Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The State Of The Region: Hampton Roads 2005, James V. Koch, Vinod Agarwal, John R. Broderick, Edward Card, Chris Colburn, Vicky Curtis, Steve Daniel, Susan Hughes, Kristine Karlsen, Feng Lian, Sharon Lomax, Linda Mcgreevy, Janet Molinaro, Kenneth Plum, Qian Sun, Gilbert Yochum

Economics Faculty Books

This is Old Dominion University's Sixth Annual State of the Region Report. While it represents the work of many people connected in various ways to the university, the report does not constitute an official viewpoint of Old Dominion, or it's president, Roseann Runte.

The report maintains the goal of stimulating thought and discussion that ultimately will make Hampton Roads an even better place to live. We are proud of our region's many successes, but realize that it is possible to improve our performance. In order to do so, we must have accurate information about "where we are" and a sound …

God And The Global Economy: Religion And Attitudes Towards Trade And Immigration In The United States, Joseph P. Daniels, Marc Von Der Ruhr

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

Using the results of a national identity survey, we test the impact of religious affiliation on trade and immigration-policy preferences of US residents while controlling for individual level of skill, political ideology and other important demographic characteristics. Our results show that religion is an important determinant of international-policy preferences as individuals who are pre-Vatican II Catholic or members of a fundamentalist Protestant denomination are more likely to prefer policies that restrict imports and immigration. Religiosity, in contrast, has a separate effect of moderating attitudes towards immigration. In addition, we find evidence of denominational effects among African Americans in that members …

Perfect Competition In A Bilateral Monopoly (In Honor Of Martin Shubik), Pradeep Dubey, Dieter Sondermann

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We show that if limit orders are required to vary smoothly, then strategic (Nash) equilibria of the double auction mechanism yield competitive (Walras) allocations. It is not necessary to have competitors on any side of any market: smooth trading is a substitute for price wars. In particular, Nash equilibria are Walrasian even in a bilateral monopoly.

Continuous Versus Discrete Market Games, Alexandre Marino, Bernard De Meyer

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

De Meyer and Moussa Saley [4] provide an endogenous justification for the appearance of Brownian Motion in Finance by modeling the strategic interaction between two asymmetrically informed market makers with a zero-sum repeated game with one-sided information. The crucial point of this justification is the appearance of the normal distribution in the asymptotic behavior of V n ( P )// n . In De Meyer and Moussa Saley’s model [4], agents can fix a price in a continuous space. In the real world however, the market compels the agents to post prices in a discrete set. The previous remark raises …

Testing For Non-Nested Conditional Moment Restrictions Via Conditional Empirical Likelihood, Taisuke Otsu, Yoon-Jae Whang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose non-nested tests for competing conditional moment restriction models using a method of empirical likelihood. Our tests are based on the method of conditional empirical likelihood developed by Kitamura, Tripathi and Ahn (2004) and Zhang and Gijbels (2003). By using the conditional implied probabilities, we develop three non-nested tests: the moment encompassing, Cox-type, and efficient score encompassing tests. Compared to the existing non-nested tests which mainly focus on testing unconditional moment restrictions, our approach directly tests conditional moment restrictions which imply the infinite number of unconditional moment restrictions. We derive the null distributions and power properties of the proposed …

The Incidence And Cost Of Job Loss In The Ukrainian Labor Market, Hartmut Lehmann, Norberto Pignatti, Jonathan Wadsworth

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

We examine the effects of economic transition on the pattern and costs of worker displacement in Ukraine, using the Ukrainian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey (ULMS) for the years 1992 to 2002. Displacement rates in the Ukrainian labor market average between 3.4 and 4.8 percent of employment, roughly in line with levels typically observed in several Western economies, but considerably larger than in Russia. The characteristics of displaced workers are similar to those displaced in the West, in so far as displacement is concentrated on the less skilled. Around one third of displaced workers find re-employment immediately while the majority continues into …

On Valuing Negative Cash Flows Related To Contamination, Asset Removal, Or Functional Obsolescence, Hal B. Heaton

Faculty Publications

Appraisers are frequently faced with having to value future expected negative cash flows. This article will demonstrate that valuing negative cash flows requires a different approach from valuing positive cash flows. The concepts of valuing remediation costs, asset removal costs, and other types of functional obsolescence will be used to illustrate this concept.

Occupation Analysis For The Greater Cleveland Area, Jun Koo

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

Occupation is an important aspect of regional economy; it has been forgotten, however, in most studies of regional economies. We developed a set of benchmark occupation clusters that share similar knowledge and skills and examined the Cleveland metropolitan area based on the derived occupation clusters.

Green Revolutions And Miracle Economies: Agricultural Innovation, Trade And Growth, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

The purpose of this paper is to develop a simple model of an economy in which growth is driven by a combination of exogenous technical change in agriculture as well as by a rising world demand for labor-intensive manufactured exports. We explore the relative roles of agricultural innovation and rising export demand in a model with two traded industrial goods and a non-traded agricultural good, food. When the non-traded sector uses a specific factor, we show that technical change in agriculture may be the key to sustained factor accumulation in industry, in particular driving intersectoral labor migration. A key assumption …

School Finance Reform And Property Values, Part 2: Public Service Capitalization, 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.

After Argentina, Anna Gelpern

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Argentina recently completed the largest sovereign bond restructuring in history. As soon as the government announced the results of its $100 billion tender in March 2005, editorial pages worldwide heralded a new era for sovereign debt, for the emerging markets and, occasionally, for international finance. Their views on Argentina's lessons were as disparate as they were definite. Some said the exchange would close the markets to middle-income countries. To others, it reaffirmed the markets' resilience. Some claimed it proved the need for statutory sovereign bankruptcy. Others said it clearly discredited the idea. Most spoke too soon. The deal took months …

Comment On "Realized Variance And Market Microstructure Noise" By Peter R. Hansen And Asger Lunde, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

With the availability of ultra high frequency financial data, the task of finding an appropriate econometric model to describe the movement of financial variables at the tick-by-tick level has become an important goal in financial econometric research. The task has both theoretical and empirical dimensions. From an empirical perspective, the near continuous recording of financial asset prices has opened up the intriguing possibility of fitting the quadratic variation process empirically, leading to what is possibly the most direct nonparametric measure of asset price volatility. The resulting quantity has become known in the financial econometrics literature as realized variance (RV) and …

The Auditor And The Firm: A Simple Model Of Corporate Cheating And Intermediation, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

We apply a game-theoretic model to the analysis of the recent spate of corporate scandals in which firms have cheated their investors, often with the aid of external auditors. We characterize the different types of equilibria that obtain for different parameter ranges in an auditor’s absence (the parameters we consider being early signal accuracy – a measure of transparency – and withdrawal costs – a measure of the liquidity of investments). We also analyze whether and under what conditions the presence of an informed auditor could lead to an improvement in the sense of honest behavior replacing cheating as the …

The Case Of The Errant Executive: Management, Control And Firm Size In Corporate Cheating, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

Firm insiders – a manager and a board – face moral hazard in relation to their outside shareholders in a repeated game with asymmetric information and stochastic market outcomes. The manager determines whether or not outsiders are cheated; the board, whose objectives differ from those of outside shareholders, attempts to control the manager through compensation contracts and dismissal threats Since compensation determines the manager’s incentive to cheat, firms competing for outside capital publicly announce their managerial contracts. However, secret renegotiation between firm and manager is still possible: so outsiders guard against being cheated by limiting their total stake in any …

Games Suppliers And Producers Play: Upstream And Downstream Moral Hazard With Unverifiable Input Quality, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

We pin down the optimal relational contract between an input supplier and a final goods producer given a framework of bilateral moral hazard with variable but non-verifiable input quality. Given the inability of third parties to verify input quality, each party has an incentive to cheat the other by making a false claim about input quality. We derive the contract which (a) induces honest behavior and brings about the Pareto superior first-best outcome for the widest possible range of exogenous parameters, and (b) maximizes the Nash product of both parties’ payoffs subject to incentive compatibility. An interesting feature of the …

Trade, Growth And Increasing Returns To Infrastructure: The Role Of The Sophisticated Monopolist, Ashok S. Guha, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

We consider a model of international trade with increasing returns in a non-traded input into industry, infrastructure, and show that the nature of equilibrium depends crucially on whether the infrastructure provider acts in a naïve manner – akin to a Level 1 agent in a cognitive hierarchy (C-H) model – or in a more sophisticated manner. Infrastructure requires a fixed investment and is produced under decreasing marginal costs, and we model two possible market forms, monopoly and Cournot oligopoly with free entry – both capable of generating pecuniary externalities in the manufacturing sector . Unlike most other work exploring the …

Honesty And Intermediation: Corporate Cheating, Auditor Involvement And The Implications For Development, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

We examine self-enforcing honesty in firm-investor relations in an imperfect public information game. Minimum firm size requirements and moral hazard limit ability to raise outside capital, yielding a floor on personal wealth required to enter entrepreneurship. Credible auditing could create efficiency gains. We propose mandatory disclosure of audit fees and an interpretation of international differences in shareholding patterns. We endogenize auditor-firm collusion and extortion by auditors. We embed our game-theoretic analysis in a general equilibrium model to generate unique equilibria that trace the impact of the distribution of wealth on the existence of the market and consequences for development.

Insurance, Self-Protection, And The Economics Of Terrorism, Darius Lakdawalla, George Zanjani

Darius N. Lakdawalla

This paper investigates the rationale for public intervention in the terrorism insurance market. It argues that government subsidies for terror insurance are aimed, in part, at discouraging self-protection and limiting the negative externalities associated with self-protection. Cautious self-protective behavior by a target can hurt public goods like national prestige if it is seen as “giving in” to the terrorists, and may increase the loss probabilities faced by others by encouraging terrorists to substitute toward more vulnerable targets. We argue that these externalities are essential for normative analysis of government intervention and may also explain why availability problems in this market …

A Theory Of Health Disparities And Medical Technology, Darius Noshir Lakdawalla, Dana Goldman

Darius N. Lakdawalla

Better-educated people are healthier, although the sources of this relationship remain unclear. Starting with basic principles of consumer theory, we develop a model of how health disparities are determined that does not depend on the precise causal mechanism. Improvements in the productivity of health care disproportionately benefit the heaviest health care users. Since richer patients tend to use the most health care, this suggests that new technologies—by making more diseases treatable, reducing the price of health care, or improving health care productivity—could widen socioeconomic disparities in health. An exception to this rule, however, is a simplifying technology, which can contract …

Regional Analysis And Sustainable Development: Application Of A Synthetic Sustainability Index To Galicia And The European Union, Fernando González-Laxe

Fernando González-Laxe

No abstract provided.

The Two-Part Instrument In A Second-Best World, Don Fullerton, Ann Wolverton

Don Fullerton

Standard Pigovian tax theory has been extended in two directions. First, many polluting activities are difficult to tax because they are not market transactions, and so recent papers have shown that the same effects can be achieved by use of a two-part instrument (2PI): a tax on output or income and a subsidy for clean alternatives to pollution. It is a generalization of a deposit-refund system. Second, a different literature concerns the second-best pollution tax in the presence of other tax distortions. Here, we combine the two extensions by looking at the second-best 2PI. When government needs revenue, is the …

Do Institutions Really Matter? Assessing The Impact Of State Judicial Structures On Citizen Litigiousness, Jeff L. Yates, Paul Brace, Holley Tankersley

ExpressO

No abstract provided.

An Analysis Of The Duties And Obligations Of The International Legal Community To The Eradication Of Poverty And Growth Of Sustainable Development In Light Of The Jus Cogens Nature Of The Declaration Of The Right To Development, Freda R. Murray-Bruce

ExpressO

This paper examines the copious problem of world poverty affecting half of the world’s population in the South and assesses the international legal obligations of the international legal community, viz., developed states, transnational corporations and the international financial institutions of the IMF, World Bank and WTO to the eradication of poverty and the growth of sustainable development, in view of the inviolability and peremptory nature of the Charter of the UN, and the international human rights provisions arising therefrom. To this extent, we examine the 1986 General Assembly Declaration on the Right to Development, along with the other International Bill …

The Same Side Of Two Coins: The Peculiar Phenomenon Of Bet-Hedging In Campaign Finance, Jason Cohen

ExpressO

The paper addresses the propensity of large donors to give to competing candidates or competing party organizations during the same election cycle – for example, giving money to both Bush and Kerry during the 2004 presidential race – a practice here termed 'bet-hedging.' Bet-hedging is analyzed in strategic and game-theoretic terms. The paper explores the prevalence of bet-hedging, the possible motivations behind the practice, and the informational concerns surrounding it. The paper argues that bet-hedging, out of all donation practices, carries with it a uniquely strong implication of ex post favor-seeking: if a donor prefers one side over the other, …

The Problematics Of The Pareto Principle, Daniel A. Farber

ExpressO

The Pareto Principle asserts in one form that an outcome which is unanimously preferred by individuals should be chosen by society; or in another form that an outcome should be chosen if it is preferred by at least one individual and the remaining members of society are indifferent. It is little wonder that this principle, which has the ring of a self-evident truth, has been the “gold standard” for law and economics. Despite its appeal, however, the Pareto Principle has limitations that are irrelevant in some spheres such as corporate law, but that may have serious import for fields such …

Unemployment Compensation Throughout The World: A Comparative Analysis, Wayne Vroman, Vera Brusentsev

Upjohn Press

The authors book that contains a contemporary perspective and review of UC programs in numerous countries throughout the world.

The Economics Of Sustainable Development, Sisay Asefa Editor

Upjohn Press

This title provides an economic perspective on critical issues that characterize the topic of sustainable development. In each case, the authors give hope that the challenges facing societies can be surmounted and millions can be lifted out of poverty by adopting policies that encourage the investment in human capital, democratic institutions, and improved market performance.

Welfare And Work: Experiences In Six Cities, Christopher T. King, Peter R. Mueser

Upjohn Press

King and Mueser examine changes in welfare participation and labor market involvement of welfare recipients in six major cities during the 1990s. By focusing on these six cities (Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, and Kansas City) they are able to glean the extent to which differences in state and local policy, administrative directives, and local labor market conditions contribute to the trends in caseloads, employment, and well-being observed among former recipients.

Safety Practices, Firm Culture, And Workplace Injuries, Richard J. Butler, Yong-Seung Park

Upjohn Press

The authors present analysis of the impact of various HRM practices on firms’ workers’ compensation costs; specifically, which practices lower firms’ workers’ compensation costs and whether the impact is the result of changes in technical efficiency or comes through induced changes in workers’ behavior.

Workplace Injuries And Diseases: Prevention And Compensation - Essays In Honor Of Terry Thomason, Karen Roberts Editor, John F. Burton Editor, Matthew M. Bodah Editor

Upjohn Press

This book presents a set of essays from a group of leading scholars that provides a detailed overview of what is known about the disability insurance system while highlighting areas of the system that beg for greater understanding.