Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Developmental State And Public Participation: The Case Of Energy Policymaking In Post-Fukushima Japan, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

After the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the Japanese government tried to democratize energy policy-making by introducing public participation. Over the course of its implementation, however, public participation came to be subordinated to expert committees as the primary mechanism of policy rationalization. The expert committees not only neutralized the results of public participation but also discounted the necessity of public participation itself. This trajectory of public participation, from its historic introduction to eventual collapse, can be fully explained only in reference to complex interactions between the macroinstitutions and microsituations of Japanese policy-making at the time of the nuclear disaster: the macroinstitutional …

Income Inequality And Workplace Mobility During The Covid-19 Pandemic, John Washburn

Honors Theses and Capstones

With the pandemic being a once in a lifetime event (hopefully), there are many areas of research with purpose that were impossible to research beforehand. This paper looks at how income inequality created a separation between the rich and the poor regarding work and residential movement during the pandemic in the United States. By taking work and residential movement data from the Google Mobility report, which measures movement during the pandemic as a percent change benchmarked against pre pandemic movement and correlating it to the logarithm of Gross domestic product per capita, the effects of income can be seen. By …

Consumer Preferences Of Solar Systems In Boston And Atlanta: A Choice Experiment, Sam Mabile

Honors Theses and Capstones

Creating a cleaner energy grid has become a hot topic over the past 20 years, as the effects of fossil fuels on our planet has become clearer. The solar market in the US has exploded over the past 10 years, with an average annual growth rate of about 42% (Solar Industry Research Data, 2020). Choice experiments are often conducted to better understand consumers preferences towards products or characteristics of products. In this study, data of a choice experiment in a survey of residents in Boston and Atlanta regarding preferences for attributes of household solar energy collecting system are …

The Role Of Tax Incentives On Business Location And Economic Growth, Sadie Xi Rose Mazzola

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

The Impact Of Microfinance On Women Empowerment In The Case Of Vietnam, Long Bui Thanh

Doctoral

In recent years, most microfinance programs have focused on gender issues with significant support given to poor female clients with the goal of facilitating their access to capital. An interesting fact to be considered is that women are regarded as wonderful clients, as they appear to engage in a more efficient manner in the saving process and the repayment of microloans when compared to men. Based on existing studies, researchers suggest that women are also more responsible regarding the management of finances in the context of poor families (Aggarwal et al., 2015; D'Espallier et al., 2011; Mayoux, 2005).

Submission To The Future Of The Media Commission, Brendan K. O'Rourke, Joseph K. Fitzgerald

Reports

Dr. Brendan K. O’Rourke is a Senior Lecturer at Technological University Dublin, where he focuses on learning in the area of discourses of the economy, in particular examining enterprise, policy and public discourses on the economy. His scholarly work has been widely published as chapters in edited volumes, encyclopedia / handbook entries and in over 20 peer-reviewed academic journals such the Critical Discourse Studies, Politics and Social Semiotics. More information on his work is available on www.brendankorourke.com . Dr. Joseph K. FitzGerald lectures in international strategy at Technological University Dublin and has published on topics such as how young men …

Media Discourses On The Economy In Ireland: Framing The Policy Possibilities, Brendan K. O'Rourke

Books/Book Chapters

Ireland suffered a lot economically in the Great Recession, yet its policies continued on a neoliberal trajectory, making Irish neoliberalism less a non-dead Zombie and more like a reinvigorated Frankenstein’s monster, with ordoliberal transplants from Germany grafted into an Anglo-American neoliberal composite body. Yet along with these continuities come much change. There was political change in party strengths and personnel. There was change in the Irish state’s capacity for policy analysis (MacCarthaigh, 2017) an increase in the number of Ireland’s policy analysts and their specialisms, and an increased stress on evidence-based policy-making. How can we explain both these continuities and …

The Impact Of Place-Based Policy: Evidence From A Multiple Synthetic Control Analysis Of The Northeastern Revitalization Program In China, Justin T. Callais, Linan Peng

School of Business and Leadership Working Papers

We examine the effect of a well-known place-based policy in China, the Northeastern Revitalization Program. In 2003, the State Council of the People’s Republic of China initiated the program in northeastern China by removing an agricultural tax, enhancing the urban social security system, facilitating foreign investments, and restructuring state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the region. Using a budding case-study approach (the synthetic control method), we find that the program had no significant effect on GDP per capita in all three regions. Liaoning had slightly worse GDP per capita post-treatment, as well as Heilongjiang (albeit to a less extent). While the multiple …

Postbellum Electoral Politics In California And The Genesis Of The Chinese Exclusion Act Of 1882, Vincent Geloso, Linan Peng

School of Business and Leadership Working Papers

After the Civil War, the Democratic party carried an important electoral penalty from being associated with the war. To deal with this penalty, the party took increasingly anti-immigration positions to compete with Republicans. This led some Republican strongholds such as California to become competitive and also forced Republicans to embrace stricter immigration proposals. In this paper, we argue that adopting anti-immigration and raising awareness against immigration made California increasingly competitive in electoral terms. This electoral competitiveness can serve to explain the genesis of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

Public Health Insurance And Pharmaceutical Innovation: Evidence From China, Xuan Zhang, Huihua Nie

Research Collection School Of Economics

Developing countries are characterized by low levels of pharmaceutical innovation. A likely reason is their small market size, which is not because of the population size but because of low levels of income and lack of health insurance coverage. This study exploits a natural experiment from the implementation of a public health insurance program for rural residents in China (New Cooperative Medical Scheme [NCMS]) to examine whether the pharmaceutical industry increases innovation regarding diseases covered by the NCMS that are prevalent in rural areas. We examine the 1993–2009 patent data to gauge pharmaceutical innovation in China. Diseases with a 10% …

A Theory Of Revealed Indirect Preference, Gaoji Hu, Jiangtao Li, John K.-H. Quah, Rui Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

A preference over menus is said to be an indirect preference if it is induced by a preference over the objects that make up those menus, i.e., a menu A is ranked over B whenever A contains an object that is preferred to every object in B. The basic question we address in this paper is the following: suppose an observer has partial information of an agent’s ranking over certain menus; what necessary and sufficient conditions on those rankings guarantee the existence of a preference over objects that induces the observed menu rankings? Our basic result has a wide variety …

Joint Tests For Dynamic And Spatial Effects In Short Dynamic Panel Data Models With Fixed Effects And Heteroskedasticity, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Simple and reliable tests are proposed for testing the existence of dynamic and/or spatial effects in fixed-effects panel data models with small T and possibly heteroskedastic errors. The tests are constructed based on the adjusted quasi scores (AQS), which correct the conditional quasi scores given the initial differences to account for the effect of initial values. To improve the finite sample performance, standardized AQS tests are also derived, which are shown to have much improved finite sample properties. All the proposed tests are robust against nonnormality, but some are not robust against cross-sectional heteroskedasticity (CH). A different type of adjustments …

Generalized Jump Regressions For Local Moments, Tim Bollerslev, Jia Li, Leonardo Salim Saker Chaves

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop new high-frequency-based inference procedures for analyzing the relationship between jumps in instantaneous moments of stochastic processes. The estimation consists of two steps: the nonparametric determination of the jumps as differences in local averages, followed by a minimum-distance type estimation of the parameters of interest under general loss functions that include both least-square and more robust quantile regressions as special cases. The resulting asymptotic distribution of the estimator, derived under an infill asymptotic setting, is highly nonstandard and generally not mixed normal. In addition, we establish the validity of a novel bootstrap algorithm for making feasible inference including bias-correction. …

Retirement Preparedness In Singapore, Junxing Chay, Seonghoon Kim

Research Collection School Of Economics

This chapter presents empirical evidence on a variety of measures to assess the social and economic well-being of near-retirees and retirees in Singapore based on rich data from the Singapore Life Panel, a nationally representative monthly panel survey of 50- to 70-year-old adults in Singapore. Large differences in retirement behaviour and household financial conditions related to retirement preparedness across education and wealth groups are documented. This suggests the importance of a retirement-related policy that focuses on the low-skilled and low-wealth groups. In addition, we discuss and evaluate current public policy designed to increase the employment of older workers and propose …

Evaluating College Students' Attitudes And Understanding Of Recycling, Taylor Shipley

Honors Program Theses

Individuals have different habits, beliefs, and knowledge regarding recycling. These can be due to a variety of reasons such as peers, upbringing, accessibility of recycling, or prior knowledge of what can be recycled. A school setting, in particular, can be influential to a student’s motivation to recycle; schools can provide an environment for students to learn about the importance of recycling and other various sustainability initiatives. Like most campuses, students’ recycling behaviors on the University of Northern Iowa’s (UNI) campus are likely to be affected to some degree by the reasons listed above as well as other life experiences.

Recycling …

Strategies Worker-Owned Cooperatives Use To Remain Profitable During Economic Downturns, Termaine Davis

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

New managers of worker-owned cooperatives who fail to adapt to changing conditions can threaten the organization’s viability. Some new managers of worker-owned cooperatives may lack the strategies they need to maintain consistent employment levels during economic downturns. Grounded in the expected utility theory, the purpose of this qualitative multiple case study was to explore the strategies used by managers of worker-owned cooperatives to maintain consistent employment levels during sustained periods of low revenue. Participants comprised seven managers of worker-owned cooperatives with a minimum of 5 years’ experience in the Midwest of the United States managing cooperatives during sustained periods of …

Export Success And Sustainable Strategies For Cameroonian Small And Medium-Sized Enterprises, Christian N. Bikai

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractAccording to the Cameroon Ministry of Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) constitute 99.8% of companies, employ over 70% of the active population, and contribute significantly to economic growth and development. However, less than 25% of new SMEs in Cameroon survive beyond 3 years. Sustainability is essential to small business owners in exporting coffee from Cameroon as an indicator of economic growth and job creation. The purpose of this qualitative multiple case study guided by the transaction cost economics theory was to explore strategies owners of small businesses exporting coffee from Cameroon use to sustain business beyond …

Competition And Technical Efficiency For General Medical And Surgical Hospitals In Georgia, Nathan Ekow Davies

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The primary aim of this study was to enhance understanding of the fundamental socioeconomic problem associated with inefficient hospital competition in the United States in terms of demand and supply of services as well as the efficiency of hospitals. The relationship between market competition and hospital efficiency was investigated among general medical and surgical hospitals in Georgia. The X-efficiency theory was used which defines efficiency as the degree of effectiveness that an organization can maintain while operating in imperfect competition. The theory is most applicable in terms of addressing imperfect market characteristics of the healthcare industry. Correlations between efficiency and …

The Gendered Impact Of Droughts On Household Decision Making: Evidence From Uganda, Fiona Onyango, Andrew Hobbs

Master's Theses

Do female headed households lose/ sell more of their livestock in the event of a drought as compared to households headed by males? We address this question through an analysis of the combination of Living Standards Measurement study Integrated surveys on Agriculture dataset on Uganda using data from the period 2011-2016 and NDVI & Weather data. We carry out both OLS and fixed effects estimations. Our OLS Results are consistent with the theory of Consumption smoothing while we do not find evidence of any gendered effects from both the OLS and IV estimations.

The Housing Risk Premium In A Production Economy, Sungjun Huh, Insu Kim

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This article studies how the housing risk premium is determined in a simple real business cycle model. We present a consumption-based asset pricing model for the housing risk premium and evaluate whether the model is able to explain the observed housing risk premium. Our findings show that a real business cycle model with generalized recursive preferences is able to match the observed housing risk premium. We also find that the volatility of the housing demand shock plays a crucial role in determining the risk–return relationship for housing.

An Examination Of The Effects Of Environmental Regulations On Retail Gasoline Price Seasonality, Michael C. Davis

Economics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Stricter environmental standards on gasoline have had impacts on the prices of gasoline including the seasonality of gasoline prices. Using both national data and individual station data, the paper tests for a possible explanation for this increase. Three theories are tested: that gasoline seasonality increases due to higher costs, due to greater market power because of segmented markets, or due to greater asymmetry because of greater inattention on the part of customers. The results suggest that gasoline price seasonality has increased both due to higher costs and greater market power with mixed results on the inattention of consumers.(JEL Q41, Q53, …

Identifying Consumer Preferences From User-Generated Content On Amazon.Com By Leveraging Machine Learning, Jikhan Jeong

Economics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Inexperienced consumers may have high uncertainty about experience goods that require technical knowledge and skills to operate effectively; therefore, experienced consumers' prior reviews can be useful for inexperienced consumers. However, one-sided review systems (e.g., Amazon) only provide the opportunity for consumers to write a review as a buyer and contain no feedback from the seller's side, so the information displayed about individual buyers is limited. Therefore, this study analyzes consumers' digital footprints (DFs) for programmable thermostats to identify and predict unobserved consumer preferences, using a dataset of 141 million Amazon reviews. This paper proposes novel approaches (1) to identify unobserved …

The Influence Of Wildland Urban Interface Areas On Resource Assignments To Large Wildland Fires, Kurt Swimley

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

We examine the relationship between U.S. wildfire resource assignments and fire proximity to inhabited areas. Climate change and previous vegetation buildup have enabled more severe fire seasons, while more structures are being developed near vegetated, wildland areas. These changes have contributed to a steep increase in the overall cost of wildfire management, the annual costs of which regularly rise into the billions (NIFC, 2021). Still, the extent to which each driver of suppression costs contributes to the increase in spending is not entirely understood. Previous studies have shown that more suppression resources are allocated to fires near inhabited areas, …

Is It Export- Or Import-Led Growth? The Case Of Kenya:, Peter Simiyu Wamalwa, Maureen Were

Journal of African Trade

No abstract provided.

Fair Innings? The Utilitarian And Prioritarian Value Of Risk Reduction Over A Whole Lifetime, Matthew D. Adler, Maddalena Ferranna, James K. Hammitt, Nicolas Treich

Faculty Scholarship

The social value of risk reduction (SVRR) is the marginal social value of reducing an individual’s fatality risk, as measured by some social welfare function (SWF). This Article investigates SVRR, using a lifetime utility model in which individuals are differentiated by age, lifetime income profile, and lifetime risk profile. We consider both the utilitarian SWF and a “prioritarian” SWF, which applies a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation to individual utility.

We show that the prioritarian SVRR provides a rigorous basis in economic theory for the “fair innings” concept, proposed in the public health literature: as between an older individual …

Regulating Financial Guarantors, Steven L. Schwarcz

Faculty Scholarship

To improve financial regulation, scholars have engaged in extensive research over the past decade to try to understand why systemically important financial firms engage in excessive risk-taking. None of that research fully explains, however, the unusually excessive risk-taking by financial guarantors such as bond insurers, protection sellers under credit-default-swap (CDS) derivatives, credit enhancers in securitization transactions, and even issuers of standby letters of credit. With tens of trillions of dollars of financial guarantees outstanding, the potential for failure is massive. This Article argues that financial guarantor risk-taking is influenced by a previously unrecognized cognitive bias, which it calls “abstraction bias.” …

Trade Integration In West Africa: Does The Quality Of Institutions Matter?:, Vigninou Gammadigbe

Journal of African Trade

No abstract provided.

Regional Developmentalism In West Africa: The Case For Commodity-Based Industrialization Through Regional Cooperation In The Cocoa–Chocolate Sector:, Jonathan Bashi Rudahindwa, Sophie Van Huellen

Journal of African Trade

No abstract provided.

Trade Costs And Demand-Enhancing Effects Of Agrifood Standards: Consequences For Sub-Saharan Africa:, Aristide Djimgou Tchakounte, Dela-Dem Doe Fiankor

Journal of African Trade

No abstract provided.

Prospects And Challenges For Supply Chain Trade Under The Africa Continental Free Trade Area☆:, Jaime De Melo, Anna Twum

Journal of African Trade

No abstract provided.