Economics Commons^™

Welfare-To-Work: The Effect Of Childcare Subsidies On Labor Force Participation Rates For Low-Income Single Mothers, Ariana Cubela

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The allocation of funding toward childcare has historically been debated due to conflicting views on the effect childcare subsidies have on low-income, single mothers. Some suggest that federal, state and local funding could put the money allocated for childcare subsidies to better use – or perhaps that there is no need for additional federal, state and/or local funding. However, there is sufficient evidence that children raised in a family structure with low-income single mothers may face long-term negative consequences not only socially, but also economically. An increase in labor force participation rates as a result of childcare subsidies not only …

Fighting World Hunger Can Be A Win-Win: Innovating Firms Can Do Well By Doing Good, Konstantinos Giannakas, Amalia Yiannaka

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

A 2018 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations estimates that more than 820 million people around the world have been facing malnutrition and hunger.

Based on K. Giannakas and A. Yiannaka. 2018. Doing Well by Doing Good: Agricultural Biotechnology in the Fight against Hunger. Agricultural Economics. doi: 10.1111/agec.12455

Exploring The Relation Between Sectoral Foreign Direct Investment And Domestic Investment: Case For Turkey, Selin Erkan

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis investigates the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and domestic investment in Turkey during 2005Q1-2016Q2 to see if there is a crowding-in or crowding-out relationship. Sectoral FDI data for manufacturing, agriculture and service are employed and gross fixed capital formation is used as a proxy for domestic investment. GDP and export are used as control variables. A VAR model estimates negative coefficients of sectoral FDI on domestic investment indicating that there is some crowding-out in Turkey during 2005Q1-2016Q2 although not one-for-one. These negative effects are concentrated in the manufacturing sector.

The Effect Of Fast Food Restaurants On Type 2 Diabetes Rates, Grace Bailey

CMC Senior Theses

This paper conducts an analysis of county level data to determine the effect of fast food restaurants on type 2 diabetes rates. Due to endogeneity concerns with respect to the location of fast food restaurants, this paper follows the work of Dunn (2010) and uses the number of interstate exits in a given county to serve as an instrument for fast food restaurants. The strength of the instrument, which is theoretically and empirically tested in this paper, imposes some restraints on the interpretation of the findings. Using the Two-Stage Least Squares estimation method, I find that the presence of fast …

Human Development And Subnationalism: A Disaggregated Analysis Of Indian States: Kerala And Uttar Pradesh, Manika Garg

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis investigates achievements in human development outcomes on health, education, and poverty indicators across Indian states, in order to discern what factors might influence a state’s better orientation toward social policies. After conducting data analysis, the study explains differences in outcomes, as achieved by Kerala and Uttar Pradesh, by building an argument of subnational solidarity and its impact on determining the state’s policy agendas.

Climate And Crime: Examining The Relationship Between Extreme Weather Events And Crime Rates In The United States, Erin Tully

CMC Senior Theses

This study attempts to determine whether there is a relationship between extreme weather events and crime rates. Due to the increasing effects of climate change, it is critical we understand the societal effects of extreme weather. Here, a panel data fixed effects regression was used to analyze state and year level data. It was hypothesized that there would be a relationship between crime and extreme events, but the results did not show a statistically significant relationship. Further research with increased geographic and temporal controls is encouraged.

Analysis Of The Economic Impact Of Constructing A Nba Arena On The Host City, Grant Gilchrist

CMC Senior Theses

Using economic data collected from 24 different Metropolitan Statistical Areas in the US, this thesis investigates the impact of constructing a new National Basketball Association (NBA) arena on the host city’s economy. When a simplistic model is implemented, which does not control for other economic factors or individual subject heterogeneity, significantly positive economic impacts of arena construction are observed. However, when a more appropriate model specification is implemented that controls for economic activity and individual heterogeneity, these effects are no longer statistically significant. This comparative analysis ultimately highlights the importance of appropriate model specification and supports the conclusion that new …

Is Avocado Toast The Reason I'M Still Living With My Parents?, Brendan Macdonald

CMC Senior Theses

Is avocado toast the reason that I am still living with my parents? In other words, does the consumption of avocado toast, or more specifically eating out in general, have any impact on one’s ability to be a homeowner. In May of 2017, an Australian real estate developer by the name of Tim Gurner was asked to provide advice to young people who could not afford to purchase a home. He responded by saying, “when I was trying to buy my first home, I wasn’t buying smashed avocado for $19 and four coffees at $4 each,” (Victor, 2017). While the …

Are Volatility Expectations In Different Countries Interdependent? A Data-Driven Solution To Structural Var Identification For Implied Equity Volatility Indices, Timothy H. De Silva

CMC Senior Theses

Over the past couple of decades, the number of volatility indices has increased rapidly. These indices seek to represent the market’s expectation of realized volatility over the coming month, based on the prices of options traded on each underlying equity index. Although the dynamics of realized volatility spillover have been studied extensively, very few studies exists that examine the spillover between these volatility indices. By using DAG-based structural vector autoregression, this paper provides evidence that implied volatility spillover differs from realized volatility spillover. Through solving the well-known VAR identification problem for these indices, this paper finds that Asia, more specifically …

Trade Openness, Government Spending, Institutions And Their Effects On Economic Growth In Selected Mena Countries, Saif Mohammad Alqahtani

Masters Theses

The objective of this study to examine how import, export, government spending, and institutions impact on economic growth. Of the four selected North African countries, (Egypt, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia), six periods of five years from 1985-2015, we used the panel data model. In this model, we used panel data which consist of random effect and fixed effect, based on Hausman test, we selected one of them. The GDP per capita growth was used as a dependent and import, export, government spending as independent main variables. Also, gross capital formation (GCF), inflation, population growth, and HDI which consist of life …

The Impact Of Government Debt On Macroeconomic Indicators: Evidence From G7 And Asean Countries, Amani Ahmed Alzahrani

Masters Theses

Government debt continues to be a critical economic policy issue, which largely affects both developed and developing countries, due to elevated level of debt. From a general viewpoint, government debt is a crucial feature of a country's financial system and a major indicator that contributes to the formation of a country's reputation in the international market.

This paper investigates the impact of government debt on certain macroeconomic and wellbeing indicators in a group of industrialized and developing countries. That is, the study seeks to examine how government debt influences GDP per capita, domestic and foreign investment, and HDI in both …

The Impact Of Fiscal Policy On Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence From Four South Asian Countries, Tasnia Symoom

Masters Theses

There is a constant debate about the effectiveness of fiscal policy on economic growth of developing countries. Policy makers in developing countries generally attempt to address socioeconomic issues such as poverty, unemployment, hunger, poor investment, and illiteracy while adjusting the levels of public spending and determining tax rates. This thesis examines the impact of fiscal policy on economic growth in four countries of South Asia. For reasons of data availability I choose four of these countries – Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka – for the period 1980 to 2016. I use the Error Correction Model (ECM) and Autoregressive Distributed …

Shocks Pass-Through To Prices In U.S. And Canada: Evidence From Oil And Exchange Rate Markets, Eiman Aiyash

Masters Theses

This paper investigates the degree of exchange rate and oil prices pass-through to import prices, producer prices, and consumer prices in Canada and United States over the period from 1980 to 2017 using a Structural Vector Auto-Regression (SVAR) model. The results indicate a robust evidence of a positive long-run correlation between exchange rate & oil prices and aggregate price levels. Impulse response function reveals a persistent and incomplete pass-through for both exchange rates and oil prices i.e. 0.20 and 0.04 for Canada and 0.27 and 0.25 for the U.S. That is, greater pass-through exist in an economy which has a …

Investigating The Impact Of Foreign Direct Investment On Domestic Investment In Sub-Saharan Africa: A Case Study Of Kenya And South Africa, George Anaman

Masters Theses

In the progression towards economic growth, countries consider investment as a critical feature in raising productivity levels by boosting technological progress and reducing the unemployment rate. In recent years, the government of South Africa and Kenya have both enacted policies to entice Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the view of creating more jobs and bolstering the economy. However, in the bid to attract these foreign investors, FDI may either end up complementing or stifling local investments over time. From this perspective, the objective of the study is to investigate the impact of FDI on Domestic Investments in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) …

Estimation Of A Partially Linear Regression In Triangular Systems, Xin Geng, Carlos Martins-Filho, Feng Yao

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

We propose kernel-based estimators for the components of a partially linear regression in a triangular system where endogenous regressors appear both in the linear and nonparametric components of the regression. Compared with other estimators currently available in the literature, e.g. the sieve estimators proposed in Ai and Chen (2003) or Otsu (2011), our estimators have explicit functional form and are much easier to implement. They rely on a set of assumptions introduced by Newey et al. (1999) that characterize what has become known as the “control function” approach for endogeneity in regression. We explore conditional moment restrictions that make this …

Three Essays On Maternal And Child Health, Mandar V. Bodas

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a collection of three separate essays on the health of women and children. In the first essay, I along with my co-authors, analyzed the impact of two large, national-level health policies (the Janani Suraksha Yojana (JSY) and the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM)) on maternal health outcomes (proportion of institutional deliveries) in India. We used data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) and found that the JSY and the NRHM had a greater impact on institutional deliveries in high-focus states. We also found that the conditions of the public health facilities, did not change after the …

Culture And Colonial Legacy: Evidence From Public Goods Games, Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin, Sriya Iyer, Anand Shrivastava

ESI Working Papers

We conduct a public goods game in three small towns in the Indian state of Rajasthan. Due to historical military conquest, until 1947 these towns were on (barely) opposite sides of a colonial border separating British India from the Princely States. Our research design offers a treatment comparison between the towns of (British) Kekri and (Princely) Sarwar, and a control comparison between (Princely) Sarwar and (Princely) Shahpura. We find no significant difference in contributions to home town groups, but a significant difference in contributions to mixed town groups. Participants in (British) Kekri are more co-operative (i.e., contribute more) in mixed …

Trust In Humans And Robots: Economically Similar But Emotionally Different, Eric Schniter, Timothy W. Shields, Daniel Sznycer

ESI Working Papers

Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a looming concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based investments and emotions from across three nearly identical economic games: human-human trust games, human-robot trust games, and human-robot trust games where the robot decision impacts another human. Robots in our experiment mimic humans: they are programmed to make reciprocity decisions based on previously observed …

Extremal Quantile Treatment Effects, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper establishes an asymptotic theory and inference method for quantile treatment effect estimators when the quantile index is close to or equal to zero. Such quantile treatment effects are of interest in many applications, such as the effect of maternal smoking on an infant’s adverse birth outcomes. When the quantile index is close to zero, the sparsity of data jeopardizes conventional asymptotic theory and bootstrap inference. When the quantile index is zero, there are no existing inference methods directly applicable in the treatment effect context. This paper addresses both of these issues by proposing new inference methods that are …

Pythagorean Generalization Of Testing The Equality Of Two Symmetric Positive Definite Matrices, Jin Seo Cho, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

We provide a new test for equality of two symmetric positive-definite matrices that leads to a convenient mechanism for testing specification using the information matrix equality or the sandwich asymptotic covariance matrix of the GMM estimator. The test relies on a new characterization of equality between two k dimensional symmetric positive-definite matrices A and B: the traces of AB−1 and BA−1 are equal to k if and only if A=B. Using this simple criterion, we introduce a class of omnibus test statistics for equality and examine their null and local alternative approximations under some mild regularity conditions. A preferred test …

The Effect Of Changes In Racial Composition On Housing Prices: A Study Of The Most Diverse Place In The World, Youseph Anwar

Theses and Dissertations

This study attempts to illustrate that increases in minority residents may lead to decreases in housing prices. I observe the effects of changes in racial composition on housing prices in Queens, NY from 2011-2015. The following econometric tools are implemented: a fixed effects model, quantile, hedonic, and OLS regressions.

New Hampshire Effect: Behavior In Sequential And Simultaneous Multi-Battle Contests, Shakun D. Mago, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Sequential multi-battle contests are predicted to induce lower expenditure than simultaneous contests. This prediction is a result of a “New Hampshire Effect” – a strategic advantage created by the winner of the first battle. Although our laboratory study provides evidence for the New Hampshire Effect, we find that sequential contests generate significantly higher (not lower) expenditure than simultaneous contests. This is mainly because in sequential contests, there is significant over-expenditure in all battles. We suggest sunk cost fallacy and utility of winning as two complementary explanations for this behavior and provide supporting evidence.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- December 2017, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Bayesian Analysis Of Bubbles In Asset Prices, Andras Fulop, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a new asset price model where the dynamic structure of the asset price, after the fundamental value is removed, is subject to two different regimes. One regime reflects the normal period where the asset price divided by the dividend is assumed to follow a mean-reverting process around a stochastic long run mean. This latter is allowed to account for possible smooth structural change. The second regime reflects the bubble period with explosive behavior. Stochastic switches between two regimes and non-constant probabilities of exit from the bubble regime are both allowed. A Bayesian learning approach is employed to jointly …

Inference In Continuous Systems With Mildly Explosive Regressors, Ye Chen, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

New limit theory is developed for co-moving systems with explosive processes, connecting continuous and discrete time formulations. The theory uses double asymptotics with infill (as the sampling interval tends to zero) and large time span asymptotics. The limit theory explicitly involves initial conditions, allows for drift in the system, is provided for single and multiple explosive regressors, and is feasible to implement in practice. Simulations show that double asymptotics deliver a good approximation to the finite sample distribution, with both finite sample and asymptotic distributions showing sensitivity to initial conditions. The methods are implemented in the US real estate market …

Identifying Latent Group Structures In Nonlinear Panels, Wuyi Wang, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a procedure to identify latent group structures in nonlinear panel data models where some regression coefficients are heterogeneous across groups but homogeneous within a group and the group number and membership are unknown. To identify the group structures, we consider the order statistics for the preliminary unconstrained consistent estimators of the regression coefficients and translate the problem of classification into the problem of break detection. Then we extend the sequential binary segmentation algorithm of Bai (1997) for break detection from the time series setup to the panel data framework. We demonstrate that our method is able to identify …

Business Time Sampling Scheme With Applications To Testing Semi-Martingale Hypothesis And Estimating Integrated Volatility, Yingjie Dong, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a new method to implement the Business Time Sampling (BTS) scheme for high-frequency financial data. We compute a time-transformation (TT) function using the intraday integrated volatility estimated by a jump-robust method. The BTS transactions are obtained using the inverse of the TT function. Using our sampled BTS transactions, we test the semi-martingale hypothesis of the stock log-price process and estimate the daily realized volatility. Our method improves the normality approximation of the standardized business-time return distribution. Our Monte Carlo results show that the integrated volatility estimates using our proposed sampling strategy provide smaller root mean-squared error.

Inference In Continuous Systems With Mildly Explosive Regressors, Ye Chen, Peter C. B. Phillips, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

New limit theory is developed for co-moving systems with explosive processes, connecting continuous and discrete time formulations. The theory uses double asymptotics with infill (as the sampling interval tends to zero) and large time span asymptotics. The limit theory explicitly involves initial conditions, allows for drift in the system, is provided for single and multiple explosive regressors, and is feasible to implement in practice. Simulations show that double asymptotics deliver a good approximation to the finite sample distribution, with both finite sample and asymptotic distributions showing sensitivity to initial conditions. The methods are implemented in the US real estate market …

Volatility Spillovers And Linkages In Asian Stock Markets, Hwee Kwan Chow

Research Collection School Of Economics

Diebold–Yilmaz spillover indexes are computed for weekly return volatilities based on daily benchmark stock indexes of the US, the UK, and 10 Asian countries. We found (i) the strengthening of overall volatility spillovers is not a temporary surge but persisted after the crisis; (ii) the susceptibility of individual Asian stock markets to inward volatility transfers is linked to its degree of openness; and (iii) the Asian bourses are becoming more important emitters of financial shocks since the crisis. Rolling regressions on volatility linkages reveal the relative dominance of the US over the Japanese and Chinese bourses, and the level of …

Disaster And Recovery: The Effects Of Post-Disaster Aid On Economic Development, Joshua M. Drouin

Steeplechase: An ORCA Student Journal

The effects of aid on economic development is topic typically studied from the perspective of corruption and allocative efficiency. We examine aid to less developed nations from a different viewpoint; assuming aid reaches the intended recipients, does it actually benefit them? We utilize Indonesia and the 2004 earthquake and tsunami as a natural experiment to observe the influx of aid, and compare the regions development before and after the disaster. By establishing a baseline before the disaster, and utilizing a new start point after the destruction, we can gauge the reconstruction efforts and observe whether aid is beneficial or harmful. …