Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Currencies, Identities, Free Banking, And Growth In Early Twentieth Century Manchuria, Thomas Gottschang

Economics Department Working Papers

From 1906 until 1931, Manchuria – Northeast China - was a complex patchwork of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian spheres of control. Since political authority was fragmented, none of the governments was capable of establishing a central bank with a monopoly over the money supply. Multiple currencies were in use, ranging from strings – tiao- of traditional Chinese copper cash, to silver dollars (yuan) from Mexico, China, and Japan, to Russian rubles (which crashed in value after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution), and miscellaneous paper currencies of varying stability. The modern banks established under national and private auspices to serve the commercial …

Do Policy-Makers Earmark To Constrain Their Successors? The Case Of Environmental Earmarking, Neva Novarro

Economics Department Working Papers

This paper examines whether legislators earmark funds in order to constrain the spending of future legislators with different preferences. Specifically, panel data is used to estimate the probability a new environmental earmarking law is passed as a function of Democrats holding and subsequently losing majority control of the government. The results of this study do not support this hypothesis. In fact, Democrats with a large majority who subsequently lose this majority power following the next election are found to be less likely to earmark funds for the environment. One possible explanation for this finding may be that competing forces make …

South Dakota 2004 Custom Rates Survey, Burton Plueger

Economics Commentator

No abstract provided.

Putting Humpty Dumpty Back Together: Pricing In Anticommons Property Arrangements, Ben Depoorter, Sven Vanneste

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Recently, a new theory has drawn considerable attention in the literature on common property. A number of scholars have pointed to the danger of excessive propertization in the context of what are termed "anticommons" property regimes. Although this theory has found its way into numerous legal and economic applications, the empirical and cognitive foundations of the theory of fragmentation remain unexplored. Based on experimental data, this Article conducts an investigation into the social and personal processes involved in the anticommons.

The results confirm the theoretical proposition that anticommons deadweight losses increase with the degree of complementarity between individual parts and …

The Unsolvable Dilemma Of A Paretian Policymaker, Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci, Nuno Garoupa

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

In this paper, we argue that social decisionmaking is subject to a fundamental conflict between consistency and completeness. We show that a consistent welfarist method of policy assessment, that is, one that never violates the Pareto principle, may be incomplete in the sense of being incapable of providing a solution to important social welfare problems.

Results And Recommendations Of Water And Wastewater Affordability Study, Ryan A. Breisach, George A. Erickcek, Brad R. Watts

Reports

No abstract provided.

Counterfactual Reasoning And Common Knowledge Of Rationality In Normal Form Games, Eduardo Zambrano

Economics

When evaluating the rationality of a player in a game one has to examine counterfactuals such as "what would happen if the player were to do what he does not do?" In this paper I develop a model of a normal form game where counterfactuals of this sort are evaluated as in the philosophical literature (cf. Lewis, 1973; Stalnaker, 1968). According to this method one evaluates a statement like ``what would the player believe if he were to do what he does not do'' at the world that is closest to the actual world where the hypothetical deviation occurs. I …

Does Soft Dollar Brokerage Benefit Portfolio Investors: Agency Problem Or Solution?, Stephen M. Horan, D. Bruce Johnsen

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

With soft dollar brokerage, institutional portfolio managers pay brokers “premium” commission rates in exchange for rebates they use to buy third-party research. One hypothesis views this practice as a reflection of the agency problem in delegated portfolio management; another views it as a contractual solution to the agency problem that aligns the incentives of investors, managers, and brokers where direct monitoring mechanisms are inadequate. Using a database of institutional money managers, we find that premium commission payments are positively related to risk-adjusted performance, suggesting that soft dollar brokerage is a solution to agency problems. Moreover, premium commissions are positively related …

Benefit-Cost Analysis Of The Southwest Organizations Unifying Resources For Our Community And Employers (Source), George A. Erickcek, Bridget F. Timmeney, Brad R. Watts

Reports

No abstract provided.

A Culturally Correct Proposal To Privatize The British Columbia Salmon Fishery, D. Bruce Johnsen

George Mason University School of Law Working Papers Series

Canada now faces two looming policy crises that have come to a head in British Columbia. The first is long-term depletion of the Pacific salmon fishery by mobile commercial ocean fishermen racing to intercept salmon under the rule of capture. The second results from Canadian Supreme Court case law recognizing and affirming “the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada” under Section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982. This essay shows that the economics of property rights provides a joint solution to these crises that would promote the Canadian commonwealth by way of a privatization auction …

The Transition From Dirty To Clean Industries: Optimal Fiscal Policy And The Environmental Kuznets Curve, Steven P. Cassou, Stephen F. Hamilton

Economics

This paper investigates privately and socially optimal patterns of economic development in a two-sector endogenous growth model with clean and dirty goods. We consider a second-best fiscal policy framework in which distortionary taxes jointly influence economic growth and environmental quality. In this policy setting, three conditions produce an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC): (i) dirty output is bounded; (ii) clean output grows endogenously; and (iii) growth in the dirty sector reduces growth in the clean sector. These conditions do not arise with a consumption externality, but can emerge with a production externality. Endogenous labor supply implications are also investigated. Although not …

The Coordinated Effects Of Mergers In Differentiated Products Market, Kai-Uwe Kuhn

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

No abstract provided.

Ranking And Selection Of Motor Carrier Safety Performance By Commodity, William C. Horrace, Thomas P. Keane

Economics - All Scholarship

We use recent safety performance data to rank US motor carrier commodity segments (e.g., Tank segment or Produce segment) in terms of several driver-related, vehicle-related, and crash-related safety measures. Ranking and selection inference techniques are used to determine the best and worst performing commodity segments at the 95% confidence level. The results are mixed, however the Passenger segment is generally best, while the Produce, Intermodal, and Refrigerated segments tend to be worst.

Upgrading California’S Home Care Workforce: The Impact Of Political Action And Unionization, Candace Howes

Economics Faculty Publications

Candace Howes examines the recent history of one of California's rapidly growing occupations: home care. As the author's analysis demonstrates, home care has been extensively transformed in recent years through large-scale unionization and coalition-based political action, which have led to major improvements in wages and benefits. Apart from providing many home care workers with better pay, the upgrading of this occupation has also improved the quality of care that clients receive, since higher wages make for lower turnover. The improved working and living conditions that result benefit caregivers and those they serve alike. The author's empirical analysis has obvious ramifications …

Pastoralist Livestock Marketing Behavior In Northern Kenya And Southern Ethiopia: An Analysis Of Constraints Limiting Off-Take Rates, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Winnie Luseno, Peter D. Little, Sharon M. Osterloh, Hussein Mahmoud, Getachu Gebru

Economics - All Scholarship

Pastoralists in East Africa's arid and semi-arid lands (ASAL) regularly confront climatic shocks that plunge them into massive herd die-offs and loss of scarce wealth. One of the most puzzling features of pastoralist behavior in times of stress has been their relatively low and non-responsive rate of marketed off-take of animals when faced with likely losses to herd mortality. As Figure 1, from Desta (1999), finds in 17-year herd history data from Borana pastoralists in southern Ethiopia, mortality always exceeds net sales as a share of beginning period herd size, with the latter never exceeding three percent and moving hardly …

November 2004, Syracuse Department Of Economics

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Probabilities As Similarity-Weighted Frequencies, Antoine Billot, Itzhak Gilboa, Dov Samet, David Schmeidler

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A decision maker is asked to express her beliefs by assigning probabilities to certain possible states. We focus on the relationship between her database and her beliefs. We show that, if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the belief formation process follows a simple formula: beliefs are a similarity-weighted average of the beliefs induced by each past case.

Predicting Electoral College Victory Probabilities From State Probability Data, Ray C. Fair

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A method is proposed in this paper for predicting Electoral College victory probabilities from state probability data. A “ranking” assumption about dependencies across states is made that greatly simplifies the analysis. The method issued to analyze state probability data from the Intrade political betting market. The Intrade prices of various contracts are quite close to what would be expected under the ranking assumption. Under the joint hypothesis that the Intrade price ranking is correct and the ranking assumption is correct, President Bush should not have won any state ranked below a state that he lost. He did not win any …

Fact-Free Learning, Enriqueta Aragones, Itzhak Gilboa, Andrew Postlewaite, David Schmeidler

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

People may be surprised by noticing certain regularities that hold in existing knowledge they have had for some time. That is, they may learn without getting new factual information. We argue that this can be partly explained by computational complexity. We show that, given a database, finding a small set of variables that obtain a certain value of R 2 is computationally hard, in the sense that this term is used in computer science. We discuss some of the implications of this result and of fact-free learning in general.

Multivariate Stochastic Volatility Models: Bayesian Estimation And Model Comparison, Jun Yu, Renate Meyer

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we show that fully likelihood-based estimation and comparison of multivariate stochastic volatility (SV) models can be easily performed via a freely available Bayesian software called WinBUGS. Moreover, we introduce to the literature several new specifications which are natural extensions to certain existing models, one of which allows for time varying correlation coefficients. Ideas are illustrated by fitting, to a bivariate time series data of weekly exchange rates, nine multivariate SV models, including the specifications with Granger causality in volatility, time varying correlations, heavy-tailed error distributions, additive factor structure, and multiplicative factor structure. Empirical results suggest that the …

Asymmetric Response Of Volatility: Evidence From Stochastic Volatility Models And Realized Volatility, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the asymmetric response of equity volatility to return shocks. We generalize the news impact function (NIF), originally introduced by Engle and Ng (1993) to study asymmetric volatility under the ARCH-type models, to be applicable to both stochastic volatility (SV) and ARCH-type models. Based on the generalized concept, we provide a unified framework to examine asymmetric properties of volatility. A new asymmetric volatility model, which nests both ARCH and SV models and at the same time allows for a more flexible NIF, is proposed. Empirical results based on daily index return data support the classical asymmetric SV model …

Is Smaller Better? A Comment On "Comparative Economic Impact Analyses" By Michael Mondello And , Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

In a recent article in Economic Development Quarterly, "Comparative Economic Impact Analyses: Differences Across Cities, Events, and Demographics" (November 2004), Michael Mondello and Patrick Rishe examined the economic impact of small, amateur sporting events on host economies. This response to their work suggests four reasons why ex ante economic impact estimates for smaller sporting events may come closer to matching ex post reality than those for "mega-events" including less crowding out, lower hosting costs, higher multipliers, and less incentive for boosters to published inflated figures.

Rule-Based And Case-Based Reasoning In Housing Prices, Gabrielle Gayer, Itzhak Gilboa, Offer Lieberman

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

People reason about real-estate prices both in terms of general rules and in terms of analogies to similar cases. We propose to empirically test which mode of reasoning fits the data better. To this end, we develop the statistical techniques required for the estimation of the case-based model. It is hypothesized that case-based reasoning will have relatively more explanatory power in databases of rental apartments, whereas rule-based reasoning will have a relative advantage in sales data. We motivate this hypothesis on theoretical grounds, and find empirical support for it by comparing the two statistical techniques (rule-based and case-based) on two …

Retrospective On The Postwar Productivity Slowdown, William D. Nordhaus

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The present study reviews the “productivity slowdown” of the 1970s and 1980s. The study also develops a new data set — industrial data available back to 1948 — as well as a new set of tools for decomposing changes in productivity growth. The major result of this study is that the productivity slowdown of the 1970s has survived three decades of scrutiny, conceptual refinements, and data revisions. The slowdown was primarily centered in those sectors that were most energy-intensive, were hardest hit by the energy shocks of the 1970s, and therefore had large output declines. In a sense, the energy …

Estimated Age Effects In Athletic Events And Chess, Ray C. Fair

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Rates of decline are estimated using record bests by age for chess and for various track and field, road running, and swimming events. Using a fairly flexible functional form, the estimates show linear percent decline between age 35 and about age 70 and then quadratic decline after that. Chess shows much less decline than the physical activities. Rates of decline are generally larger for the longer distances, and for swimming they are larger for women than for men. An advantage of using best-performance records to estimate rates of decline is that the records are generally based on very large samples. …

Measurement And Assessment Of Efficiency And Productivity In Kentucky State Government Services, William H. Hoyt

CBER Research Report

Excerpt from the executive summary:

This report examines the provision of a variety of government services within Kentucky. The provision of these public services, specifically the cost of providing these services is examined for the years 1992, 1997, and 2002. In addition, employment and salaries in government services are also examined. In addition to comparing costs within Kentucky during this period, the costs of providing public services are also compared to costs of the same government services by its neighboring states (Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia).

The Effect Of Income Taxation On Consumption And Labor Supply, James P. Ziliak, Thomas J. Kniesner

Center for Policy Research

We estimate the incentive effects of income taxation in a life-cycle model of consumption and labor supply that relaxes the standard assumption of strong separability within periods. Our model permits identification of both within-period preference parameters and lifecycle preference parameters such as the inter-temporal substitution elasticity. Results indicate that consumption and hours worked are direct complements in utility, and both increase with an increase in the after-tax share and with a compensated increase in the net wage. The compensated net wage elasticity is about 0.3, nearly double the standard estimates for men in the United States that ignore within-period non-separability …

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- November 2004, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Sustained Growth In Nebraska, Saeed Ahmad, John Austin, Tom Doering, Ernie Goss, Bruce Johnson, Mike Lundeen, Donis Petersan, Franz Schwarz, Eric Thompson, Keith K. Turner

Economics Faculty Publications

National Macroeconomic conditions are favorable for future expansion of income, employment, and revenue in Nebraska. In particular, the U.S. economy is now in the heart of an expansion expected to persist over the three year forecast period. The principal engine of growth will be a sustained expansion in private sector investment and consumption demand. However, the rate of growth in the national economy likely will be moderate rather than rapid. At least three factors will act to moderate growth. The first is higher energy prices. Rapid growth in global demand is expected to keep prices for oil and natural gas …

The Cfe Case, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

It’s Elementary is a series of essays on topics in education and education policy. The main focus is on education finance in New York State, but general research findings in education and education policy issues in several other states are also discussed. John Yinger, Professor of Economics and Public Administration at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University is the author of most of these essays, although a few are written by or co-authored with other scholars.