Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

First Proof Solutions And Comments, Mohammed Abouzaid, Andrew J. Blumberg, Martin Hairer, Joe Kileel, Tamara G. Kolda, Paul D. Nelson, Daniel Spielman, Nikhil Srivastava, Rachel Ward, Shmuel Weinberger, Lauren Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Here we provide our solutions to the First Proof questions. We also discuss the best responses from publicly available AI systems that we were able to obtain in our experiments prior to the release of the problems on February 5, 2025. We hope this discussion will help readers with the relevant domain expertise to assess such responses.

Stochastic Optimization And Coupling, Frank Yang, Kai Hao Yang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We study optimization problems in which a linear functional is maximized over probability measures that are dominated by a given measure according to an integral stochastic order in an arbitrary dimension. We show that the following four properties are equivalent for any such order: (i) the test function cone is closed under pointwise minimum, (ii) the value function is affine, (iii) the solution correspondence has a convex graph with decomposable extreme points, and (iv) every ordered pair of measures admits an order-preserving coupling. As corollaries, we derive the extreme and exposed point properties involving integral stochastic orders such as multidimensional …

Globalization And Structural Transformation: The Role Of Tradable Services, Sang Min Lee

Faculty Publications

This paper studies how globalization impacts structural transformation from goods to services. I construct a multi-country, multi-sector model in which the transformation occurs through changes in income, prices, comparative advantage, or input-output linkages. I parameterize it with data from 1995 to 2018 for 66 countries covering diverse stages of economic development. Decomposition exercises show that globalization outweighs productivity growth in shaping structural transformation and that globalization’s impact primarily operates through comparative advantage. Counterfactual exercises reveal globalization’s heterogeneous impact on countries’ structural transformation. I characterize the underlying factor behind this result: Globalization affected countries’ transformation to the extent that it altered …

Farmers Markets As Community Infrastructure: Evidence From A Three-Year Statewide Data Project In Utah, Jaclyn Pace, Roslynn Mccann, Blue Cook, Steven Price, Lorali Smith, Dianna Parkynn, Joshua Cafferty

Outcomes and Impact Quarterly

Utah farmers markets play a critical role in food access, small business viability, and community connection, yet limited statewide data document their impact. The Utah Farmers Market Network (UFMN) and Utah State University (USU) Extension conducted a mixed-methods evaluation (2023–2025) and found that farmers markets make valuable contributions to the community.

The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Rohini Pande

Discussion Papers

Since the late 1980s, extreme poverty has declined sharply, life expectancy and schooling have increased, and electoral democracy has expanded. However poverty reduction has slowed in recent years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, amid intensifying conflict, fragility, climate risks, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of global trends—including trade integration and geopolitical stability—that once supported growth. These dynamics raise three interrelated questions: what barriers impede further progress; where will future growth in lower-income countries come from; and how can growth be broadly shared. Taking stock of 15 chapters forthcoming in Volume 6 of the Handbook of Development Economics, we discuss how …

Bundled Guidance Types And Changes In Expected Volatility, Thaddeus Neururer, George Papadakis

University Research

We examine how different types of bundled managerial guidance affect uncertainty levels around earnings announcements. To measure changes in uncertainty, we use both changes in implied volatilities and methods that decompose the implied volatility term structure. Unlike prior studies, we find little evidence that earnings guidance is associated with investor uncertainty. Our results instead indicate that other forms of bundled guidance are associated with lower uncertainty levels. Revenue, capital expenditure, and earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization guidance are strongly associated with reductions in investor uncertainty, even when firms provide earnings guidance.

The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi Goldberg, Rohini Pande

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Since the late 1980s, extreme poverty has declined sharply, life expectancy and schooling have increased, and electoral democracy has expanded. However poverty reduction has slowed in recent years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, amid intensifying conflict, fragility, climate risks, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of global trends—including trade integration and geopolitical stability—that once supported growth. These dynamics raise three interrelated questions: what barriers impede further progress; where will future growth in lower-income countries come from; and how can growth be broadly shared. Taking stock of 15 chapters forthcoming in Volume 6 of the Handbook of Development Economics, we discuss how …

The Geometry Of Learning Under Ai Delegation, Lingxiao Huang, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

As AI systems shift from tools to collaborators, a central question is how the skills of humans relying on them change over time. We study this question mathematically by modeling the joint evolution of human skill and AI delegation as a coupled dynamical system. In our model, delegation adapts to relative performance, while skill improves through use and decays under non-use; crucially, both updates arise from optimizing a single performance metric measuring expected task error. Despite this local alignment, adaptive AI use fundamentally alters the global stability structure of human skill acquisition. Beyond the high-skill equilibrium of human-only learning, the …

Thin Sets Are Not Equally Thin: Minimax Learning Of Submanifold Integrals, Xiaohong Chen, Wayne Yuan Gao

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Many economic parameters are identified by “thin sets” (submanifolds with Lebesgue measure zero) and hence difficult to recover from data in an ambient space. This paper provides a unified theory for estimation and inference of such “thin-set” identified functionals. We show that thin sets are not equally thin: their intrinsic dimensionality m matters in a precise manner. For a nonparametric regression h0 with Hölder smoothness s and d-dimensional covariates in the ambient space, we show that n^{-s/(2s+d−m)} is the minimax optimal rate of estimating linear and nonlinear (e.g., quadratic, upper contour) integrals of h0 on an m-dimensional submanifold (0 ≤ …

Screening And Segmenting: A Consumer Surplus Perspective, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Michael C. Wang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We analyze consumer surplus when a monopolist can adjust both prices and prod-uct qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the consumer-optimal segmentation and show that it has a striking structure: consumers with the same value receive the same quality in every segment, though prices differ. Under mild conditions, any segmentation harms consumers if and only if demand is sufficiently more elastic than supply. Hence, po-tential benefits for consumers depend critically on demand and supply elasticities. These findings have implications for regulatory policy regarding price discrimination and market segmentation.

Identifying Common Trend Determinants In Panel Data, Yoonseok Lee, Peter C.B. Phillips, Suyong Song, Donggyu Sul

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper develops a novel method for identifying observable determinants of latent common trends in nonstationary panel data, which are typically removed or controlled in two-way fixed effects regressions. By examining cross sectional dispersion processes, we assess whether panel series exhibit distributional convergence toward specific observed time series, revealing them as long run determinants of the underlying latent trend. The approach also offers a new perspective on cointegration between time series and panel data, focusing on the relative variation of the panel data with respect to the cointegration error. Applying this method to U.S. state-level crime rates demonstrates that the …

The Skill Premium In Times Of Rapid Technological Change, Tarek Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Pascual Restrepo

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

No abstract provided.

Trade, Labor Market Concentration, And Wages, Mayara Felix

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

I estimate the effect of trade on local labor market concentration and its implications for wages using employer-employee linked data and tariff shocks from Brazil’s trade liberalization. Trade increased concentration by 7%, an effect driven by firm exit and worker flows to surviving import-competing firms. Increased concentration reduced wage take-home shares—estimated at 50 cents on the dollar pre-shock—enough to offset small wage gains from reallocation, but did not meaningfully reduce wages on net. Most of the wage declines attributed to Brazil’s trade liberalization resulted instead from reductions in the marginal revenue product of labor. Incorporating informality reveals substantial regional heterogeneity.

Subjective Earnings And Employment Dynamics, Manual Arellano, Orazio Attanasio, Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi, Gonzalo Paz-Pardo

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop a new approach to estimating earnings, job, and employment dynamics using subjective expectations data from the NY Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations. These data provide beliefs about future earnings offers and acceptance probabilities, offering direct information on counterfactual outcomes and enabling identification under weaker assumptions. Our framework avoids biases from selection and unobserved heterogeneity that affect models using realized outcomes. First-step fixed-effects regressions identify risk, persistence, and transition effects; second-step GMM recovers the covariance structure of unobserved heterogeneities such as ability, mobility, and match quality. We find lower risk and persistence of the individual productivity component than in …

Art Pricing And Anti-Corruption Campaigns: Evidence From Repeat Sales Of Chinese Paintings, Yihan Wang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

My dissertation investigates the impact of China’s anti-corruption campaign on the pricing of traditional Chinese paintings, leveraging a unique dataset of repeat sales transactions. Since the 1990s, China’s art market has experienced explosive growth, becoming the world’s largest by 2011. However, this market is characterized by extreme opacity, facilitating elegant bribery (“ya hui” in Chinese), where artworks serve as vehicles for implicit corruption through inflated auctions or disguised gifts to officials. The launch of the "Eight-point Regulation" in December 2012 marked a significant intensification of anti-corruption efforts, raising the critical question of how such political shocks affect asset pricing in …

Evolving U.S. And Chinese International Development Policy: Institutions, Strategies, And Global Impact, Julian Kai Lehto

Social Sciences

This paper is inspired by, and meant to understand, recent changes in global policy towards foreign aid and international development. 2025 saw one of the biggest changes to international development in decades, when President Donald Trump’s new administration made the decision to effectively shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). At the same time, China has been taking on a growing role in foreign aid and development over the last decade. Chinese projects like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) have become globally significant. This paper will explore the changing impacts and influence of both the U.S. …

High Dimensional Regression Coefficient Test With High Frequency Data, Dachuan Chen, Long Feng, Per A. Myklang, Lan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper presents the first study on high-dimensional regression coefficient tests with high-frequency financial data. These tests allow the number of regressors to be larger than the number of observations within each estimation block and can grow to infinity in asymptotics. In this paper, the sum-type test and max-type test have been proposed, where the former is suitable for the dense alternative (many small betas) and the latter is suitable for the sparse alternative (a very small number of large betas). By showing the asymptotic independence between the sum-type test and max-type test, the paper proposes a third test – …

Expanding Public Health Insurance To Parents: Effect On Parents' And Children’S Well-Being, Michelle Marcus, Xuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Expanding public health insurance to parents may not only improve parental outcomes but also have spillover effects on their children. This paper leverages the natural experiment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to estimate the causal effects of expanding public health insurance to low-income parents on their well-being and that of their children. Using a difference-in-differences model and data from the 2010–2017 National Health Interview Surveys, we observe significant improvements in health care access, increased health care utilization, reduced financial burdens, and slight improvements in health status among low-income parents. For children in Medicaid expansion states, we find reductions in …

Bespoke Realized Volatility: Tailored Measures Of Risk For Volatility Prediction, Andrew John Patton, Haozhe Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Standard realized volatility (RV) measures estimate the latent volatility of an asset price using high frequency data with no reference to how or where the estimate will subsequently be used. This paper presents methods for “tailoring” the estimate of volatility to the application in which it will be used. For example, if the volatility measure will be used in a specific parametric forecasting model, it may be possible to exploit that knowledge to construct a better measure of volatility. We use methods from machine learning to estimate optimal “bespoke” RVs for heterogeneous autoregressive (HAR) and GARCH-X forecasting applications. We apply …

The Smu Trade Dashboard: Tracking And Quantifying The Trump Ii Tariffs, Pao-Li Chang, Ruoqing Chen, Lin Ma

Research Collection School Of Economics

The SMU Trade Dashboard (https://economics.smu.edu.sg/soetrade/tr ade-dashboard), developed by the SMU Center for Research on International Trade, consists of Tariff Tracker and Trade Simulation functions. The Tariff Tracker allows users to track the tariff applicable to an HS 6-digit product or an ISIC 2-digit sector bymarkets and country origins. The Trade Simulation presents quantitative simulation results of the effects of Trump II tariffs (and the associated tariff responses by its trading partners) on trade flows, welfare, and wages. This companion paper documents the methodologies underlying the tariff data collection protocol and the structuralsimulation designs.

Financial Valuation Of Retirement Village Via Stochastic Modelling Of Disability Prevalence Rates, Jackie Li, Mingke Wang, Jia Liu, Jessica Wai Yin Leung

Research Collection School Of Economics

Global mortality rates continue to decline, and life expectancy continues its upward trend. Besides mortality levels, policymakers and providers of financial and health services would also be interested in disability prevalence and its potential future trajectories. The length of time in good health versus the duration with major disabilities or long-term illnesses has significant financial implications for both individuals and society. In this paper, we develop Bayesian common factor models to analyse Australian age- and sex-specific disability prevalence rates. In particular, there are one or more common factors shared by both sexes, as well as specific factors for each sex. …

Montana Residents’ Attitudes Towards Tourism – 2025, Carter Bermingham, Megan Schultz, Jayce Beck

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

Montana residents maintain a broadly positive outlook on tourism, with 66% agreeing that tourism's benefits outweigh its drawbacks and 72% recognizing the economic value of state-supported tourism promotion. However, resident sentiment remains nuanced: 45% report concerns about overcrowding, and fewer than half (36%) believe increased tourism would improve their personal quality of life — a trend consistent across four consecutive years.

Regional divides are pronounced. Communities near high-visitation destinations such as Glacier National Park and Yellowstone National Park express greater skepticism toward tourism growth, while lower-visitation regions, including Central Montana, Southeast Montana, and Missouri River Country, hold more favorable views …

Beyond Artifacts And Fossils: Exploring The Contributions And Socioeconomic Impacts Of Montana’S Museums And Paleontological Tourism, Emma Keinath-Lopez, Elena Bigart, Glenna Hartman, Kara Grau, Ava Worbets, Melissa Weddell

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

This study explores how Montana’s museums, including those along the Montana Dinosaur Trail, influence communities, economies, and visitor experiences in a post-pandemic environment. Through mixed methods—511 visitor surveys at 44 museums and 18 interviews with museum professionals— this research provides a holistic understanding of museum operations, visitor motivations, and community impacts.

Effective Demand Note On Empty Folder, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Effective demand, growth, and cycles: Three adjustments [Handwritten notes on folder cover].

The Poverty Of Algebra, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes.

• Anwar Shaikh. (n.d.). The poverty of algebra: Critical notes on neo-Ricardian economics (Unpublished manuscript). Department of Economics, The New School for Social Research, New York, NY.

Low-Dose Prophylaxis Versus On-Demand Treatment For Children With Severe Hemophilia A In Indonesia: A Conceptual Model, Levina Chandra Khoe, Nur Atika, Dhia Ticha Pertiwi, Septiara Putri

Kesmas

Hemophilia A is a rare bleeding disorder caused by a deficiency of clotting factor VIII, leading to recurrent bleeds, joint damage, and disability. Low-dose prophylaxis has been shown to achieve better clinical outcomes than on-demand treatment in reducing bleeding frequency. However, in Indonesia, access and affordability remain key challenges. This study aimed to develop a conceptual model for conducting a health economic evaluation of low-dose prophylaxis treatment for children with severe hemophilia A in Indonesia. This study followed the ISPOR-SMDM Modeling guidelines, outlining two-stage processes: conceptualization of the clinical problem and model development. A systematic literature review was conducted to …

Mathematical Appendix To The Transformation Problem, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes.

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Marx’s theory of value transformation [Mathematical appendix, unpublished manuscript].

National Income And Marxian Categories, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes.

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). National income accounts and Marxian categories [Unpublished manuscript].

The Role Of Corporate Managers In Improving Profit Performance Of Commercial Banks In Kosovo, Flutura Beka Kamberaj

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

The profitability of commercial banks is a key indicator of financial system stability and economic growth, albeit Kosovo’s banking sector continues to face challenges from nonperforming loans, regulatory constraints, and limited innovation. Corporate managers at Kosovo’s commercial banks are reporting low profit performance despite overall sector stability. The purpose of this qualitative single-case study was to explore how corporate managers contribute to improving profit performance in Kosovo’s commercial banks. The resource-based view and corporate governance theory provided the theoretical foundation. The participants comprised 20 corporate managers at commercial banks in Kosovo. Data were collected using semistructured interviews and public documents. …

Notes On The Marxian Notion Of Competition 2, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Notes on the Marxian notion of competition [Unpublished manuscript]. Anwar Shaikh, PhD.