Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Estimating The Effect Of Extended And Emergency Unemployment Benefits On The Long-Term Unemployed, James Jones

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Unemployment insurance is designed to help workers smooth consumption in the event of a negative employment shock. These benefits are traditionally funded and administrated by the individual states and territories of the United States. The depth and severity of the “Great Recession” that started in December of 2007 and ended in June of 2009 was such that, Congress was compelled on multiple occasions to extend those benefits. Legislation during this period extended the duration of unemployment benefits to the longest period in history, as unemployed individuals in many states could receive up to 99 weeks of unemployment compensation. The policy …

How Much Is Your Home Worth? Essays On Housing Value And Its Determinants, Anne Anders

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This first chapter uses neighborhood vacancies as a proxy for foreclosures and examines their impact on the value of surrounding neighborhood properties.

Often, the negative spillover of a foreclosure results from decay of the foreclosed property. Existence of a foreclosure within a neighborhood is proxied for by a vacant structure within 300 feet of the observed unit, resulting in a lower bound foreclosure externality.

Using the special neighbor sample of the American Housing Sample waves 1985, 1989 and 1993, small neighborhoods are observed and categorized into racially different neighborhoods (black, integrated or white neighborhood). Additionally, neighborhood-specific averages are constructed, such …

Essays On The Financial Crisis, Financial Regulation, And Banks, Danielle Zanzalari

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The conventional wisdom was that the Capital Purchase Program (CPP), under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), would benefit large banks over small sized banks, magnifying the claim that banks were 'Too Big to Fail'. In my first chapter, I examine whether investors react differently to important news regarding the CPP, depending on the asset size of banks. Using returns to common stock shareholders, I analyze the CPP announcement, bank capital infusions, and repayments and find that large banks, regardless of whether or not they entered into the CPP program and received capital, had large and significant returns at the …

Three Essays On Corruption And Government Finance, Yukun Sun

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There are three chapters in my dissertation. In chapter one I study the impact of government corruption on tax avoidance by corporations with tax liability in China. I begin by developing a model of a firm's choice of tax avoidance based on the level of corruption in the firm's province. I show that a higher level of government corruption and a higher tax rate are predicted to increase a firm's tax avoidance. My empirical estimates show that a one-standard-deviation increase in government corruption corresponds to a 6% increase in tax avoidance by firms, based on data from nearly 600,000 firms …

Estimation Of Procurement Auctions With Secret Reserve Prices, Di Wu

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The first two chapters of my dissertation are essays on estimation of procurement auctions with secret reserve prices. In the last chapter, I develop a test on strong disposability versus weak disposability for non-parametric data envelopment analysis (DEA) estimators. In auctions with secret reserve prices, the possibility that the item goes unsold in the first round generates a particular form of multi-round auction in which information on bids is revealed after each round. If bidders have an imperfect estimate of project costs, the information revealed by observing the bids of others in the previous round can mitigate the classic winner's …