Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Three Essays In Forward Rate Unbiasedness Hypothesis, Devalina Chatterjee

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

The objective of this dissertation is to verify and explain the forward exchange rate unbiasedness hypothesis in the foreign exchange market. Since in most of the cases the unbiasedness hypothesis fails to hold, we try to provide three different explanations of this puzzling behavior in the three essays. The first essay tries to resolve the forward premium puzzle by addressing the model misspecification issue and thereby adding a time-varying risk premium term in the percentage change specification. The risk premium term is modeled using the GARCH-M representation and the model is estimated by applying a GARCH (1, 1) specification. The …

Essays On Scale Economies And Efficiency In Public Education, Kalyan Chakraborty

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Efficiency in public education is a significant issue in the United States. Nationwide, real expenditure per student increased 8% per year between 1960 and 1993, but output as measured by standardized test scores has not increased and in some cases (i.e., the verbal SAT [Scholastic Achievement Test] score) has declined. One explanation is that resources are not being utilized efficiently either in the technical or allocative sense. Also, the issue is important because substantial savings are possible by consolidation of schools and/or districts.

This dissertation explores efficiency by measuring technical efficiency at the school district level from four perspectives. The …

Essays On The Impact Of Foreign Aid On Economic Growth And Development: The Case Of Jordan, Jamal G. Husein

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation examines the role of foreign aid in economic growth and development of Jordan. The flow of foreign capital takes two main forms: private foreign investment, mostly foreign direct investment by large multinational corporations, and public development assistance (foreign aid) from both individual national governments and multinational donor agencies. The distinguishing characteristic of foreign aid is the concessional element. In this dissertation, recent techniques and advances in time-series analysis are used in the empirical section of Chapters 2 and 3, i.e., vector autoregression (VAR), impulse response functions, and variance decompositions. In the fourth chapter, we use a nonlinear three-stage …

Essays On The Determination Of Equilibrium Real Exchange Rate For Taiwan, 1981-1993, Mei-Ling Chen

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Taiwan is one of the four smaller Asian economies. Before 1960, Taiwan pursued industrialization policies by limiting imports of manufactured goods, gradually adopting an open and outward-oriented economic policy, believing it would expend exports and yield gained ground.

With this increasingly open and outward-oriented economic policy as the background, we will study the real exchange rate (RER) misalignment in Taiwan over the period 1981-93. The RER plays a critical role in maintaining external competitiveness. Hence, from the policy point of view, this rate should not be allowed to deviate much from its equilibrium level. Since the equilibrium real exchange rate …

Three Essays On Labor Force Participation Rates Among The Fifty States, With Empirical Tests Using Panel Data, John D. Groesbeck

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation examined the theoretical foundations of an individual's labor force participation decision. Further, this dissertation provided empirical analysis of the impact of state tax rates, the duration of unemployment, and household size on male, female, and combined labor force participation rates of the fifty states from 1985 to 1990. Empirical tests showed that: 1) no significant relationship existed between tax variables and participation rates; 2) the duration of unemployment was positively related with participation rates while unemployment was negatively related; 3) service sector growth was positively correlated with longer durations of unemployment; and 4) household size was negatively related …