Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Agglomeration Economics: Small Establishments/Big Effects: Agglomeration, Industrial Organization And Entrepreneurship, Stuart S. Rosenthal, William Strange

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Similarities In Fan Preferences For Minor-League Baseball Across The American Southeast, Tyler Anthony, Tim Kahn, Briana Madison, Rodney Paul, Andrew Weinbach

Falk College Research Center

Three Minor League Baseball leagues across the Southeastern United States are studied in order to determine what drives fan attendance. Individual game attendance and game characteristics are examined for three leagues located in the American southeast, the Florida State League, the Southern League, and the South Atlantic League. Despite the three leagues encompassing different levels of play (from A to AA), the determinants of attendance are similar across leagues. Factors affecting attendance such as winning percentage, weather conditions, local income and population, and individual game promotions, such as fireworks, are explored.

China's Growing Role In World Trade: Trade Growth, Production Fragmentation, And China's Environment, Judith M. Dean, Mary Lovely

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Regional Differences In Fan Preferences For Minor League Hockey: The Ahl, Rodney Paul, Robert Chatt

Falk College Research Center

Regional differences in fan preferences for minor league hockey in the United States are explored using simple linear regression models. The top-level minor league for the NHL, the American Hockey League (AHL), was studied for the 2008-09 season. Key attributes with respect to attendance are studied for hockey including population, income per capita, promotions, scoring, and winning percentage. In addition, a key socio-economic variable, fighting is also investigated. Major differences are found for fan preferences across geographic regions in relation to population, income per capita, a variety of promotions, and team success. In addition, fan reaction to fighting tends to …

Strategic Substitutes Or Complements? The Game Of Where To Fish, Robert L. Hicks, William C. Horrace, Kurt E. Schnier

Economics - All Scholarship

The ‘‘global game with strategic substitutes and complements’’ of Karp et al. (2007) is used to model the decision of where to fish. A complete information game is assumed, but the model is generalized to S > 1 sites. In this game, a fisherman’s payoff depends on fish density in each site and the actions of other fishermen which can lead to congestion or agglomeration effects. Stable and unstable equilibria are characterized, as well as notions of equilibrium dominance. The model is applied to the Alaskan flatfish fishery by specifying a strategic interaction function (response to congestion) that is a non-linear …

Social Interactions In The Labor Market, Andrew Grodner, Thomas J. Kniesner, John A. Bishop

Economics - All Scholarship

We examine theoretically and empirically social interactions in labor markets and how policy prescriptions can change dramatically when there are social interactions present. Spillover effects increase labor supply and conformity effects make labor supply perfectly inelastic at a reference group average. The demand for a good may also be influenced by either a spillover effect or a conformity effect. Positive spillover increases the demand for the good with interactions, and a conformity effect makes the demand curve pivot to become less price sensitive. Similar social interactions effects appear in the associated derived demands for labor. Individual and community factors may …

Losers And Losers: Some Demographics Of Medical Malpractice Tort Reforms, Andrew Friedson, Thomas J. Kniesner

Economics - All Scholarship

Our research examines individual differences in the effects of medical malpractice tort reforms on pre-trial settlement speed and settlement amounts by age and most likely settlement size. Findings of note include that, unlike previously assumed, both absolute and percentage losses from tort reform are small for infants in an asset value sense and that the prime-aged working population is the group most negatively affected by tort reform. Maximum entropy quantile regressions highlight the robustness of our conclusions and reveal that the settlement losses most informative for policy evaluation differ greatly from mean regression estimates.

The Turkish Wage Curve; Evidence From The Household Labor Force Survey, Badi H. Baltagi, Yusuf Soner Baskaya, Timur Hulagu

Center for Policy Research

This paper examines the Turkish wage curve using individual data from the Household Labor Force Survey (HLFS) including 26 NUTS-2 regions over the period 2005 - 2008. When the local unemployment rate is treated as predetermined, there is evidence in favor of the wage curve only for younger and female workers. However, if the lagged unemployment rate is used as an instrument for current unemployment rate, we find an unemployment elasticity of -0.099. We also find a higher elasticity for younger, less educated, low experienced workers than for older, more educated and more experienced workers. Another important finding is that …

What’S Wrong With Economics? It Ignores The Pogo Principle: 'We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us', Jerry Evensky

Economics - All Scholarship

The piece begins with the proposition that the economic perspective on human activity must reflect the fact that human beings transact in a world defined for the actors by social norms. An analysis of the crisis of 2008 is offered as a demonstration of the value of adopting such a broader perspective. Part two offers a historical model based on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy of such a broader analysis. The piece closes with the case that the history of ideas offers alternative perspectives on the questions we explore in economics today and thus can serve as a valuable resource for …

Social Interactions In The Labor Market, Andrew Grodner, Thomas J. Kniesner, John A. Bishop

Center for Policy Research

We examine theoretically and empirically social interactions in labor markets and how policy prescriptions can change dramatically when there are social interactions present.

Spillover effects increase labor supply and conformity effects make labor supply perfectly inelastic at a reference group average. The demand for a good may also be influenced by either a spillover effect or a conformity effect. Positive spillover increases the demand for the good with interactions, and a conformity effect makes the demand curve pivot to become less price sensitive. Similar social interactions effects appear in the associated derived demands for labor.

Individual and community factors may …

Losers And Losers: Some Demographics Of Medical Malpractice Tort Reforms, Andrew I. Friedson, Thomas J. Kniesner

Center for Policy Research

Our research examines individual differences in the effects of medical malpractice tort reforms on pre-trial settlement speed and settlement amounts by age and most likely settlement size. Findings of note include that, unlike previously assumed, both absolute and percentage losses from tort reform are small for infants in an asset value sense and that the prime-aged working population is the group most negatively affected by tort reform. Maximum entropy quantile regressions highlight the robustness of our conclusions and reveal that the settlement losses most informative for policy evaluation differ greatly from mean regression estimates.

The Value Of Life: Real Risks And Safety-Related Productivity In The Himalaya, Jeremy Goucher, William C. Horrace

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper estimates the value of a statistical life from commercial Himalayan expeditions. Because deaths occur with a fair amount of regularity, fatality rates are calculated for each mountain trail and are, hence, disaggregated measures of risk. Also, since the marginal product of labor in the industry is (in part) the marginal product of safety, our revenue measures may account for unobserved safety-related productivity of guides. Guide safety is explicitly observed by market participants, and is reflected in higher wages for safer guides. Our VSL estimates are about $5 M.

Leaving Or Staying: Inter-Provincial Migration In Vietnam, Phuong Nguyen-Hoang, John G. Mcpeak

Economics - All Scholarship

Internal migration has several policy implications for economic growth and development for developing countries in general and for the fast growing low-income country of Vietnam in particular. Little research has been done, however, on inter-provincial migration in Vietnam. This study makes two major contributions to the migration and development literature in terms of the datasets and policy-relevant estimation approach. It is the first paper to use the annual survey data on migration published by Vietnam’s General Statistics Office. This study also adopts a functional form to accommodate the flexibility of income’s elasticity. Income, together with urban unemployment rates, are endogenously …

Homeownership Boom And Bust 2000 To 2009: Where Will The Homeownership Rate Go From Here?, Stuart A. Gabriel, Stuart S. Rosenthal

Economics - All Scholarship

The increase in the homeownership rate in the middle of the last decade extended to all age groups but was most pronounced among individuals under age 30. These increases coincided with looser credit conditions that enhanced household access to mortgage credit along with evidence of less risk averse attitudes towards investment in homeownership. Following the crash, these trends have reversed and homeownership rates have largely reverted back to the levels of 2000. The drop in the homeownership rate from an all-time high of 69.2 in 2004 to 66.4 percent in the first quarter of 2011 reflects a decline from unsustainable …

What's Wrong With Economics? It Ignores The Pogo Principle: "We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us", Jerry Evenesky

Economics - All Scholarship

The piece begins with the proposition that the economic perspective on human activity must reflect the fact that human beings transact in a world defined for the actors by social norms. An analysis of the crisis of 2008 is offered as a demonstration of the value of adopting such a broader perspective. Part two offers a historical model based on Adam Smith’s Moral Philosophy of such a broader analysis. The piece closes with the case that the history of ideas offers alternative perspectives on the questions we explore in economics today and thus can serve as a valuable resource for …

Do Arbitrageurs Amplify Economic Shocks?, Harrison Hong, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Tal Fishman

Economics - All Scholarship

We test the hypothesis that arbitrageurs amplify economic shocks in equity markets. The ability of speculators to hold short positions depends on asset values: shorts are often reduced following good news about a stock. Therefore, the prices of highly shorted stocks are excessively sensitive to shocks compared to stocks with little short interest. We confirm this hypothesis using several empirical strategies including two quasi-experiments. In particular, we establish that the price of highly shorted stocks overshoots after good earnings news due to short covering compared to other stocks.

Outsourcing Mutual Fund Management: Firm Boundaries, Incentives And Performance, Joseph S. Chen, Jeffrey D. Kubik, Harrison Hong

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper investigates the effects of managerial outsourcing on the incentives and performance of mutual funds. We document that mutual fund families outsource the management of a significant fraction of their funds to unaffiliated advisory firms. Funds managed externally significantly under-perform those ran internally. To establish the causality of this relationship, we instrument for whether a fund is outsourced and find similar estimates. We hypothesize that contractual externalities due to firm boundaries make it more difficult to extract performance from an outsourced relationship. We verify two auxiliary predictions of this hypothesis: compared to counterparts ran internally, an outsourced fund faces …

The Impact Of International Trade On Wages: Trade Flows And Wage Premiums: Does Who Or What Matter?, Mary Lovely, J. David Richardson

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Challenging Orthodoxies: Understanding Poverty In Pastoral Areas Of East Africa, Peter D. Little, John G. Mcpeak, Christopher B. Barrett, Patti Kristjanson

Economics - All Scholarship

Understanding and alleviating poverty in Africa continues to receive considerable attention by a range of diverse actors, including politicians, international celebrities, academics, activists, and practitioners. Despite the onslaught of interest, there surprisingly is little agreement on what constitutes poverty in rural Africa, how it should be assessed, and what should be done to alleviate it. Based on data from an interdisciplinary study of pastoralism in northern Kenya, this article examines issues of poverty among one of the continents most vulnerable groups, pastoralists, and challenges the application of such orthodox proxies as incomes/expenditures, geographic remoteness, and market integration. It argues that …

Empirical Forecasting Of Slow-Onset Disasters For Improved Emergency Response: An Application To Kenya's Arid North, Andrew G. Mude, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak, Robert Kaitho, Patti Kristjanson

Economics - All Scholarship

Mitigating the negative welfare consequences of crises such as droughts, floods, and disease outbreaks, is a major challenge in many areas of the world, especially in highly vulnerable areas insufficiently equipped to prevent food and livelihood security crisis in the face of adverse shocks. Given the finite resources allocated for emergency response, and the expected increase in incidences of humanitarian catastrophe due to changing climate patterns, there is a need for rigorous and efficient methods of early warning and emergency needs assessment. In this paper we develop an empirical model, based on a relatively parsimonious set of regularly measured variables …

Sozialpolitik Nach Dem Verursacherprinzip : Beispiele Der Anwendung Bei Sucht, Gewichtsproblemen, Medikamentenmissbrauch, Arbeitslosigkeit, Prostitution, Isidor Wallimann

Books

Dieses einzigartige Buch ist der "Praxisband" des bekannten und renommierten Experten im Bereich der modernen Sozialpolitik. In mehr und mehr Ländern wird punktuell das Verursacherprinzip auch in der Sozial- und Gesundheitspolitik angewendet, leider zu bruchstückhaft und oft wenig reflektiert. Sozialpolitik nach dem Verursacherprinzip ist genau jenes Thema, dass kontroversiell diskutiert wird. Prominente Fallbeispiele wie zB im Bereich der Tabakindustrie in den USA prägen die Diskussion und gesellschaftspolitischen Diskurse.

Im Idealfall sollen mit dem Verursacherprinzip Soziale Probleme und Belastungen an alle dafür verantwortlichen Akteure zurückgebunden und so vermieden werden. Akteure, die andern Schaden zufügen, müssen dafür die Verantwortung übernehmen. Kosten zu …

Test Of Hypotheses In Panel Data Models When The Regressor And Disturbances Are Possibly Nonstationary, Badi H. Baltagi, Chihwa Kao, Sanggon Na

Center for Policy Research

This paper considers the problem of hypotheses testing in a simple panel data regression model with random individual effects and serially correlated disturbances. Following Baltagi, Kao and Liu (2008), we allow for the possibility of non-stationarity in the regressor and/or the disturbance term. While Baltagi et al. (2008) focus on the asymptotic properties and distributions of the standard panel data estimators, this paper focuses on test of hypotheses in this setting. One important finding is that unlike the time series case, one does not necessarily need to rely on the “super-efficient” type AR estimator by Perron and Yabu (2009) to …

Preventing Pandemics: Contributing Factors To Susceptibility During The H1n1 Pandemic, Melanie A. Zilora

Honors Capstone Projects - All

This paper uses Poisson and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression techniques on panel data from the United Nations World Health Organization’s FluNet to evaluate factors contributing to a country’s H1N1 influenza (swine flu) pandemic outcomes. Countries with higher development (as measured by gross domestic product and the United Nations Human Development Program’s development index) and higher mean annual temperature (as measured in the capital city) tended to have an earlier first reporting of cases. Though subject to reporting biases, the results also suggest that mass vaccinations have a negative effect on weekly reported cases. Countries that would vaccinate in the …

The Effects Of Walmart On Healthcare And Unionization: Is America Really Saving Money And Living Better?, Leyla Ziad

Honors Capstone Projects - All

As the largest private sector employer in the United States, corporate retail giant Walmart continues to make waves in United States culture and the economy since launching its first store in 1962. As Walmart seeks to expand, the validity of its consumer guarantee to “save money, live better” has been increasingly scrutinized, given Walmart’s use of controversial business practices, most notably its employee benefit policies and anti-unionization efforts. With over 1.4 million employees in the United States, there is much talk surrounding the potential costs of Walmart’s low prices. This study analyzes selected healthcare and unionization impacts of Walmart in …

New York Camp Econometrics Vi Program, Center For Policy Research

Camp Econometrics-Programs

No abstract provided.

Policy Relevant Heterogeneity In The Value Of Statistical Life: New Evidence From Panel Data Quantile Regressions, Thomas J. Kniesner, W. Kip Viscusi, James P. Ziliak

Economics - All Scholarship

We examine differences in the value of statistical life (VSL) across potential wage levels in panel data using quantile regressions with intercept heterogeneity. Latent heterogeneity is econometrically important and affects the estimated VSL. Our findings indicate that a reasonable average cost per expected life saved cut-off for health and safety regulations is $7 million to $8 million per life saved, but the VSL varies considerably across the labor force. Our results reconcile the previous discrepancies between hedonic VSL estimates and the values implied by theories linked to the coefficient of relative risk aversion. Because the VSL varies elastically with income, …

Psychotherapy And Pharmacotherapy In Depression, Thomas J. Kniesner, Regina Powers, Thomas Croghan

Economics - All Scholarship

Depression is a condition with various modes of treatment, including pharmacotherapy, psychotherapy, and some combination of each. The role of psychotherapy in the treatment of depression relative to the role of pharmacotherapy is not well understood, and guidelines for psychotherapy in the primary care setting differ from guidelines for specialty care. There is little evidence about the circumstances in actual practice that affect the use of psychotherapy in conjunction with pharmacotherapy.

We retrospectively identify the most important factors associated with the use of psychotherapy in combination with pharmacotherapy in the treatment of depression. Specifically, we study provider choice, health plan …

April 2011, Syracuse Department Of Economics

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Medical Technology And The Production Of Health Care, Badi H. Baltagi, Francesco Moscone, Elisa Tosetti

Center for Policy Research

This paper investigates the factors that determine differences across OECD countries in health outcomes, using data on life expectancy at age 65, over the period 1960 to 2007. We estimate a production function where life expectancy depends on health and social spending, lifestyle variables, and medical innovation. Our first set of regressions includes a set of observed medical technologies by country. Our second set of regressions proxy technology using a spatial process. The paper also tests whether in the long-run countries tend to achieve similar levels of health outcomes. Our results show that health spending has a significant and mild …

Do The Gses Expand The Supply Of Mortgage Credit? New Evidence Of Crowd Out In The Secondary Mortgage Market, Stuart A. Gabriel, Stuart S. Rosenthal

Economics - All Scholarship

The dramatic government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in September, 2008 was motivated in part by a desire to ensure a continued flow of credit to the mortgage market. This study examines a closely related issue: the extent to which GSE activity crowds out mortgage purchases by private secondary market intermediaries. Evidence of substantial crowd out suggests that government support for the GSEs may be less warranted, whereas the absence of crowd out implies that GSE loan purchases enhance liquidity.

Using 1994-2008 HMDA data for conventional, conforming sized loans, three distinct periods with regard to GSE crowd out …