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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2009

Economics

Clemson University

Articles 1 - 17 of 17

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

The Macroeconomy And Health In The United States, Elizabeth Herring Dec 2009

The Macroeconomy And Health In The United States, Elizabeth Herring

All Theses

The economy affects everyone as it expands and contracts. This paper will look at the effects that economic downturns have on the health of Americans. It will analyze the number of deaths per year caused by certain causes of death and determine the extent to which a downturn affects these numbers. This paper also looks at the cause and effect relationship between antidepressants and suicide. The empirical results indicate that the state of the economy affects the health of the nation.

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Measuring Freedom: An Analysis Of The Economic Freedom Index, Derek Mcafee Dec 2009

Measuring Freedom: An Analysis Of The Economic Freedom Index, Derek Mcafee

All Theses

The creation and empirical use of economic freedom indices has produced a growing amount of literature over the last decade. A survey of this literature is provided, and the difficulty of measuring this concept, as well as the usefulness and limits of the various indices are discussed. The indices are reduced to their components, and testable models are used in order to determine which components are most important. Secure property rights are found to be the most important component driving the results. The results are consistent with previous studies, which indicate that greater economic freedom is related to greater growth …

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Position Value And Wage Determinants In The Nhl, Sean Watterson Dec 2009

Position Value And Wage Determinants In The Nhl, Sean Watterson

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The landscape of the NHL has changed significantly following the lockout season that began in 2004. This paper studies the effects of the rule changes that followed the lockout, the rule changes effect on the documented discrimination against French Canadian players, and models the determinants of wage in the NHL for the three positions in the NHL: forward, defenseman, and goaltender.
The rule changes and stricter enforcement of existing rules resulted in an increase in average scoring by all teams. The rule changes caused the value of scoring to decrease, and they increased the value of skilled defensemen, particularly those …

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The Traits Of Colleges And Universities That Influence Crime, Rita Palermo Dec 2009

The Traits Of Colleges And Universities That Influence Crime, Rita Palermo

All Theses

Crime on college and university campuses has been a growing problem in recent years. Schools desire to decrease crime, but often do not understand the best and most efficient way to do so. In this paper, we will attempt to understand which attributes are most influential by looking at features and crime rates for 492 different schools for which the FBI had released relevant crime data in 2006.
The data showed that many of the variables such as campus size, number of student organizations, school setting, school size, and many other topics, had a noticeable relationship with the total crime. …

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The Impact Of Drm Technology In The P2p Age, Ying Xin Aug 2009

The Impact Of Drm Technology In The P2p Age, Ying Xin

All Theses

The innovation of P2P technology in digital world challenges the present copyright institutions and retailers. People are declined to look for the protection from the traditional law in digital circumstance. As the trend of extending copyright protection term across the world, most intellectual property institutions implement new technologies to deal with such situation. This paper uses a panel of country-level data to investigate the extent to which this is a consequence of the extension of copyright protection. Utilizing the economic model, the analysis suggests that the economic effects of implementing DRM technology are generally negative, albeit uncertain. The available evidence …

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Hedonic Analysis Of The Willingness To Pay For Fuel Efficiency In The Australian Automobile Market, Michael Perkins Aug 2009

Hedonic Analysis Of The Willingness To Pay For Fuel Efficiency In The Australian Automobile Market, Michael Perkins

All Theses

The implicit prices of automobile attributes are estimated with a hedonic model of new automobiles sold in the 2005 Australian market. The estimated marginal value of decreased fuel consumption is found to be positively valued by drivers and car manufacturers. A comparison of explicit fuel savings estimated with Australian automobile market statistics to the implicit fuel savings estimated with the hedonic regression indicates that new automobile buyers accurately value the fuel cost savings associated with reductions in fuel consumption.

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Financial Globalization And Crisis: The Role Of Local Financial Markets, Xin Chen Aug 2009

Financial Globalization And Crisis: The Role Of Local Financial Markets, Xin Chen

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In this paper, I provide a specific channel through which financial development helps economic growth: by reducing the incidence of crises and making them less severe. To support this, I examine the various links among financial markets development, financial crisis, and GDP growth rate. My empirical estimates, using cross-country data from 1980 to 2007, show a statistically significant and economically relevant effect among these variables: countries with better local financial markets can largely decrease the frequency of occurrence of financial crisis, and that efficient banking systems can alleviate the adverse impact of banking crisis on output lost for the long-run, …

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Congressional Support For Campaign Finance Reform And Climate Legislation, Bryan Buckley Aug 2009

Congressional Support For Campaign Finance Reform And Climate Legislation, Bryan Buckley

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This dissertation explores two types of legislation, campaign finance reform and climate
change legislation, in order to examine the determinants of congressional voting on these acts. Chapter One outlines a theoretical model based on a model by Denzau and Munger (1989) that predicts that Representatives will vote for campaign finance reform if it improves their campaign contribution position relative to that of their opponents, rather than improves their position absolutely. Empirical estimates show that this is in fact the case and that voting on the 2002 Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was based on this rather than on party as others …

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Essays On Knowledge, Technology, And Economic Growth, Sung-Min Kim May 2009

Essays On Knowledge, Technology, And Economic Growth, Sung-Min Kim

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This thesis is motivated by the question, how does computer-related technological change affect the individual's incentive to acquire specialized knowledge? Specifically, will the impact of technological change be homogeneous for all workers regardless of their idiosyncratic characteristics such as educational attainments or occupation? If not, then how do the heterogeneous effects from advances in computer-related technology change the labor market? Based on the related theoretical frameworks from the literature, Chapter 2 focuses on the empirical implementations of heterogeneous impacts of information and communication technology on between-occupation wage differentials and within-group wage differentials, and Chapter 3 examines the impact of computerization …

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Trade Effect Of A Single Currency In East Africa, Rodgers Mukwaya May 2009

Trade Effect Of A Single Currency In East Africa, Rodgers Mukwaya

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The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of a single currency policy for Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda on the volume, value and direction of trade and the distribution of welfare changes between these countries. A single-commodity (maize), multi-country spatial equilibrium model was used to evaluate the possible trade and welfare effects of the proposed single currency. Simulation results show higher levels of aggregate regional production with increased production in Uganda and decreased production in Kenya and Tanzania. The results also show increased aggregate trade in the region, the value of exports from Uganda to Kenya increased by …

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The Expenditure Effects Of Sunset Laws In State Governments, Jonathan Waller May 2009

The Expenditure Effects Of Sunset Laws In State Governments, Jonathan Waller

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Abstract: Sunset laws are laws designed to limit the size of state government by providing a process whereby statutorily created programs, agencies and bureaus are reviewed cyclically and their effectiveness assessed. Possible sunset results include continuation of the status quo, a reorganization or consolidation with other state agencies or agency termination. These programs exist in 30 states and use four distinct approaches, reflecting the confusion associated with the purpose and effects of such programs. This paper utilizes state expenditure and employment data to isolate the effects of sunset laws in general and the effects of each of the four different …

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The Value Of Reputation In Online Auctions: Evidence From Ebay, Ahmed Eddhir May 2009

The Value Of Reputation In Online Auctions: Evidence From Ebay, Ahmed Eddhir

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Online auctions create reputation mechanisms to give users information about the reputation of their trading partners. This information helps the buyer to make an informed decision regarding his purchase: whether or not to make a purchase from a particular seller and the price the buyer is willing to pay. eBay is a leading internet auctioneers and in May 2008, it changed its feedback system. This paper examines the new feedback system and studies the impact of seller's reputation on auction's price. The empirical results show that buyers respond to the Positive Feedback ratings of sellers. However, the impact on the …

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The Consequences Of Kelo: A Financial Approach, Curry Hilton May 2009

The Consequences Of Kelo: A Financial Approach, Curry Hilton

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ABSTRACT
Municipal bonds corresponding to states that passed effective post-Kelo restrictions on eminent domain takings experienced an increase in yields. The high costs associated with property acquisitions in states with strong legislation deter economic development takings and contribute to the decreasing of municipal bond prices. The financial effect attributed to municipal bonds issued for the purpose of economic improvement completely exceeds the impact offered by industrial improvement and public improvement bonds. The Kelo decision itself reinforced the appropriateness of government takings for private gain. The outcome directly affected municipal bond yields, causing an increase in price because of the low …

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Contracting In The Pharmaceutical Industry: Predicting Payments In Strategic Alliances, Jonathan Altman May 2009

Contracting In The Pharmaceutical Industry: Predicting Payments In Strategic Alliances, Jonathan Altman

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ABSTRACT
This paper empirically analyzes how circumstances affect the creation of strategic alliances in the pharmaceutical industry, and the form these alliances take. The models introduced in this paper use the cost of capital and monitoring costs to predict the timing of the deal, which in turn allows the prediction of the deal type. The deal type is then used to predict payment types used in the deal. Deals are characterized by five payment types; upfront, royalty, milestone, equity, and research payments. Deals are also characterized by one of five deal types; co-development, license, acquisition, outsource, and asset purchase. Each …

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Two Essays On Financial Econometrics, Jia Geng May 2009

Two Essays On Financial Econometrics, Jia Geng

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The first paper examines the properties of the realized volatilities of US Dollar / Canadian Dollar spot exchange rate covering a time span of about three years and then the deseasonalized volatilities are estimated and forecasted using a fractionally-integrated model. The key feature of the realized volatilities is that they are model-free and also approximately measurement-error-free. Usually a U-shaped pattern of the intraday volatilities should be observed due to opening-closure effects in the global market. I do not see a typical U-shaped pattern in the intraday volatilities for US Dollar / Canadian Dollar. The reasons are given in this paper. …

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Essays In Public Choice: The Settings That Foster Increased Educational Quality, Interest Group Activity And Economic Development, Leslee Conaway May 2009

Essays In Public Choice: The Settings That Foster Increased Educational Quality, Interest Group Activity And Economic Development, Leslee Conaway

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ABSTRACT
The following essays in public choice are concerned with two main subjects: changes in public educational quality due to competition from surrounding private schools and the settings that foster increased interest group activity and what impact that activity has on the relative economic development of US states. While these subjects may seem varied, they are both important in understanding differences in economic development.
Education has long been associated with economic expansion, so it is important to understand the impacts that private markets for education have on its public provision. In Chapter II, I look at whether there are competitive …

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Measuring And Detecting Political Forces, Ann Zerkle May 2009

Measuring And Detecting Political Forces, Ann Zerkle

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The essays in my dissertation explore the impact of political action on everyday life by utilizing the modern theory of political economy and investigating the 'unintended' consequences of political behavior. Specifically, the first essay studies the impact on communities when the Army activates reservists and guardsmen. The second essay challenges traditional ways of measuring electoral data, helping in the understanding of election campaigns. The third essay demonstrates the new electoral measure to ask and answer, 'Did Bush bring home troops to bolster campaign support in 2004?'

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