Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Exploring Individual’S Explanations Of Economic Mobility Through The Gaze Of Intersectionality, Adam Alexander Broyles

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study looks at whether or not adopting intersectionality as a theoretical framework allows for a better understanding of individual’s explanations of economic mobility, rather than examining variables such as race, gender, and class as mutually exclusive from one another. The reason for this follows from the understanding that race, gender, and class can intersect to create unique views and opinions of the world and how it operates. Using the 2009 PEW Economic Mobility Survey as a secondary data source, I ran statistical regressions and interpreted the results.

Essays On Health Disparities And Income-Related Health Inequality In Sub-Saharan Africa, Marshall Makate

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation comprises of five empirical essays. Essay one assesses the impact of prenatal care quality and its components on child mortality using nationwide data from the Zimbabwe Demographic and Health Surveys (ZDHS), 1999-11. Results indicate that increasing prenatal care quality by one unit improves neonatal, infant and under-five survival by about 42.33, 30.86, and 28.65%, respectively and all statically significant at the 1% level.

Three Essays In Economics, James R. Bland

Open Access Dissertations

How Many Games Are We Playing: An Experimental Analysis of Choice Bracketing in Games

A subject brackets two decisions if she "choose[s] an option in each case without full regard to the other" Rabin (2009). Although in most situations such behavior is unlikely to be optimal, it is well documented in experiments where subjects make decisions in the absence of strategic considerations. This paper uses an economic experiment to investigate whether subjects also bracket their decisions in games. Subjects played two Volunteer's Dilemmas at the same time, with the payoffs from both games added to their earnings. In a lottery …

State Based Financial Liberalization, Robert J. Kulzick

Open Access Dissertations

In the last 40 years, states around the globe have increased the role of markets in their financial systems. Using newly collected information on the educational backgrounds of Central Bankers, I demonstrate that the beliefs of state officials about the proper role of markets in the financial system influence the extent to which state's liberalize their financial systems. By tracing the liberalization experiences in both France and China through secondary sources, I show that bureaucrats within the state suggest reforms that conform to their neoliberal training when political leaders turn to them for solutions to what are perceived as technical …

Tail Risk In International Markets, Yanchu Wang

Open Access Dissertations

Tail risk, defined as extreme event risk in asset markets, is an important consideration for investors when making investment decisions. This paper empirically tests the role of tail risk in international market. Using sample of 40 countries from 1980 to 2014, I show that tail risk positively predicts future market returns. Across all countries, stocks with high sensitivity to past global tail risk on average will earn higher returns than stocks with low sensitivity. In addition, I show that tail risk act as a global transmission channel of contagion during crisis.

The Labor Market Consequences Of Endogenous Low-Skill Migration With A Market-Based Immigration Policy, German A. Marquez Alcala

Open Access Theses

The undocumented migration of Mexican nationals to the U.S. is largely influenced by labor demand in low-skill sectors. The legal migration channels available to Mexican nationals with little education are based on family petitions and subject to visa quotas which are dwarfed by the demand for entry to the United States; visa approval can take upwards of 20 years for a Mexican national with little education and few resources. Thus, undocumented immigration is a more responsive unskilled labor distribution mechanism than the existing quota-based immigration policy. However, the restrictive legal migration channels and increased costs of undocumented migration are stifling …

Mergers And Acquisitions In Food And Agribusiness: Returns, Drivers, And Long Run Performance, Josiah M. Ringelberg

Open Access Theses

Food and agribusiness in the U.S is a dynamic and ever changing business. The industry has seen booms and busts, considerable consolidation, and continued globalization in the past few decades. Businesses operating within its sectors have had to demonstrate flexibility and adaptability as the industry’s landscape consolidates at the consumer, supplier, and producer level. One strategy companies have used to grow and position themselves throughout years of industry consolidation has been merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions.

During the eleven years from 1985 and 1995, the food industry was listed in the top 10 M&A most active industries ten times. It …

Firm Demography And Location Decisions In The United States After 1990, Francisco Albert Scott

Open Access Theses

This thesis deals with firm formation and location choice of firms in the manufacturing (and commercial service) sector in the United States after 1990. The topics of firm formation and location choice are part of a wider field that is usually referred to as "firm demography.'' We start off with a description of the size structure of firms by looking at the evolution of the average size of manufacturing firms in counties in the USA between 1990 and 2011. We hypothesize that the size of manufacturing firms depends on the firm sizes in proximate regions as well as on the …

Essays In Experimental Economics On Contract Design, Jacob A. Brindley

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation contains three related essays which examine contracting environments with moral hazard. I use laboratory experiments to study how across treatment variations affect contractual outcomes including the types of contracts that principals design, the overall efficiency of the contractual relationship, and the surplus distribution between the principal and agent(s).

In the first chapter, which is joint work with Steve Wu, I investigate relational contracting within a bilateral relationship. Specifically, I explore how contracting is impacted by a reduction in the agent's market power as proxied by an exogenous decrease in the agent's expected outside option. Surprisingly, principals did not …

Essays In International Migration, Marcelo J. Castillo

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays examining the effects of high-skilled immigration on various economic outcomes within the receiving country. In the first essay, I study how skilled immigrants affect wages and employment in US industries during 1995-2007, using novel microdata on approved H-1B visas. These data show that most H-1B employers specialize in the production of high-skilled services used as inputs by other businesses. In light of this, I consider the downstream effects of skilled immigrants on industry labor market outcomes: how wages and employment in an industry respond to immigration shocks to its suppliers. The identification strategy relies …

Essays On Health Insurance, Amanda C. Cook

Open Access Dissertations

Uninsured individuals receive fewer health care services for at least three reasons: higher prices, responsibility for the entire bill, and potential provider reductions for concern of non-payment. This study isolates differences in service levels between insured and uninsured individuals that are attributed to different effective prices; the uninsured pay the bill without a contribution from an insurance company. I capitalize on Maryland's highly regulated health care system, where prices are set by the state, are uniform across all patients, and hospitals are compensated for free care and bad debt, to isolate the difference in quantity demanded by the uninsured. While …

Demand Uncertainty And Investment In The Restaurant Industry, Jayoung Sohn

Open Access Dissertations

Since the collapse of the housing market, the prolonged economic uncertainty lingering in the U.S. economy has dampened restaurant performance. Economic uncertainty affects consumer sentiment and spending, turning into demand uncertainty. Nevertheless, the highly competitive nature of the restaurant industry does not allow much room for restaurants to actively control prices, leaving most food service firms exposed to demand uncertainty. To investigate the impact of demand uncertainty in the restaurant industry, this study focused on the implications of demand uncertainty for investment.

The first essay in chapter 3 examined the impact of demand uncertainty on investment and how the impact …

Essays In Labor Economics And Panel Data Analysis, Evan S. Totty

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three independent chapters. The first chapter studies the impact of minimum wage hikes on employment of low-skill workers in the United States. The second chapter studies the lasting impact of attending a higher value-added high school on college performance. The third chapter studies the impact of stuttering on labor market outcomes.

The first chapter resolves issues in the minimum wage-employment debate by using factor model econometric methods to address concerns related to unobserved heterogeneity. Recent work has shown that the negative effects of minimum wages on employment found using traditional methods are sensitive to the …

Essays On Monetary Policy Rules And Inflation Dynamics, Saad Ahmad

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There has been a growing trend to utilize nonlinear models to analyze key issues in monetary policy and international macroeconomics. Using traditional linear models to understand nonlinear relationships can often lead to inaccurate inference and erroneous policy recommendations. The three essays in this dissertation explore nonlinearity in the Federal Reserve’s policy response as well as between a country’s inflation dynamics and integration in the global economy. My aim in accounting for potential nonlinearity is to get a better understanding of the policy makers’ opportunistic approach to monetary policy and evaluate the inflation globalization hypothesis, which basically predicts that global factors …

Modeling Economic Impacts Of The Inland Waterway Transportation System, Furkan Oztanriseven

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The inland waterway transportation system of the United States (U.S.) handles 11.7 billion tons of freight annually and connects the heartland of the U.S. with the rest of the world by providing a fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly mode of transportation. This dissertation aims to create decision support tools for maritime stakeholders to measure the economic impacts of the inland waterway transportation systems under real world scenarios including disruptions, demand changes, port expansion decisions, and channel deepening investments. Monte Carlo simulation, system dynamics, discrete-event simulation, agent-based modeling, and multiregional input-output modeling techniques are utilized to analyze the complex relationships between inland …

Spread Trading In Corn Futures Market, Ryan D. Napier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The non-linear relationship between old crop – new crop year spreads in corn futures market and stock-to-use (S-U) ratios published by the United States Department of Agriculture is analyzed. Using a non-linear logarithmic smooth transition regression (LSTR) model, we capture asymmetric market behaviors in high and low S-U regimes. Capturing this relationship and understanding the non-linear aspects of the relationship is of interest of grain merchandizers and speculators in the market. A spread trading strategy is simulated for the sample period, January 1985 through April 2015, to determine if the non-linear relationship is a profitable arbitrage opportunity in the market.

Responsible Microfinance Bundling: Experimental Evidence On Separating Insurance And Credit Offers, Vance J. Larsen

Open Access Theses

In recent years combining multiple financial products into one package in a process known as bundling has become more common among microfinance institutions (MFIs). While bundling can be beneficial to MFIs by cutting costs and providing protection from client default, the implications for MFI customers are less clear. Bundling the products may take advantage of the existing relationship between the financial institution and the client to expand microinsurance access and take-up, but alternatively offering too many products could lead to low client understanding and thus low take-up of the product. We conducted a randomized field experiment to determine if separating …

Collaboration In Scientific Digital Ecosystems: A Socio-Technical Network Analysis, Philip Mutuma Munyua

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation seeks to understand the formation, operation, organizational (collaboration) and the effect of scientific digital ecosystems that connect several online community networks in a single platform. The formation, mechanism and processes of online networks that influence members output is limited and contradictory. The dissertation is comprised of three papers that are guided by the following research questions: How does online community member’s productivity (or success) depend upon their ‘position’ in the digital networks? What are the network formation mechanism, structures and characteristics of an online community? How do scientific innovations traverse (diffuse) amongst users in online communities? A combination …

Electric Power And The Global Economy: Advances In Database Construction And Sector Representation, Jeffrey C. Peters

Open Access Dissertations

The electricity sector plays a crucial role in the global economy. The sector is a major consumer of fossil fuel resources, producer of greenhouse gas emissions, and an important indicator and correlate of economic development. As such, the sector is a primary target for policy-makers seeking to address these issues. The sector is also experiencing rapid technological change in generation (e.g. renewables), primary inputs (e.g. horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing), and end-use efficiency. This dissertation seeks to further our understanding of the role of the electricity sector as part of the dynamic global energy-economy, which requires significant research advances in …

Evaluating The Impacts Of Respondent Errors In Arms: A Case Of Farm Service Agency Loans, Louise Nicole Mcminn

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Many studies have used the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS) to research various aspects involving the agricultural sector in the United States. Since nonresponse and inaccurate reporting may cause significant bias in statistical analysis, research was conducted to determine the magnitude of response error on the farm debt section of the ARMS Phase III. A multinomial logit model identified demographic, structural, and financial characteristics of FSA Farm Loan Program (FLP) borrowers who refused to indicate if they had end of year farm debt, or who accurately or inaccurately classified their farm operations as having end …

Information Propagation In Financial Markets, Garrett A. Mcbrayer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays which examine information flows through financial markets and across firms, and investigates the factors affecting the process of information dissemination. The first essay examines whether the announcement of a credit rating change for a given firm contains information pertinent to the valuations of intra-industry peer firms. I identify an information spillover effect on peer firms surrounding credit rating downgrades. Further, I find that the post-announcement spillover effects are indicative of an overreaction in the market’s response to the downgrade announcement. Peer firms exhibit predictability in their post-announcement returns as a function of their relative …

Three Essays On The Economics Of Foreign Aid, Hongwei Song

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Recent years have seen a burgeoning interest in the issue of foreign aid especially in the context of developmental economics. As foreign aid is designed to help those less-privileged nations with developmental objectives such as poverty reduction and/or economic growth, fundamental questions include whether aid has been effective and what motivates donors to provide aid. This dissertation is composed of three essays that examine different issues concerning foreign aid. First, I focus on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and its impact on aid allocation among sectors. If specification of the MDGs affected aid flows, it should be observed that more …

Failure To Launch? Understanding Variations In Emerging Adult Flight Patterns, Christina Ashley Williams

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

What does the transition to adulthood look like for emerging adults? This study proposes that popular cultural ideas like "failure to launch" imply an oversimplified dichotomy that does not account for the multiple "flight patterns" into adulthood. Focusing on the narratives of six interview cases selected from the larger sample of interviewees from Wave 4 of the National Study of Youth and Religion and drawing on the quantitative data from the broader survey sample, this mixed-methods approach examines in-depth, narrative experiences and the ways structural barriers vary between upper-middle, lower-middle, and working class emerging adults. We find that emerging adulthood …

An Exploratory Study Of Spending Patterns, Obstacles And Traditions Among Same-Sex Marriage Vs Heterosexual Marriage: Who's The Bigger Spender?, Lydia Perritt

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study investigated if there was a significant difference in the amount of money spent on same-sex weddings versus heterosexual weddings. The results of this study would assist both the wedding and hospitality industry by providing much needed financial and planning information.

A descriptive, four-section survey was distributed online via Qualtrics utilizing snowball sampling. A total of 152 respondents participated in the study; 84 heterosexual and 68 LGBTQ. The respondents completed the questionnaire that measured wedding traditions, wedding spending, obstacles and challenges faced during their wedding and wedding planning, and demographic information.

The results of this study indicated that same-sex …

Ex Ante Analysis Of Price And Trade Effects For The Rice Sector In The Transatlantic Trade And Investment Partnership, William Lawrence Jacobs

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In 2013, trade negotiations began between the United States and the European Union to create a free trade agreement with the goal of phasing out tariffs for all but the most sensitive products. To aid negotiators in analyzing potential agriculture agreements, the objective of this study is to quantify policy impacts of a potential trade liberalization of rice. This study will also be a useful analysis for various participants in the rice market to make educated business decisions.

This study utilizes the spatial partial equilibrium model RICEFLOW to project the differences in market prices, production volumes, trade volumes, and consumption …

Estimating Truncated Hotel Demand: A Comparison Of Low Computational Cost Forecasting Methods, Yue Ding

Open Access Theses

The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the effectiveness of six selected low computational cost hotel demand forecasting methods (SA, SMA, EMA, DEMA, BP and PU) in terms of restoring truncated demand data, and then identify a low-cost and easy to follow demand forecasting method that can be used by U.S. independent hotels. Obtaining revenue gains by applying demand forecasting techniques have been proved by many studies in hospitality and other related industries. However, few studies have focused on low computational forecasting methods' comparison in hospitality field. For this reason, the author decided to test the performance of six …

The Hong Kong-Zhu Hai-Macau Bridge: Impacts On The Greater Pearl River Delta, Jun He

Open Access Theses

This research looks at the impacts of megaprojects on their host regions through a case study of the Hong Kong-Zhu Hai-Macau Bridge (HZMB). The purpose of this study is to analyze the potential economic impact of the HZMB on the region through existing data and stakeholder interviews. The research will specifically focus on megaprojects' impacts on tourism industry and economic development in general. The research results are aimed to address the four research objectives of the study, which are similarities and differences between the HZBM and other megaprojects, common issues involved in developing megaprojects, the future impacts of the HZMB …

A Comparative Analysis Of An Original And A Post-Hoc Application Of Lean Six Sigma Methodology, Jin Qiu

Open Access Theses

Current society develops faster and faster every day with customers' demands increasing rapidly. Decreasing time for product development and enhancing customer satisfaction are becoming more significant. In the business world, there is no industry that could exist without an efficient supply chain. In the fierce competitive environment of today, the supply chain must address potential problems and risks that may exist and assure continuous improvement.

One common supply chain management practice in many industries is to apply lean methodology to the supply chain model in order to maximize the customers' value and eliminate waste. By eliminating waste, the process can …

Two Essays On Insider Trading And Option Grants Around The Filing Of Influential Patents, Liu Pan

Doctoral Dissertations

Research documents that insiders, who have access to private information, appear to trade with profits before major corporate events like mergers, bankruptcy, dividend announcements, and future cash flow news (see, e.g., Seyhun, 1990; Seyhun and Bradley, 1997; John and Lang, 1991; Jiang and Zaman, 2010). Another recent stream of studies find that the size and quality of a firm's patent portfolio are positively related to the firm's future stock returns (Hirshleifer, Hsu, and Li, 2012; Pandit, Wasley, and Zach, 2011). However, there is little systematic evidence on whether insiders act opportunistically when they possess private information about the firm's patent …

Two Essays On Insider Trading And Option Grants Around The Filing Of Influential Patents, Liu Pan

Doctoral Dissertations

Research documents that insiders, who have access to private information, appear to trade with profits before major corporate events like mergers, bankruptcy, dividend announcements, and future cash flow news (see, e.g., Seyhun, 1990; Seyhun and Bradley, 1997; John and Lang, 1991; Jiang and Zaman, 2010). Another recent stream of studies find that the size and quality of a firm's patent portfolio are positively related to the firm's future stock returns (Hirshleifer, Hsu, and Li, 2012; Pandit, Wasley, and Zach, 2011). However, there is little systematic evidence on whether insiders act opportunistically when they possess private information about the firm's patent …