Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Modelo De Regresión Lineal Aplicado Al Análisis Regional, Isaac Sánchez-Juárez

Isaac Sánchez-Juárez

Este capítulo tiene como objetivo presentar detalladamente una de las técnicas más conocidas en economía regional para el análisis de la información: el modelo de regresión lineal. El trabajo se centra en su especificación, estimación, inferencia, predicción y diagnóstico, usando información regional (estatal) de México para 2003 y 2012. A diferencia de un trabajo ordinario de investigación, en el cual se establece una hipótesis y pregunta (s) de investigación asociada (s), este enfatiza la técnica y su aplicación, en aras de ayudar a que pueda ser utilizada de forma eficaz. A través de un ejemplo construido con información real que …

Measuring Risk In Business And Economics: Possibility Of Loss Or Dispersion Of Outcomes, Shyam Sunder

Shyam Sunder

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of The Volatility Of Monetary Policy On A Small Economy: Some Evidence From New Zealand, Reza Moosavi Mohseni Dr., Jiling Cao, Wenjun Zhang

Reza Moosavi Mohseni

This paper investigates the impact of the international and domestic volatility of monetary policy shocks on a small economy using the GARCH-SVAR model. We enrich the SVAR model by using time-varying International and domestic volatilities as endogenous variables. The results show that although monetary policy shocks have transient effect on real economy (neutrality of money) the impact of the volatility of monetary policy shocks on real part of the economy is permanent and significant. Findings of variance decomposition also show that New Zealand heavily depends on international trade, so international monetary shocks can have a permanent impact on the local …

Inequality And Its Discontents, Jill Littrell, Fred Brooks, Jan Ivery, Mary Ohmer

jill l littrell Dr.

In the last two decades, the income and security of the individual middle class worker has declined and the gap between the rich and the poor has widened. We will examine those policies that strengthened the middle class after World War II, which included strengthening the bargaining power of labor. We will proffer suggestions for reviving the middle class now with particular focus on empowering labor. We will offer suggestions for the role of the practitioner in this endeavor.

In Defense Of The Community Reinvestment Act, Jill Littrell, Fred Brooks

jill l littrell Dr.

In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) of 1977 has probably received more media attention in the past two years than it garnered cumulatively over the previous 30 years. Numerous conservative pundits and commentators have blamed the CRA for the subprime crisis and the subsequent world-wide financial meltdown. Most social workers are probably unaware that the CRA is probably responsible for more investment, loans, and wealth creation in low and moderate income neighborhoods than any other single piece of federal legislation over the past 40 years. This paper highlights the following features about …

Why You Should Care About The Threatened Middle Class, Jill Littrell, Fred Brooks, Jan Ivery, Mary Ohmer

jill l littrell Dr.

In the last two decades, the income and security of the individual middle class worker has declined and the gap between the middle class and the wealthy has widened. We explain how this is bad for democracy, the economy, and the aggregate health of the nation. We examine the governmental policies and interventions that increased the middle class following the depression and maintained its vigor through the post-World War II period. The impetus for these changes in governmental policies in the 1930s was to end the Great Depression. We pose the question of whether a nation can recover from a …

Current Account “Core-Periphery Dualism” In The Emu, Tatiana Cesaroni, Roberta De Santis

Roberta De Santis

Current account (CA) dispersion within European Union (EU) member states has been increasing progressively since the 1990s. Interestingly, the persistent deficits in many peripheral countries have not been accompanied by a significant growth process able to stimulate a log run rebalancing as neoclassical theory predicts. To shed light on the issue this paper investigates the determinants of Eurozone CA imbalances, focusing on the role played by financial integration. The analysis considers two samples of 22 OECD and 15 EU countries, three time horizons corresponding to various steps in European integration, different control variables and several panel econometric methods. The results …

Does Our Values Become Worsen? — A Study Of The Effects Of Fiscal Policies On Households’ Lives In Sudan, Yagoub Elryah

Yagoub Elryah (PhD)

As a result of the secession of South Sudan, Sudan has experienced the largest increases in the budget deficit, shortages of hard currencies, highest inflation rates, and debt accumulation. In this paper, we attempt to extend and contribute to prior research on the impacts of fiscal policies on households’ life in Sudan. An online data from 1999 until 2013 were used to examine the effects of fiscal policy on households’ life in Sudan. To do this, the OLS and VECM estimation procedures were considered. Our results supported hypotheses that the households’ life has become more worsen than the situation pre-secession …

Law, Environment, And The “Nondismal” Social Sciences, William Boyd, Douglas Kysar, Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Jeffrey J. Rachlinski

Over the past 30 years, the influence of economics over the study of environmental law and policy has expanded considerably, becoming in the process the predominant framework for analyzing regulations that address pollution, natural resource use, and other environmental issues. This review seeks to complement the expansion of economic reasoning and methodology within the field of environmental law and policy by identifying insights to be gleaned from various “nondismal” social sciences. In particular, three areas of inquiry are highlighted as illustrative of interdisciplinary work that might help to complement law and economics and, in some cases, compensate for it: the …

Group-Average Observables As Controls For Sorting On Unobservables When Estimating Group Treatment Effects: The Case Of School And Neighborhood Effects, Joseph G. Altonji, Richard K. Mansfield

Rick Mansfield

We consider the classic problem of estimating group treatment effects when individuals sort based on observed and unobserved characteristics. Using a standard choice model, we show that controlling for group averages of observed individual characteristics potentially absorbs all the across-group variation in unobservable individual characteristics. We use this insight to bound the treatment effect variance of school systems and associated neighborhoods for various outcomes. Across four datasets, our conservative estimates indicate that a 90th versus 10th percentile school system increases high school graduation and college enrollment probabilities by at least 0.047 and 0.11. Other applications include measurement of teacher value-added.

Carbon Free Energy Development And The Role Of Small Modular Reactors: A Review And Decision Framework For Deployment In Developing Countries, Geoffrey Black, Meredith A. Taylor, David Solan, David Shropshire

Meredith Taylor Black

Global energy demand is projected to continue to grow over the next two decades, especially in developing economies. An emerging energy technology with distinct advantages for growing economies is small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). Their smaller size makes them suitable for areas with limited grid capacities and dispersed populations while enabling flexibility in generating capacity and fuel sources. They have the ability to pair well with renewable energy sources, the major source of increased energy capacity for many developing economies. Further advantages include their passive safety features, lower capital requirements, and reduced construction times. As a result, SMRs have potential …

Three (Potential) Pillars Of Transnational Economic Justice: The Bretton Woods Institutions As Guarantors Of Global Equal Treatment And Market Completion, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This essay aims to bring two important lines of inquiry and criticism together. It first lays out an institutionally enriched account of what a just world economic order will look like. That account prescribes, via the requisites to that mechanism which most directly instantiate the account, three realms of equal treatment and market completion - the global products, services, and labor markets; the global investment/financial markets; and the global preparticipation opportunity allocation. The essay then suggests how, with minimal if any departure from familiar canons of traditional international legal mandate interpretation, each of the Bretton Woods institutions - particularly the …

Reflective Intensions: Two Foundational Decision-Points In Mathematics, Law, And Economics, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This Article, transcribed from a symposium talk given by the author, examines two critical junctures at which foundational decisions must be made in three areas of theoretical inquiry - mathematics, law, and economics. The first such juncture is that which the Article labels the "arbitrary versus criterial choice" juncture. This is the decision point at which one must select between what is typically called an "algorithmic," "principled," "law-like," or "intensionalist" understanding of those concepts which figure foundationally in the discipline in question on the one hand, and a "randomized," "combinatorial," or "extensionalist" such understanding on the other hand. The second …

From Macro To Micro To “Mission-Creep”: Defending The Imf’S Emerging Concern With The Infrastructural Prerequisites To Global Financial Stability, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Charges that the IMF has been engaging in "mission creep," gradually taking on a growing number of activities that exceed its constitutive mandate, have grown both in vehemence and in frequency since the late 1990s. I argue that, what ever the substantive merits of its actions, the IMF's developing attention to the structural determinants of global financial stability is not ultra vires. The Fund's evolving role was both foreseen and constitutionally provided for, both at its founding and at the principal constitutive Articles-amending "moments" since.

Toward A Global Shareholder Society, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

With the American economy seemingly stalling, the global economy thereby imperiled, and another electoral campaign season well underway in the U.S., the "outsourcing" of jobs from the developed to the developing world is again on the public agenda. Latest figures indicate not only that layoffs and claims for joblessness benefits are up in the U.S., but also that the rate of American job-exportation has more than doubled since the last electoral cycle. This year's American political candidates have been quick to take note. In consequence, more than at any time since the early 1990s, continued American, and with it other …

Pareto Versus Welfare, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Many normatively oriented economists, legal academics and other policy analysts appear to be "welfarist" and Paretian to at least moderate degree: They deem positive responsiveness to individual preferences, and satisfaction of one or more of the familiar Pareto criteria, to be reasonably undemanding and desirable attributes of any social welfare function (SWF) employed to formulate social evaluations. Some theorists and analysts go further than moderate welfarism or Paretianism, however: They argue that "the Pareto principle" requires the SWF be responsive to individual preferences alone - a position I label "strict" welfarism - and conclude that all social evaluation should in …

Bailouts, Buy-Ins, And Ballyhoo, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

The bailout strategy now being pursued by Treasury under the recently authorized Troubled Asset Relief Plan, if “strategy” it can be called, remains obscure and erratic at best. All the while markets remain jittery and credit remains tight, as the underlying source of our present financial jitters—continued decline in the housing market and still mounting foreclosures—goes unaddressed. This piece proposes an interesting and novel approach to solving the financial problem. If it works out, it would eventually minimize the cost to the government.

Taking Distribution Seriously, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

It is common for legal theorists and policy analysts to think and communicate mainly in maximizing terms. What is less common is for them to notice that each time we speak explicitly of socially maximizing one thing, we speak implicitly of distributing another thing and equalizing yet another thing. We also, moreover, effectively define ourselves and our fellow citizens by reference to that which we equalize; for it is in virtue of the latter that our social welfare formulations treat us as “counting” for purposes of socially aggregating and maximizing. To attend systematically to the inter-translatability of maximization language on …

Whose Ownership? Which Society?, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

The idea of an "ownership society" (OS) is not new to American politics or law. It might be called the seventeen year cicada of American domestic policy - emerging once per generation onto the national agenda, generating just a bit of buzz, then receding once again to leave a mass of empty shells and buried eggs behind. Unlike the insects, however, OS proposals seldom have sounded the same notes to everyone's ears. They have been proffered to or on behalf of differing constituencies for differing reasons, and therefore have tended to mean different things to different people. It is tempting …

What Kinds Of Stock Ownership Plans Should There Be? Of Esops, Other Sops And "Ownership Societies", Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Present-day advocates of an ownership society (OS) do not seem to have noticed the means we have already employed to become an OS where homes and human capital (higher education) are concerned. Nor do they appear to have considered whether these same means - which amount to publicly enhanced private credit markets - might be employed to spread shares in business firms, with a view to completing our OS. This article, the third in a series, seeks tentatively to fill that gap. It does so first by demonstrating how the Employee Stock Ownership Plan, or ESOP, in effect replicates our …

From "Mission-Creep" To Gestalt Switch: Justice, Finance, The Ifis, And Globalization's Intended Beneficiaries, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This essay suggests means by which the international financial institutions (IFIs), the IBRD and the IMF in particular, and indeed "globalization" more generally might be rendered more friendly to humanity. The key, it suggests, lies in a subtle shift in perspective, a "gestalt-switch": It is to move from thinking in terms of political and macroeconomic aggregates - nations and gross national products - to thinking in terms of the individuals who constitute nations and produce national products - those the essay calls the "intended beneficiaries" of globalization. Thinking in terms of those beneficiaries and their equal claims to our concern …

Minding The Gaps: Fairness, Welfare, And The Constitutive Structure Of Distributive Assessment, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

Despite over a century’s disputation and attendant opportunity for clarification, the field of inquiry now loosely labeled “welfare economics” (WE) remains surprisingly prone to foundational confusions. The same holds of work done by many practitioners of WE’s influential offshoot, normative “law and economics” (LE). A conspicuous contemporary case of confusion turns up in recent discussion concerning “fairness versus welfare.” The very naming of this putative dispute signals a crude category error. “Welfare” denotes a proposed object of distribution. “Fairness” describes and appropriate pattern of distribution. Welfare itself is distributed fairly or unfairly. “Fairness versus welfare” is analytically on all fours …

Just Insurance Through Global Macro-Hedging: Information, Distributive Equity, Efficiency, And New Markets For Systemic-Income-Risk-Pricing And Systemic-Income-Risk-Trading In A New Economy, Robert C. Hockett

Robert C. Hockett

This article considers the prospects for exploiting (a) several deep conceptual linkages between justice and insurance, (b) the rapid development of new hedging methods and technologies, and (c) an increasingly integrated global finance economy, in a manner that can render the global economy both more just and more prosperous. It first derives an account of economic justice from the best known theories currently in the field – an account likely to enjoy broad appeal. The article then elaborates on a number of striking parallels between what it takes for the best account of justice on the one hand, the theory …

The Dynamics Of Firm Behavior Under Alternative Cost Structures, George A. Hay

George A. Hay

A large and growing number of studies attempt to determine the important factors affecting firms' decisions with respect to price, output, and inventories. A striking feature of this literature is the embarrassingly large number of alternative models—all allegedly consistent with the principles of profit maximization—which are used to justify various reduced form or behavioral equations to be estimated with the appropriate firm or industry data. It is rare, however, that the equations to be estimated are derived rigorously from the underlying model. Because of this, the restrictions placed on the equations to be estimated are often limited at worst to …

Production, Price, And Inventory Theory, George A. Hay

George A. Hay

This paper is an attempt to derive empirically testable hypotheses regarding the principal determinants of firms' decisions on production, price, and finished goods inventory. The general approach to the problem is that many of the same factors which affect the optimal value for one variable will also influence decisions on the other two, and that a "proper" model must take into account the interdependence of these variables and the simultaneous nature of the decisions involving them. This is in contrast to literature on the theory of inventories (see Paul Darling and Michael Lovell) in which the firm is assumed to …

External Economies And Competitive Equilibrium, George A. Hay, John J. Mcgowan

George A. Hay

In an article published in 1955, Murray Kemp analyzed the case for interference with the competitive allocation of resources when external economies of production are present. In the specific model we are interested in—where the costs of any one producer's operations are affected by the total output of all producers of the same product—Kemp attempted to show that where entry into the industry is closed (although the industry is otherwise perfectly competitive), "there can always be found a subsidy, either on the product or on a particular factor, which will be a sufficient incentive to firms to produce an optimal …

Adjustment Costs And The Flexible Accelerator, George A. Hay

George A. Hay

The flexible accelerator concept has provided the rationale for the regression equations used in several recent econometric studies of inventory behavior. In such a model a desired (or equilibrium) level of inventories is defined, but because of costs involved in changing the level of stocks only a partial adjustment of inventories to their desired level is achieved in any time period. This leads to the familiar decision rule in which current inventory is a linear function of the previous period's stock plus a variable or set of variables representing current demand. The purpose of this note is to question whether …

External Diseconomies In Competitive Supply: Comment, George A. Hay, John J. Mcgowan

George A. Hay

In a recent article in this Review, Charles Goetz and James Buchanan (G-B) assert that " . . . the standard description of misallocation in the presence of external production diseconomies is misleading . . . " because these externalities produce a ". . . combination of exchange-inefficiency with production-inefficiency [which ] renders the construction of correction devices much more difficult" (p. 889). Stated otherwise their contention is that with external diseconomies that are internal to an industry, i.e., those that each firm in an industry inflicts on other firms in the same industry, a competitive regime in the presence …

A General Solution For Linear Decision Rules: An Optimal Dynamic Strategy Applicable Under Uncertainty, George A. Hay, Charles C. Holt

George A. Hay

Linear decision rules for controlling complex systems are often obtained by matrix inversion, but transform methods offer an alternative approach that yields insights into the structure of the decision problem of maximizing expected payoffs under constraints.

The Nexus Between Infrastructure Investment And Economic Growth In The Mexican Urban Areas, Vicente German-Soto, Héctor A. Barajas Bustillos

Vicente German-Soto