Business Commons^™

Nebraska Business And Consumer Confidence Indexes: November 9, 2018, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

Nebraska consumer and business confidence improved during October 2018. The Business Confidence Index – Nebraska (BCI-N) rose to 117.3 in October from 110.6 in September. The Consumer Confidence Index – Nebraska (CCI-N) rose to 108.3 in October after a sub-par level of 97.0 during September. Both business and consumer confidence were well above the neutral level of 100.0. When asked about the most important issue facing their business, 29 percent of respondents chose the availability and quality of labor while 27 mentioned customer demand and 15 percent mentioned competition from other businesses. This is the first time that labor availability …

Future And Value: The Library As Strategic Partner, Antje Mays

Library Presentations

Broader economic trends spawn budget pressures for education and libraries, prompting a plethora of studies on the value and relevance of libraries. Numerous reports on economic decline in libraries and studies with mixed pronouncements on the value of libraries have led to a negative self-image within the library profession. Yet libraries' leadership in connecting learners to knowledge is at the heart of producing many of the key skills sorely needed in robust societies and economies. Librarianship has many untapped opportunities for positioning itself as a prominent strategic partner. This paper outlines current research on the economic and societal context for …

Bounded Rationality And The Choice Of Jury Selection Procedures, Martin Van Der Linden

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

A peremptory-challenge procedure allows the parties to a jury trial to dismiss some prospective jurors without justification. Complex challenge procedures offer an unfair advantage to parties who are better able to strategize. I introduce a new measure of strategic complexity based on level-k thinking and use this measure to compare challenge procedures often used in practice. In applying this measure, I overturn some commonly held beliefs about which jury selection procedures are strategically simple.

Partisan Conflict And Stock Price, Dashan Huang, Wang Liyao

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Partisan conflict has been one dominant theme in U.S. politics in recent years. By using the textual index of Azzimonti (2018), this paper shows that partisan conflict positively predicts market returns, controlling for economic predictors and proxies for uncertainty, disagreement, geopolitical risk, and political sentiment. A one standard-deviation increase in partisan conflict is associated with a 0.58% increase in next month market return. The forecasting power concentrates in periods when the president is from the Republican Party or the majority of House is Republicans. Partisan conflict is positively related to downside risk, and makes investors more conservative when its value …

Potential Crime Risk And Housing Market Responses, Seonghoon Kim, Kwan Ok Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study how information on local (dis)amenities is transmitted and manifested in housing markets. Using nationwide data on multifamily homes in South Korea, we analyze heterogeneity in the effect of a sex offender's presence on sale prices and rents of nearby homes. Our results demonstrate that the price effect of the offender's move-in varies significantly by spatial context. People react more strongly and persistently to the move-in of the offender in places wherein indicators of social connectedness are stronger, such as places with relatively low population density. We also find that, unlike housing prices, rents do not change in response …

Labour Research Conference 2018: Upskilling Of Mature Workers, Stephen Hoskins, Luca Facchinello

Research Collection School Of Economics

Many developed countries are approaching an era of ageing population due to an increase in longevity and decrease in fertility rates. Singapore is no exception, having one of the fastest ageing populations in Asia, which is driven by low fertility rates and the third longest life expectancy in the world. The number of elderly citizens, defined as those aged 65 and above, is expected to triple to 900,000 by 2030, making up about 28% of the total population in Singapore (Population SG, 2016). This changing population age profile, combined with a competitive labour market, means it makes business sense to …

The Impact Of In-House Unnatural Death On Property Values: Evidence From Hong Kong, Zheng Chang, Jing Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

The occurrence of in-house unnatural death could negatively affect the value of housing property. This study evaluates the geographic and temporal scope of the impact of unnatural death on property values in Hong Kong. By exploiting the spatial and intertemporal variation of the shock in a difference-in-differences approach, we find significant negative externalities of unnatural death incidence on neighborhood housing values. On average, units in which an unnatural death occurred experience a 25% drop in value following the death. Nearby units on the same floor also show a significant price drop of 4.5%. Prices of units on other floors of …

News Co-Occurrence, Attention Spillover, And Return Predictability, Li Guo, Lin Peng, Yubo Tao, Jun Tu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine the effect of investor attention spillover on stock return predictability. Using a novel measure, the News Network Triggered Attention index (NNTA), we find that NNTA negatively predicts market returns with a monthly in(out)-of-sample R-square of 5.97% (5.80%). In the cross-section, a long-short portfolio based on news co-occurrence generates a significant monthly alpha of 68 basis points. The results are robust to the inclusion of alternative attention proxies, sentiment measures, other news- and information-based predictors, across recession and expansion periods. We further validate the attention spillover effect by showing that news co-mentioning leads to greater increases in Google and …

Entrepreneurship, College, And Credit: The Golden Triangle, Roberto M. Samaniego, Juliana Yu Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a model to evaluate the aggregate impact of college finance in an environment with entrepreneurship. The calibrated model captures the stylized fact that entrepreneurs with college are more common and more profitable in the United States. The calibration indicates this is mainly because higher labor earnings allow college‐educated agents to ameliorate credit constraints if and when they eventually become entrepreneurs. Changes in financing constraints on entrepreneurs can thus affect college attendance, and changes in financing constraints on college can affect entrepreneurship rates as well.

Strategic Sequential Bidding For Government Land Auction Sales – Evidence From Singapore, Sumit Agarwal, Jing Li, Ernie Teo, Alan Cheong

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the extent to which equilibrium auction prices are pushed up sequentially due to strategic bidding behaviors in government land auction sales. Using a unique dataset that covers the universe of tendering prices submitted by all developers for all residential land auction sales in Singapore, we find that a tenderer’s bids are significantly higher where there was a previous land parcel sold within two years and located within four kilometers. The elevated price margin decreases with time and geographic distance. Tracking sequential bids submitted by same developers over time, we find that the incumbent winner of a previous …

Are Mexican And U.S. Workers Complements Or Substitutes?, Raymond Robertson

Mission Foods Texas-Mexico Center Research

Fears of NAFTA in the United States were largely based on the belief that Mexicans and U.S. workers were substitutes: lowering barriers would allow competing products into the United States and investment outflows that would cause U.S. workers to lose their jobs to Mexico. While this may have been true when NAFTA first went into effect, subsequent production specialization between Mexico and the United States may suggest that Mexican and U.S. workers are now complements. In particular, NAFTA may have induced production restructuring throughout North America to generate integrated value chains in which workers in the three NAFTA countries work …

Impact Of Airplane Crashes On Firm's Credit Risk Under The Creditgrades Model, Alexandros Bougias

Undergraduate Economic Review

The paper examines the impact of airplane accidents with 40 or more fatalities, on airline's firm credit risk. The sample contains 20 airplane crashes for the period 2000-2017. The analysis proposes the CreditGrades model introduced by Finger et al. (2002) , which is an extension of the first passage time model of Black and Cox (1976). The study concludes that airplane accidents lead to a statistically significant increase in airline's Probability of Default. The results are both significant and robust under the t-Test and the non-parametric Wilcoxon Signed-rank test.

Nebraska Monthly Economic Indicators: October 24, 2018, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

The Leading Economic Indicator – Nebraska (LEI-N) 1 fell by 0.35% during September of 2018. The decline in the LEI-N, which is designed to predict economic activity six months into the future, suggests that Nebraska economic growth will slow in the coming months. Initial claims for unemployment insurance rose in Nebraska during September, while building permits for single-family and airline passenger counts both declined. Business expectations were a bright spot for the Nebraska economy. Respondents to the September Survey of Nebraska Business reported plans to increase both sales and employment at their businesses over the next six months. Manufacturing hours-worked …

Black Panther: Thrills, Postcolonial Discourse, And Blacktopia, Giana M. Eckhardt

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

Black Panther challenges traditional depictions of African nations in film by showcasing the fictional African country of Wakanda as a global technological leader, its citizens as being comfortable in global settings, and by having Wakanda deliver social aid to the US, reversing the typical global flow of assistance. Wakanda is depicted as a Blacktopia, where societies thrive beyond the reach of white supremacy as they have not been subject to colonization.

Introduction To The Special Issue: Alternative Imaginings, Mine Üçok Hughes, Rika Houston

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

No abstract provided.

Moral Hazard And Adverse Selection In The Insurance Market, Kevin Willardsen

Applied Econometrics Workshops

Willardsen presented on his upcoming article with the same title. The abstract from this paper is as follows:

Understanding the relative significance of adverse selection and moral hazard is important in determining effective policy for insurance markets. Separate identification of these two effects, empirically, is difficult. To overcome this limitation, this paper uses experimental methods to examine how adverse selection and moral hazard separately affect agent performance in a real-effort task. In particular, we explore how agent behavior (effort in the task) changes across a baseline with no insurance option, a treatment where individuals can choose to purchase insurance, and …

Is Uber A Substitute Or Complement For Public Transit?, Jonathan D. Hall, Craig Palsson, Joseph Price

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

How Uber affects public transit ridership is a relevant policy question facing cities worldwide. Theoretically, Uber’s effect on transit is ambiguous: while Uber is an alternative mode of travel, it can also increase the reach and flexibility of public transit’s fixed-route, fixed-schedule service. We estimate the effect of Uber on public transit ridership using a difference-in-differences design that exploits variation across U.S. metropolitan areas in both the intensity of Uber penetration and the timing of Uber entry. We find that Uber is a complement for the average transit agency, increasing ridership by five percent after two years. This average effect …

Nebraska Business And Consumer Confidence Indexes: October 5, 2018, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

Nebraska consumer and business confidence diverged further during September 2018. The Business Confidence Index – Nebraska (BCI-N) remained at a high level, rising from 110.4 In August to 110.6 in September. The Consumer Confidence Index – Nebraska (CCI-N) fell, dropping from a neutral value of 100.2 in August to 97.0 in September. Business confidence is strong, but consumer confidence has turned negative. When asked about the most important issue facing their business, customer demand was mentioned by 35 percent of respondents, while the availability and quality of labor was mentioned by 26 percent and 16 percent mentioned competition from other …

Technological Change, Automation And Employment: A Short Review Of Theory And Evidence, K. V. Ramaswamy

International Review of Business and Economics

A selective survey of recent papers in the area of technological change, automation and employment is presented. The objective is to convey analytical ideas and the empirical evidence that have informed studies in this area of contemporary policy relevance. Automation occurs when a machine does work that might previously have been done by a person. How robots and automation affect the availability of jobs for labor force? There are very few emerging studies that address the issue with detailed data on robots usage and employment in different sectors of the economy. Based on our review of available studies and empirical …

Impact Of Infrastructure On Economic Growth: A Panel Data Approach Using Pmg Estimator, Esra Kabaklarli, Fatih Mangir, Bansi Sawhney

International Review of Business and Economics

Growth theory asserts that infrastructure investments promote economic growth by improving the quality of life and increasing private sector productivity . Transport services, water utility services and telecommunication services provide better facilities to attract FDI (foreign direct investment) and increase productivity across sectors. The aim of this article is to analyze whether transport infrastructure investments have a strong effect on the economic growth. It also attempts to analyze the differential impact of each type of infrastructural spending on economic growth. Our data set covers annual data from 1993 to 2015 period for 15 OECD countries (Austria, Turkey, Czech Republic, Spain, …

Dynamics Of Tobin’S Q And Us Stock Performance, Matiur Rahman, Muhammad Mustafa

International Review of Business and Economics

To study the dynamic effects of changes in Tobin’Q on stock prices of selected 249 US public companies of different industry categories. Panel unit roots tests and cointegration tests are implemented. Next, DOLS and GMM models are estimated. Annual data for the 2004-2012 period are used for the above selected US companies. Panel unit root tests provide somewhat mixed evidence of non-stationarity of both variables. There is clear evidence of cointegration between the above variables. The negative coefficient of the error-correction term shows convergence toward long-run equilibrium, though at slow pace. The estimates also reveal shortrun net positive interactive feedback …

The Hubbert Curve And Rare Earth Elements Production, Zachary Gann

International Review of Business and Economics

This paper intends to apply the Hubbert curve to the production of rare earth elements by the United States, China, and total global production. The goal of this research is to see if the production of rare earth elements follows the predicted production forecasted by the Hubbert curve and to observe if the curve can create usable predictions of future production. Global demand for rare earth elements has drastically increased in the modern era due to their unique properties. Global production has increased as well to meet this increased demand. Rare earth elements are a collection of seventeen chemical elements …

Retesting The Dual Sector Model In India And Brazil, Jiade Xiao

International Review of Business and Economics

India and Brazil are developing countries and emerging markets, enjoying economic development in the recent decades. The development experience of both countries may provide persuasive evidences in supporting or disapproving the economic theories. Arthur Lewis’ structural-change theory focuses on the transition of economic structure with the character from depending heavily on agricultural sector to the character with more contribution from industrial sector occurring in the developing countries. His model of dual sector, as an important part of the structural-change theory, argues that the labor moving from agricultural sector to industrial sector associated with the migration from rural area to urban …

Detecting Multiple Bubbles And Exuberance In Financial Data: An Extensive Empirical Examination Over Four Major Foreign Indexes, Swarna D. Dutt, Dipak Ghosh

International Review of Business and Economics

History is replete with incidents of financial crisis, which ex-post become a wakeup call for policy makers and the people. But there were no tests which could identify and date financial bubbles in real time, till now. Phillips, Shi and Yu [2015] provides the first and only model to recursively examine for multiple bubbles. Their “flexible window” methodology provides consistent results and has successfully identified the well-known historical episodes of exuberance and collapse. This accuracy provides very useful “warning alerts” to central bankers, fiscal regulators and policy makers to pre-emptively act and possibly eliminate an impending implosion. We extensively examine …

2016 Rupee Demonetization (Dn): It’S A Success!, Sudhanva Char

International Review of Business and Economics

The November 2016 Dn of the rupee is a phenomenal event in India’s monetary history with spillovers into every nook and corner of Indian economy, and yet it has hardly received the attention it warrants from economists and other professionals. To better understand the socioeconomic consequences this paper compiles and evaluates the positives and negatives of Dn in spite of challenges in quantifying them. There was uproar at the outset because of the market turmoil notebandi caused, but some twenty months later Indian economy is doing well on the Dn stress test. This is evident in a) the broadening of …

Could An Alternative Policy Design Have Produced A Stronger Mortgage Modification Outcome For Hamp?, Sean Macdonald

Publications and Research

This paper conducts a study of the relative effectiveness of the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) - the primary federal mortgage loan modification program - from early 2009 through 2016. It evaluates U.S. Treasury Department and other data sources, and reviews the recent literature on the relative success of the program. The analysis suggests that HAMP’s success rate in modifying mortgage loans was likely constrained by its voluntary design, a structure that enabled lenders and servicers to prioritize the interests of investors in assessing the risks of modification. It then considers the economic issues surrounding the foreclosure issue and presents …

Can Maternity Benefits Have Long-Term Effects On Childbearing? Evidence From Soviet Russia, Olga Malkova

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper quantifies the effects of Russia’s 1981 expansion in maternity benefits on completed childbearing. The program provided one year of partially paid parental leave and a small cash transfer upon a child’s birth. I exploit the program’s two-stage implementation and find evidence that women had more children as a result of the program. Fertility rates rose immediately by 8.2% over twelve months. The increase in fertility rates not only persisted for the ten-year duration of the program, but it reflected large increases in higher-order births to older women who already had children before the program started.

Impact Of Payment Technology Innovations On The Traditional Financial Industry: A Focus On China, Meifeng Yao, He Di, Xianrong Zheng, Xiaobo Xu

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

With the rapid advent of e-commerce in China, the technological innovation of third-party payment has experienced explosive growth. This important technological innovation, initiated by emerging Internet companies, is helping the traditional financial industry's payment business-represented by commercial banks-expand in both depth and breadth. Meanwhile, there is also a large degree of substitution, competition and crowding out among these banks in terms of the traditional financial industry's basic payment and settlement functions, potential customers, deposit and loan services and traditional intermediary business. This paper explores the impact (episodic and long-term steady-state) of the technological innovation of payment on commercial banks. It …

Earnings Per Occupation In East Texas - October 2018, Rod Mabry, Manuel Reyes-Loya, Marilyn Young

Hibbs Newsletter

It’s that time of year—students have headed back to school! This issue of our Hibbs Outlook newsletter focuses on education and its relationship to income. This is one issue you will want to give to your own students, your grandchildren or neighbor children and send to teachers everywhere.

Border Prospects For 2019 (Nafta / Alcan / Usmca), Thomas M. Fullerton Jr.

Border Region Modeling Project

No abstract provided.