Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Sports Team Success And Managerial Decisions: The Role Of Playing Time Concentration, Alexander Cardazzi, Brad R. Humphreys, Kole Reddig

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Professional sports teams employ highly paid managers and coaches to train players and make tactical and strategic team decisions. A large literature analyzes the impact of manager decisions on team outcomes. Empirical analysis of manager decisions requires a quantifiable proxy variable for manager decisions. Previous research focused on manager dismissals, tenure on teams, the number of substitutions made in games, or the number of healthy players on rosters held out of games for rest, generally finding small positive impacts of manager decisions on team success. We analyze manager decisions by developing a novel measure of game-specific coach decisions based on …

The Growth Of Firms, Markets And Rents: Evidence From China, Daniel Berkowitz, Shuichiro Nishioka

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

The evidence for whether China become more competitive following its accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) is mixed. Using recent methods for estimating markups and profit shares, this paper documents that Chinese manufacturing firms on average collected more rents after the accession because the rate of net entry of firms lagged the rapid growth of the domestic market. While the selection on large productive firms drove the rise in the aggregate markups in the United States (De Loecker et al, 2020), these competitive forces played a secondary role in China.

Measuring Persistent Global Economic Factors With Output, Commodity Price, And Commodity Currency Data, Arabinda Basistha, Richard Startz

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

In this study we use monthly G7 industrial production data, commodity price index data, and commodity currency exchange rate data in a dynamic factor model to examine the global economic factors useful for commodity price prediction. We differentiate between the dynamic factors by specifying a persistent factor and a non-persistent factor, both as a single global factor using all data and as factors for each category of data. The in-sample predictive performances of the three persistent factors together are better than the non-persistent factors and the single global factors. Out-of-sample outcomes based on forecast combinations also support the presence of …

Political Regimes And Firms' Decisions To Pay Bribes: Theory And Evidence From Firm-Level Surveys, Shuichiro Nishioka, Sumi Sharma, Tuan Le

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

This paper makes the most of the observed actions of bribe takers and givers from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys and studies how a taker’s action influences a giver's decision to pay bribes. To motivate our empirical study, we consider Kaufmann and Wei's (1999) Stackelberg game between a tax authority and a firm that undergoes tax inspection. The model predicts that, when the authority can use its action as a credible threat for the firm's profitability, the authority disturbs the firm by inspecting more, and the firm is more likely to pay bribes. Consistent with the theoretical prediction, we find …

Now You Can Take It With You: Effects Of Occupational Credential Recognition On Labor Market Outcomes, Kihwan Bae, Edward Timmons

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Occupational credentials are typically not portable across geography. Using policy reforms by U.S. states, we show that the limited portability of occupational licenses constrains labor market activity and geographic mobility of licensed individuals. After states implement universal recognition, a policy that allows individuals with occupational licenses issued by other states to work without repeating a costly relicensing procedure, we find that the employment ratio increases by 0.98 percentage points among licensed individuals in the sample relative to unlicensed individuals. The employment effect is co-driven by additional labor market participation and a reduction in unemployment after the policy. With the employment …

Certifiably Employable?: The Effects Of Occupational Regulation On Unemployment Duration, Ilya Kukaev, Edward Timmons

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Occupational regulation is a labor market institution that has received a growing amount of attention by researchers. Existing research has explored the effects of occupational regulation on wages and employment. To the best of our knowledge, no existing study has estimated the effect of occupational credentials on unemployment duration in the US. We derive a random search model to explain differences in individual unemployment duration resulting from heterogeneous effects from licenses and certificates. Our model predicts that an occupational credential with a stronger signaling or human capital effect results in a shorter individual unemployment duration. To estimate the effect of …

The Scope Of Variable Inputs And Markup Estimates, Shuichiro Nishioka, Mari Tanaka

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

This paper builds an empirically tractable framework for the analysis of marginal costs in markup estimates from the production approach and examines how markups differ by the scope of variable inputs. Using plant-product matched data from Japan, we show that changes in markups can capture price and marginal cost dynamics, irrespective of the scope of variable inputs. Markups, however, are negatively and conditionally correlated with real output when only the most flexible intermediate inputs are selected as variable inputs. We find that the properties of markups depend on how variable inputs are selected and how underlying marginal costs are specified.