used to time volatility under different market conditions in the United States. During good (bad) market conditions, the high- (low-) volatility portfolio produces the highest return. The authors proceed to devise a volatility timing strategy based on statistical tests on the slope of the volatility decile portfolio’s return profile. Volatility timing is achieved by being aggressive during strong growth periods and conservative during market downturns. Superior performance is obtained, with an additional return of 4.1% observed in the volatility timing strategy, …

Algorithmic Transparency, Jian Sun

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

I study the optimal algorithmic disclosure in a lending market where lenders use a predictive algorithm to mitigate adverse selection. The predictive algorithm is unobservable to borrowers and uses a manipulable borrower feature as input. A regulator maximizes market efficiency by disclosing information about the statistical properties of variables embedded in the predictive algorithm to borrowers. Under the optimal disclosure policy, the posterior belief consists of two disjoint regions in which the borrower feature is more relevant and less relevant in predicting borrower quality, respectively. The optimal disclosure policy differentiates posterior lending market equilibria by the equilibrium data manipulation levels. …

A Data Envelopment Analysis Approach To Portfolio Selection: An Application To The Blue Chip Stocks In The Philippine Stock Exchange (2010-2019), Vishal Bhagia, Colleen Monica K. Chiu, Paulynne J. Castillo, Roberto B. Raymundo, Joel Q. Tanchuco

Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies (AKI)

There has been a growing interest in the application of data envelopment analysis (DEA) as a nonparametric approach in portfolio optimization due to its flexibility in overcoming the limitations of the conventional mean-variance portfolio (MVP) model. Therefore, this study aims to validate the allocative efficiency of the DEA cross-efficiency model using blue chip stocks in the Philippine Stock Exchange from 2010 to 2019. This study finds that the proposed model is able to distinguish a unique set of best-performing stocks across each holding period and outperforms the MVP more consistently. The results of this study suggest that the proposed DEA …

Nebraska Monthly Economic Indicators: October 27, 2021, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

The LEI-N fell by 0.91% during September 2021. The decline in the leading indicator, which is designed to predict economic activity six months in the future, suggests that economic growth will slow significantly in Nebraska during the first quarter of 2022. While business expectations remained solid, other components of the leading indicator worsened. Manufacturing hours worked, airline passenger counts, and building permits for single-family homes all declined. There also was an increase in initial claims for unemployment insurance during the month.

Mutual Fund Stewardship And The Empty Voting Problem, Jill E. Fisch

All Faculty Scholarship

When Roberta Karmel wrote the articles that are the subject of this symposium, she was skeptical of both the potential value of shareholder voting and the emerging involvement of institutional investors in corporate governance. In the ensuing years, both the increased role and engagement of institutional investors and the heightened importance of shareholder voting offer new reasons to take Professor Karmel’s concerns seriously. Institutional investors have taken on a broader range of issues ranging from diversity and political spending to climate change and human capital management, and their ability to influence corporate policy on these issues has become more significant. …

Investment Patterns In Mountain West States, Counties, And Nevada Cities 2005-2019, Peter Grema, Zachary Walusek, Katie M. Gilbertson, William E. Brown Jr.

Economic Development & Workforce

The purpose of this fact sheet is to summarize findings on capital flows across Mountain West states and counties, and within Nevada cities. The “Gauging Investment Patterns across the US” report by the Urban Institute present findings of overall volume of capital deployed, racial equity of investments, and income equity for each respective geographic area. The full report further breaks down these three main categories into 18 other metrics.

Supporting Renewable Energy Market Growth Through The Circular Integration Of End-Of-Use And End-Of-Life Photovoltaics, Erika Marsillac

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

Energy demand continues to grow with the world’s burgeoning population. Meeting energy needs through renewable sources allows for market growth with limited environmental impact, but sourcing constraints can limit production, creating industrial and environmental problems. The exploitation of end-of-use and end-of-life photovoltaic (PV) options that are traditionally treated as waste offers a valuable opportunity to support renewable energy market growth with fewer sourcing constraints and minimal environmental impacts, but this circular investment has not yet been broadly implemented, nor is broad guidance widely available to aid its implementation. From a business perspective, this paper discusses the technical issues, assesses the …

Implications Of Online Gambling Legalization, William M. Schmidt

Student Publications

The tradition of gambling has been around for thousands of years, but has undergone a recent evolution into what it is perceived as today. This has turned it into an industry of its own, which will only continue to grow with the ongoing legalization of online gambling. Past trends in these legislations would project further economic growth tied to the gambling industry. However, the mental health implications that have been seen to stem from the practice of gambling are as present as ever. This problem associated with the industry will also be expected to climb as gambling becomes both more …

Business Models For Post-Crisis Information Ecosystems, Antje Mays

Library Faculty and Staff Publications

Since early 2020, the global COVID-19 pandemic has interrupted activity across business, education, research, and communities. Public health safety precautions have forced drastic reductions in economic and educational activity, resulting in widespread economic uncertainty and sizeable budget cuts. With library budgets already declining since the 2001-2002 recession following the dotcom crash and more steeply since the 2007-2009 Great Recession spawned by the financial crash, the pandemic has accelerated trends that were already underway. Libraries’ reduced purchasing power places the information ecosystem at risk of contraction in the race to contain costs. While economic contexts and publishing forms have changed considerably. …