Business Commons^™

Do Gasoline Prices Affect Residential Property Values?, Adele C. Morris, Helen R. Neill

Brookings Mountain West Publications

This paper estimates the effect of gasoline prices on home values and explores the degree to which the relationship varies across a city. Using data from 930,702 home sales in Clark County, Nevada, from 1976 through 2010, we find that gasoline prices have significantly different effects on the sales price of homes in different neighborhoods. A ten percent increase in gasoline prices is associated with changes in location-specific average home values that span a range of over $13,000. This suggests that energy policies may affect household housing wealth via gasoline prices, a heretofore unrecognized distributional outcome.

International City/County Management Association 1999 Revenue Estimation Survey Revisited, Benjamin Bond

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In 1899 the National Municipal League declared that it was the duty of the Mayor to submit to the Council the annual budget of current expenses of the city, for almost as long, the budgeting process has been researched (Hou, 2006). Researching budgets is important and needed but comparatively little attention has been paid to revenue forecasts or to those responsible for the generation of revenue forecasts. Professional public administrators responsible for generating revenue forecasts have largely been overlooked in research. Judging by the lack of scholarly material available in academic journals, it appears the political process in which budget …

Mountain Monitor - 3rd Quarter 2014, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

As a group, the 10 major metro areas of the Mountain West outperformed the national economy during the third quarter of 2014 on all four indicators of economic vitality measured by the Mountain Monitor: employment growth, output growth, unemployment, and house prices. In the three months ending in September, the country’s large metropolitan areas were anticipating the rapid uptick in national economic growth that took hold at the end of 2014. Mountain region metro areas led the way.

All but two major metro areas in the region added jobs, and six did so at a faster rate than the …

A Study On Employee Turnover In Shanghai’S Fine Dining Restaurants, Yang Liu

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

No abstract provided.

Empirical Studies On Interest Rate Derivatives, Xudong Sun

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Interest rate models are the building blocks of financial market and the interest rate derivatives market is the largest derivatives market in the world. In this dissertation, we shall focus on numerical pricing of interest rate derivatives, estimating model parameters by Kalman filter, and studying various models empirically. We shall propose a front-fixing finite element method to price the American put option under the quadratic term structure framework and compare it with a trinomial tree method and common finite element method. Numerical test results show the superiority of our front-fixing finite element method in the aspects of computing the option …

Power America's — And Nevada's — Advanced Industries: State By State, Region By Region, Mark Muro

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

With the U.S. economy still flat, economic experts and leaders continue to search for the next source of U.S. and regional growth. One key component of the next era of prosperity can be projected: It is what the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program calls the advanced industry (AI) sector. The nation’s most strategic R&D — and STEM worker intensive industries, AIs like aerospace and IT are prime movers of regional and national prosperity, because they are key sources of technology innovation and generate domestic and international exports. Accordingly, the AI swatch of 50 discrete industries has emerged as an important new …

Mountain Monitor - 2nd Quarter 2014, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

Economic growth returned to the 10 major metro areas of the Mountain West in the second quarter of 2014 after slippage in the first quarter of the year. The resumption of vitality progressed unevenly, however. Denver and Salt Lake City pulled ahead as the fastest-growing metro areas in the region. Ogden and Provo’s days of above-average growth appeared to be fading. Las Vegas’ economic recovery advanced strongly, but Sun Belt peers Phoenix and Tucson had more difficulty moving beyond the first quarter’s slowdown. Albuquerque, for its part, welcomed a return to employment and output growth.

Across the region’s 10 major …

Mountain Monitor - 1st Quarter 2014, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

The quarter’s Mountain Monitor finds that the rate of economic recovery in the major metropolitan areas of the Mountain West is no longer impervious to national trends.

The previous edition of the Mountain Monitor observed that the regional rate of recovery seemed to be converging toward that of the nation. This edition of the Mountain Monitor suggests that the trend has progressed further.

The rate of economic recovery broadly slowed across the region from the fourth quarter of 2013 to the first quarter of 2014, just as it did nationally. The national headlines in the first three months of the …

Lattice Methods For The Valuation Of Options With Regime Switching, Atul Sancheti

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this thesis, we have developed two numerical methods for evaluating option prices under the regime switching model of stock price processes: the Finite Difference lattice method and the Monte Carlo lattice method.

The Finite Difference lattice method is based on the explicit finite difference scheme for parabolic problems. The Monte Carlo lattice method is based on the simulation of the Markov chain. The advantage of these methods is their flexibility to compute the option prices for any given stock price at any given time. Numerical examples are presented to examine these methods. It has been shown that the proposed …

Mountain Monitor - 4th Quarter 2013, Kenan Fikri, Mark Muro

Mountain Monitor Quarterly

The quarter’s Mountain Monitor finds that the pace of economic recovery in the Mountain West region’s major metropolitan areas converged toward that of the rest of the nation in the last quarter of 2013.

While quarterly performance on the Monitor’s four indicators of economic recovery—employment, output, the unemployment rate, and house prices—varied considerably across the 10 major metro areas of the region, their combined performance broadly slowed to track with the rate of national economic recovery. The quarter’s average job growth remained unchanged in the region at 0.4 percent as the national economy caught up. The gap between the national …

Cracking The Code On Stem: A People Strategy For Nevada's Economy, Jessica A. Lee, Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, Scott Andes, Siddharth Kulkarni

Brookings Mountain West Publications

Nevada has in place a plausible economic diversification strategy—and it’s beginning to work. Now, the state and its regions need to craft a people strategy. Specifically, the state needs to boost the number of Nevadans who possess at least some postsecondary training in the fields of science, technology, engineering, or math—the so-called “STEM” disciplines (to which some leaders add arts and design to make it “STEAM”).

The moment is urgent—and only heightened by the projected worker needs of Tesla Motors’ planned “gigafactory” for lithium-ion batteries in Storey County.

Even before the recent Tesla commitment, a number of the more high-tech …

Cracking The Code On Stem: A People Strategy For Nevada's Economy Executive Summary, Jessica A. Lee, Mark Muro, Jonathan Rothwell, Scott Andes, Siddharth Kulkarni

Brookings Mountain West Publications

Nevada has in place a plausible economic diversification strategy—and it’s beginning to work. Now, the state and its regions need to craft a people strategy. Specifically, the state needs to boost the number of Nevadans who possess at least some postsecondary training in the fields of science, technology, engineering, or math—the so-called “STEM” disciplines (to which some leaders add arts and design to make it “STEAM”).

The moment is urgent—and only heightened by the projected worker needs of Tesla Motors’ planned “gigafactory” for lithium-ion batteries in Storey County.

Even before the recent Tesla commitment, a number of the more high-tech …