Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Is Offense Worth More Than Defense In The National Basketball Association?, Justin Ehrlich, Joel Potter

Sport Management - All Scholarship

Motivated by the popular sports saying, “Offense sells tickets, defense wins championships,” we use Forbes revenue data to quantify whether offense really does sell more ‘tickets’ than defense in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Employing team offensive and defensive win shares as measures of offensive and defensive proficiency, we find offensively oriented teams generate the same amount of revenue as do defensively oriented teams, other things equal. Our results suggest that both profit-maximizing and win-maximizing teams should value offensively and defensively players equivalently (per unit). Thus, in an efficient free agent market, we would expect equilibrium player salaries for offensive …

Nonparametric Identification And Estimation Of Stochastic Frontier Models, Jun Cai

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation studies nonparametric identication and estimation of stochastic frontiermodels. It is composed of three chapters. The rst chapter investigates the identication and estimation of a cross sectional stochastic frontier model with Laplacian errors and unknown variance, which is built on a nonparametric density deconvolution strategy. Chapter two studies a zero-ineciency stochastic frontier model utilizing a penalized sieve estimator, which allows flexible function forms and arbitrary distributions of ineciency. The third chapter explores identication and estimation of a nonparametric panel stochastic frontier model based on Kotlarski's Lemma and moments derived from conditional characteristic functions.

Essays On Globalization, Labor Market, And Productivity, Hoang Pham

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation studies issues at the intersection of globalization, labor market, and productivity in developing countries. It is composed of three chapters.

Chapter 1 studies how a country's trade policy affects competition in its domestic labor market. In a heterogeneous-firm model with oligopsonistic local labor markets, this chapter demonstrates that opening up to trade can affect distortions in such markets. These distortions arise because firms are large and able to exercise market power over their local workers. Using a panel dataset of Chinese manufacturing firms from 1998-2007, I measure firm-level labor market distortion, captured by the ratio between marginal revenue …

Workflowy, Trudi Antoine

Upstate New York Science Librarians Conference

No abstract provided.

Essays On Foreign Direct Investment, Agglomeration And Productivity, Fariha Kamal

Economics - Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the role of foreign direct investment and agglomeration economies in the process of industrial development, with a focus on the productivity of manufacturing firms. The first chapter analyzes the importance of the source of foreign direct investment on the performance of domestic Chinese firms. The second chapter studies the interaction between foreign and domestic manufacturing firms operating in the same industry and located within the same Chinese city. The third chapter examines the response of multinational companies to changes in domestic institutions. My findings highlight the importance of the source of foreign direct investment, proximity to economic …

Eliminating The Underlying Cause Of Poverty As A Means To Global Economic Recovery, Robert Ashford

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

The public analysis of the causes of the current recession and the ways to achieve economic recovery generally proceed on the widely-shared, tacit assumption that there is that there is no substantial, first-order connection between the recession and the failure to address the problem of systemic poverty. Otherwise, the need to alleviate systemic poverty and needed solutions to promote economic recovery would be commonly addressed in the same discussions; and they are not. This widely-shared, tacit assumption is false. The failure to reverse systemic poverty is the fundamental cause of current economic crisis. Recessions (and sub-optimal growth) occur when a …