Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Transmission Linked To Structural Vulnerability: How Low-Income Countries Endured The Great Recession, Rachel F. Hartgen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The implosion of the 2008 financial crisis ignited fears that integration would transmit the crisis’ effects throughout the global system. Examining two countries, Bangladesh and Zambia, this project shows that low-income countries with relatively little integration also saw negative impacts. This occurred through three main transmission mechanisms: trade flows, rising prices and financial flows that could have possible long-term effects at the macro and micro level. The manner and impact of each transmission mechanism, however, varied among LICs according to each country’s individual structural economic and financial vulnerabilities. Bangladesh saw a delayed impact but did not avoid the crisis completely, …

The Impact Of European Monetary Integration On The Labour And Conservative Parties In Britain, 1983–2003, Denise Froning

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study examines what effect the movement towards deeper economic and political integration in the EU has had on the domestic politics of a member country, Britain. This study argues that this pressure to integrate by joining the single currency, or European Monetary Union (EMU), and its predecessor, the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), has exacerbated the cross-cutting cleavages inherent in British party politics, making them potentially dangerous to party unity and to successful governance by making party management more challenging. The pressure imposed by the EU on British parties and governments to follow the path of economic integration to …

Three Essays On Applications Of Intrahousehold Resource Allocation Models, Santikorn Pamornpathomkul

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three chapters on the topic of intrahousehold resource allocation models. The first chapter tests the unitary and general collective models of intrahousehold resource allocation for various household compositions. I find that, for the quasiquadratic Engel curve specification, the overall results support the previous findings in the literature that the unitary model fails to explain how resources are allocated for all household types. However, when using the QUAIDS specification, the results can reject the unitary model only for smaller-sized households. The general collective model, on the other hand, cannot be rejected in either quasi-quadratic or QUAIDS and …

Quantifying The Impacts Of The 2007 Economic Crisis On A Local Tourism Industry And Regional Economy, Yun Ying Zhong

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of the study is to explore the accuracy of the Input-Output model and its derivative, the Occupation-Based model in investigating the impacts of the 2007 economic crisis on the tourism-related industries and the local economy in the Metro Orlando Area, Florida. The 2007-2008 total visitor expenditure change is taken as an initial shock from the economic crisis on the region's tourism-related industries, and the total impacts are measured in terms of industry output (sales), employment and annual occupational wage. The estimation results are compared with the actual data to verify the accuracy of the modeling results. Paired-sample T …

The Impact Of Continuing Education Modules On The Moral Obligations And Responsibilities Of Financial Advisors, Sandy Modell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Increased life expectancies and a significant reduction in the number of corporate pension plans nationwide have made the prospects of retirement a challenge for many of us. The burden of funding retirement will move from the corporation or government to the individual. Those individuals with limited financial experience will most likely need the guidance of a financial advisor. Can we trust and rely upon them? Following the 2004 late trading scandal and the 2008 financial meltdown, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority ("FINRA") implemented Continuing Education requirements at the advisor level. The intent was to improve the quality and integrity of …

Specialty Service Lines In The United States Hospital System: Old Wine, New Bottles, Michael Sajovetz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The emergence of specialty service lines in the United States health care system presents many significant questions regarding the access to, provision of, and financing of healthcare. In general terms, specialty service lines represent the newest development in several important trends in the American hospital system and reflect important trends in the wider economy. Many claims have been made regarding the effect of physician-owned specialty hospitals, from their exemption from self-referral prohibitions, their diversion of services away from general hospitals that use high profit margins to subsidize the "safety net," and concerns regarding the over-provision of technologically complex treatments in …

A Mixed-Methods Study Of Resident Readiness, Engagement, And Relocation During Mixed-Income Redevelopment, Laurie A. Walker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Since 1990, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has supported mixed-income redevelopment (MIR) strategies to address the problems of concentrated urban poverty neighborhoods with traditional public housing structures. This study focused on two neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado, with more than 38% of the residents living in poverty, which are facing transit-oriented MIR in the coming years. Residents in both neighborhoods have engaged in formal planning processes and community organizing as a way to be prepared for the change.

The study posed three research questions: (1) what predicts a community's readiness for MIR, (2) what predicts resident involvement as …

China And The United States' Recovery From The Global Financial Crisis, Yufei Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Faced with the global financial crisis, which has a large impact on the world's economy, China and the United Stated took different actions to pull the economy out of it, based on the fairly different financial, fiscal, and even political systems they have. This thesis focuses on the comparison of the financial and fiscal systems and trade structures between the two different countries, and how these have impact on their stimulus packages, thus influencing the economic recovery as a whole.

Macroeconomics After The Great Recession: Consensus Or Conflict?, Hailiang Xu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unlike microeconomics where there are relatively few disagreements, the field of macroeconomics has always been the arena of several competing theories. Despite that history of conflict, in the late 1980s during the Great Moderation, the New Classicals and the New Keynesians reached an agreement, known as the New Consensus during the Great Moderation. For decades, the New Consensus has dominated macroeconomic theory and policymaking not only in the U.S., but also throughout the world. After many years of calm, however, the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage crisis and its consequent Great Recession demonstrated that how fragile that consensus was.

While the debate …

Structured Finance And Its Effects On Macroeconomic Stability, Brian Charles Fahey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The tools and techniques of structured finance have changed banking remarkably over the past twenty years. This area grew to become larger than the sum total of traditional banking deposits in 2007. Despite this, the field is poorly understood and its connection to macroeconomic stability was underestimated until the credit crisis. This paper explores the structured finance market in three phases. First, the market is broken into parts based on the incentives and motivations of each of the three major agents in the field. Next, a critical review of pricing models that are used to justify the valuations of the …

Distribution Shifts And Declines In Autonomous Consumption: A Great Recipe For A Great Recession, David Michael Peterson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Great Recession has been drawing the attention of many due mainly to its global impact that has been considered very similar to the Great Depression. So have been the root causes. Among the competing explanations, the present study focuses on two of them that were the same factors - among others - to explain the root causes of the Great Depression: the dramatic shift in income distribution and the sudden drop in autonomous (or wealth-based) consumption. Accordingly the present study examines first, the role of income distribution shifts to demonstrate the fact that such a shift placed a significantly …

Products Of Their Environment? Nuclear Proliferation And The Emerging Multipolar International System, Jonathan David Moore

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The world is shifting from a unipolar system following the end of the Cold War to a multipolar system that is ushered in by "the rise of the rest." This change in the global structure has led some analysts to predict an increase in nuclear weapons proliferation caused by increased uncertainty and a decrease in alliances and security assurances. Nuclear proliferation, however, will not increase because these types of predictions are founded upon realist assumptions that inaccurately predict the characteristics of the emerging multipolar system as well as inaccurately understanding calculations of states with regard to nuclear weapons programs. I …

Three Essays On The Impact Of Information And Transparency In Firms, Lloyd R. Wade

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on the information and transparency in firms. In the first essay, we provide some of the first evidence regarding the impact of safety expenditures on moral hazard induced by increases in workers' compensation benefits. Prior studies have inferred the effect of safety incentives by testing the relation between claims frequency and benefit increases. However, these studies have not explicitly modeled the impact of actual safety expenditures. Using a proprietary dataset containing policy-level data for several thousand policies over a 13-year period we show that safety expenditures play a positive role in reducing the moral …

The Social Determinants Of Hiv/Aids In Cambodia: Is It Too Early To Call Micro Medical Efforts A Success?, Matthew Aaron Sherwood

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Cambodia, a least developed country (LDC) with a recent history of civil war and genocide, has been widely considered to be a success story when it comes to the fight against HIV/AIDS. Within a few years of the first HIV positive blood test in the kingdom in 1991, it quickly became the country with the highest prevalence in the region, with estimates of as many as 4% of the population being infected at one point.

In recent years, Cambodia's HIV/AIDS infection rates have plummeted to below 1%, with most of the credit being given to the implementation of micro-medical measures, …

Perceptions And Their Role In Consumer Decision-Making, Raman Khaddaria

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is an empirical investigation into the roles that different quantifiable and measurable perceptions play in defining individual behavior across a variety of decision-making contexts. In particular, the focus lies on smokers and the choices they make with regard to smoking and beyond. Chapter 1 analyzes a nationally representative sample of adults (23 years and older) in the United States, pertaining to the Annenberg Perception of Tobacco Risk Survey II (1999-2000). It is observed that three dimensions to smoking behavior viz., risk, temporality and addiction, interact to determine the smoking status of an individual. Although previous studies mostly looked …

Divergence Of Opinion And Share Repurchase, Hao Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Variation In The Dynamic Response Of Housing Markets, Andrew Pate Hill

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study evaluates the existence of asset bubbles in Florida metropolitan statistical areas during 2000–2010. Estimation occurs in two stages with the first being the estimated fundamental price of housing using a fixed effects estimator. Once the fundamental price of housing is determined an error correction model of housing prices is estimated to evaluate the degrees of serial correlation and mean reversion existing in the sampled geographic areas. Serial correlation and mean reversion are then interacted with the hypothesized effects of information costs, supply costs, and expectations of future price behavior to uncover variation in the dynamic response of housing. …

A Nonparametric Bounds Approach For Hedonic Housing Price Indexes With An Application To The Southern California Market 1996 To 2008, Zhizhong Shan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I propose a nonparametric bounds approach for hedonic housing price models partially identified due to sample selection of an unknown form. To construct bounds for the identification region, I use a nonparametric hedonic housing price model that allows spatial correlation and propose estimators of extreme conditional quantiles. The estimated bounds are then used to generate price indexes in the form of a time-series of intervals. In contrast to conventional housing price indexes, these interval-valued indexes do not suffer from sample selection bias. The approach is used to construct both metro and zip code level price indexes from a sample of …

The Heavy Hand Of Government: An Economic Study Of Obesity, Kanybek Imanakovich Sagynbekov

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Although there is extensive theoretical and empirical coverage of the incentive effect of an income tax on labor supply in the economics literature, there is no study of the secondary behavioral effects of an income tax. In this thesis, I explore the relationship among income, marginal income tax, and body weight. Namely, I show that under general conditions the Engel curve for the optimal weight is an inverted U-shaped function and the effect of the marginal income tax upon weight is non-linear. The empirical investigation uses two datasets: a panel dataset with 459 state-level observations for US states from 1992 …

Three Essays On Trading And Banking, William Paul Spurlin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay, Short Sales in the NYSE Batch Open and NASDAQ Opening Cross, examines opening-trade short volume's relation to short volume for the rest of the trading day and to overnight, previous-day, and same-day price changes. We find that short volume in the batch open and opening cross increases with short volume for the rest of the day, with previous-day, open-to-close price changes, and with overnight price changes for S&P 500 stocks. Batch-open short volume increases with overnight price changes, and it increases (does not decrease) for firms making positive (negative) overnight earnings …