Economics Commons^™

The Effects Of Winning A Basketball National Championship On Admission Factors, Daniel Weistrop

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Collegiate sports attract a lot of attention and money. Many universities are sponsored by high powered sportswear and equipment companies including Nike and Adidas. Furthermore, CBS, Fox, and Disney participate in multimillion dollar media deals to exclusively cover a variety of sporting events featuring mainly collegiate basketball and football.

This is best demonstrated by the television coverage that respective sports receive. For example, CBS is in the midst of an 11 year, $6 billion contract that will pay the National Collegiate Athletic Association approximately $545 million per year to carry the NCAA basketball tournament. The NCAA basketball tournament is held …

The Interrelation Of Box Office Results How Does One Weekend’S Movie Attendance Affect The Next?, Drew Sullivan

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

In this paper, I attempted to determine the relationship between a movie’s box office success and the immediate timing of its release. Considering the large investment that needs to be made in producing and distributing a major motion picture, a full understanding of the factors that affect its success is vital. One factor that has been historically underexplored is the impact of movies that are directly competing with each other at the box office. This has been due to limitations in data. However, using publicly available data I was able to put together a dataset that looked at box office …

Homo Economicus: Alive And Diversified In The Economic Research Program, Bradley R. Turner

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This paper seeks to (1) offer a conceptual overview of the methodology of science research programs (MSRP) of Imre Lakatos; (2) apply the framework of that methodology to the neoclassical theory of Gary S. Becker; and (3) explore a quantitative-driven, atheoretical alternative, which challenges the view that there can be or should be any body of theoretical economics. The MSRP framework is used in an instrumental manner in the pursuit of a lucid and interesting historical analysis. The pros and cons of Becker’s approach are presented in the tradition of instrumentalism, and in light of recent discussion of economics imperialism. …

April 2010, Syracuse Department Of Economics

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Alternative Technical Efficiency Measures: Skew, Bias, And Scale, Qu Feng, William C. Horrace

Economics - All Scholarship

In the fixed-effects stochastic frontier model an efficiency measure relative to the best firm in the sample is universally employed. This paper considers a new measure relative to the worst firm in the sample. We find that estimates of this measure have smaller bias than those of the traditional measure when the sample consists of many firms near the efficient frontier. Moreover, a two-sided measure relative to both the best and the worst firms is proposed. Simulations suggest that the new measures may be preferred depending on the skewness of the inefficiency distribution and the scale of efficiency differences.

Panel Data Inference Under Spatial Dependence, Badi H. Baltagi, Alain Pirotte

Center for Policy Research

This paper focuses on inference based on the usual panel data estimators of a one-way error component regression model when the true specification is a spatial error component model. Among the estimators considered, are pooled OLS, random and fixed effects, maximum likelihood under normality, etc. The spatial effects capture the cross-section dependence, and the usual panel data estimators ignore this dependence. Two popular forms of spatial autocorrelation are considered, namely, spatial auto-regressive random effects (SAR-RE) and spatial moving average random effects (SMA-RE). We show that when the spatial coefficients are large, test of hypothesis based on the usual panel data …

Binary Economics - An Overview, Robert Ashford

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Based on binary economic principles, this paper asserts that one widely overlooked way to empower economically poor and working people in market economy is to universalize the right to acquire capital with the earnings of capital. This right is presently largely concentrated, as a practical matter, in less than 5 % of the population. The concentration of the right to acquire capital with the earnings of capital helps to explain how people either remain poor or end up poor no matter how hard they work or are willing to work. Binary Economics offers a conception of economics that is foundationally …

Trusts Versus Corporations: An Empirical Analysis Of Competing Organizational Forms, A. Joseph Warburton

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This paper studies the effects of organizational form on managerial behavior and firm performance, from an empirical perspective. Managers of trusts are subject to stricter fiduciary responsibilities than managers of corporations. This paper examines the ramifications empirically, by exploiting data generated by a change in British regulations in the 1990s that allowed mutual funds to organize as either a trust or a corporation. I find evidence that trust law is effective in curtailing opportunistic behavior, as trust managers charge significantly lower fees than their observationally equivalent corporate counterparts. Trust managers also incur lower risk. However, evidence suggests that trust managers …

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 …

Sportsbook Pricing And The Behavioral Biases Of Bettors In The Nhl, Rodney Paul, Andrew Weinbach

Falk College Research Center

The betting market for the NHL is investigated using actual betting percentages on favorites and underdogs from real sportsbooks. Sportsbooks do not appear to attempt to price to balance the book as betting percentages are not proportional to set odds. As in the NFL and NBA, bettors are shown to have a strong preference for favorites and road favorites in particular. Simple strategies of betting against significant imbalances toward the favorite are shown to generate positive returns. Although not pricing to balance the book, sportsbooks do not appear to price to exploit known bettor biases in all cases. Clear bettor …

November 2009, Syracuse Department Of Economics

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

The Value Of Statistical Life: Pursuing The Deadliest Catch, Kurt E. Schnier, William C. Horrace, Ronald G. Felthoven

Economics - All Scholarship

Observed trade-offs between monetary returns and fatality risk identify estimates of the value of a statistical life (VSL), which inform public policy and quantify preferences for environmental quality, health and safety. To date, few investigations have estimated the VSL associated with trade-offs between returns from natural resource extraction activities and the fatality risks they involve. Furthermore researchers have been unable to determine whether or not one’s VSL is stable across multiple decision environments using revealed preference methods. Understanding these tradeoffs (and the VSL that they imply) may be used to inform resource management policy and safety regulations, as well as …

A Note On The Application Of Ec2sls And Ec3sls Estimators In Panel Data Models, Badi Baltagi, Long Liu

Economics - All Scholarship

Baltagi and Li (1992) showed that for estimating a single equation in a simultaneous panel data model, EC2SLS has more instruments than G2SLS. Although these extra instruments are redundant in White (1986) terminology, they may yield different estimates and standard errors in empirical studies with finite N and T. We illustrate this using the crime data of Cornwell and Trumbull (1994). We show that the standard errors of EC2SLS are smaller than those of G2SLS for this example. In general, we prove that the asymptotic variance of G2SLS differs from that of EC2SLS by a positive semi-definite matrix. Although this …

Measuring The Effect Of Conflict On Oil Production And Prices, Benjamin Skomsky

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

This paper examines the degree to which armed conflict interrupts oil production, and the effects of these supply shocks on the region-specific oil prices. By measuring the effect of conflict on oil output, I aim to quantify one important and underexamined economic cost of conflict. By examining the effect on oil prices, I hope to provide new empirical evidence on the global demand curve for oil and the substitutability of demand across alternative oil types.

New York Camp Econometrics Iv Program, Center For Policy Research

Camp Econometrics-Programs

No abstract provided.

Search And Offshoring In The Presence Of 'Animal Spirits', Devashish Mitra, Priya Ranjan

Economics - All Scholarship

In this paper, we introduce two sources of unemployment in a two-factor general equilibrium model: search frictions and fairness considerations. We find that a binding fair-wage constraint increases the unskilled unemployment rate and can at the same time lead to a higher unemployment rate for skilled workers, as compared to an equilibrium where fairness considerations are absent or non-binding. Starting from a constrained equilibrium, an increase in the fairness parameter leads to increases in both skilled and unskilled unemployment. The wage of unskilled workers increases but the wage of skilled workers decreases. Next we allow for offshoring of unskilled jobs …

Offshoring And Unemployment: The Role Of Search Frictions And Labor Mobility, Devashish Mitra, Priya Ranjan

Economics - All Scholarship

In a two-sector, general-equilibrium model with labor-market search frictions, we find that wage increases and sectoral unemployment decreases upon offshoring in the presence of perfect intersectoral labor mobility. If, as a result, labor moves to the sector with the lower (or equal) vacancy costs, there is an unambiguous decrease in economywide unemployment. With imperfect intersectoral labor mobility, unemployment in the offshoring sector can rise, with an unambiguous unemployment reduction in the non-offshoring sector. Imperfect labor mobility can result in a mixed equilibrium in which only some firms in the industry offshore, with unemployment in this sector rising.

Broadening The Right To Acquire Capital With The Earnings Of Capital: The Missing Link To Sustainable Economic Recovery And Growth, Robert Ashford

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

This article presents a proposal to broaden the right to acquire capital with the earnings of capital as a means of promoting sustainable economic recovery and growth. It would open the markets for real and financial capital acquisition more fully and competitively to poor and working people (1) to distribute more broadly the earnings of capital and (2) to profitably employ more capital and labor. The article notes that both the recession and the strategies advanced to promote economic recovery may be viewed as responses to the prospect of inadequate present and future earning capacity of both consumers and producers …

A Generalized Spatial Panel Data Model With Random Effects, Badi H. Baltagi, Peter Egger, Michael Pfaffermayr

Center for Policy Research

This paper proposes a generalized panel data model with random effects and first-order spatially auto correlated residuals that encompasses two previously suggested specifications. The first one is described in Anselin's (1988) book and the second one by Kapoor, Kelejian, and Prucha (2007). Our encompassing specification allows us to test for these models as restricted specifications. In particular, we derive three LM and LR tests that restrict out generalized model to obtain (i) the Anselin model, (ii) the Kapoor, Kelejian, and Prucha model, and (iii) the simple random effects model that ignores the spatial correlation in the residuals. For two of …

Hedonic Markets And Explicit Demands: Bid-Function Envelopes For Public Services, Neighborhood Amenities, And Commuting Costs, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

Hedonic regressions with house value as the dependent variable are widely used to study the value of public services and amenities. This paper builds on the theory of household bidding and sorting to derive a bid function envelope, which provides a form for these regressions. This approach uses a general characterization of household heterogeneity, yields estimates of the price elasticities of demands for services and amenities directly from the hedonic with no need for a Rosen two-step procedure, and provides tests of key hypotheses about household sorting. An application to data from Cleveland in 2000 yields precise estimates of price …

Public Long-Term Care Insurance And The Housing And Living Arrangements Of The Elderly: Evidence From Medicare Home Health Benefits, Gary V. Engelhardt, Nadia Greenhalgh-Stanley

Economics - All Scholarship

We provide empirical evidence on the extent to which long-term care insurance affects the housing and living arrangements of the elderly by examining plausibly exogenous changes in the supply of long-term care insurance through the Medicare program that occurred in the late 1990s. Prior to 1997, Medicare reimbursed home health care agencies on a retrospective-cost basis. Then, starting in October, 1997, as a result of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 (BBA97), Medicare switched to a system of prospective payments for home health care, which induced state-by-calendar-year variation in the supply of this type of public long-term care insurance. We …

Interest On Bank Reserves And Optimal Sweeping, David D. Vanhoose, Donald H. Dutkowsky

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper utilizes a profit maximizing banking model to analyze sweeping behavior. Comparative statics results indicate that sweeping responds positively to increases in bank loan rates and reserve ratios and negatively to increases in the interest rate on reserves or to exogenous increases in bank deposits or equity. Sweeping generates greater responsiveness in lending to changes in loan rates or the interest rate on reserves and lower responsiveness to exogenous changes in reserve ratios or equity. Empirical analysis of an explicit condition that we derive relating sweeping to the interest rate on reserves suggests with an unchanged reserve requirement, the …

A Review Of Real Education By Charles Murray, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

It’s Elementary is a series of essays on topics in education and education policy. The main focus is on education finance in New York State, but general research findings in education and education policy issues in several other states are also discussed. John Yinger, Professor of Economics and Public Administration at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University is the author of most of these essays, although a few are written by or co-authored with other scholars.

Household Wealth And Heterogeneous Impacts Of A Market-Based Training Program: The Case Of Projoven In Peru, Jose Galdo, Miguel Jaramillo, Veronica S. Montalva, Sonia Moreau

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper analyzes the relationship between households' wealth and heterogeneous treatment impacts for a market-based training program that has benefited more than 40,000 disadvantaged individuals in Peru since 1996. We proxy long-run wealth by a linear index based on 21 household assets, and three main findings emerge. First, we find that voluntary choices among eligibles, rather than administrative choices, play a bigger role in explaining demographic disparities in program participation. Second, quantile treatment effects on the treated suggest important differences in program impacts at different quantiles of earnings, and strong differences in distributional impacts for men and women. Third, both …

Distribution Of Wealth And Interdependent Preferences, Andrew Grodner, Thomas J. Kniesner

Economics - All Scholarship

We examine the socially optimal wealth distribution in a two-person two-good model with heterogeneous workers and asymmetric social interactions where only one (social) individual derives positive or negative utility from the leisure of the other (non-social) individual. We show that the interdependence can effectively counter-act the need to transfer wealth to low-wage individuals and may require them to be poorer by all objective measures. We demonstrate that in the presence of social interactions it can be socially desirable to keep substantial wealth inequality.

The Incidence Of Tobacco Taxation: Evidence From Geographic Micro-Level Data, Andrew Hanson, Ryan S. Sullivan

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper uses a recent increase in the state of Wisconsin's tobacco tax as a natural experiment to measure the economic incidence of tobacco taxation. We estimate the economic incidence of tobacco taxation using micro level data on cigarette prices collected from retail locations in Wisconsin and states that share its border. We find that Wisconsin's $1.00 increase in tobacco tax was over-shifted to consumers; they pay the entire amount of the tax as well as a premium of between $0.08 and $0.17 per pack of cigarettes. We use geo-coded data to test if the incidence of the tobacco tax …

Social Interactions In Demand, Andrew Grodner, Thomas J. Kniesner

Economics - All Scholarship

We examine theoretically demand in a two-good economy where the demand of one good is influenced by either a spillover effect in the form of an externality from other consumers' choices and or a conformity effect representing a need for making similar choices as others. A positive spillover effect increases the demand for the good with interactions, and a conformity effect makes the demand curve pivot around the average market demand to make demand less price sensitive. The collateral implication is that spillover in consumption increases the associated derived demand for labor and conformity in consumption makes the associated derived …

Can Offshoring Reduce Unemployment?, Devashish Mitra, Priya Ranjan

Economics - All Scholarship

In this paper, in order to study the impact offshoring on sectoral and economywide rates of unemployment, we construct a two-sector, general-equilibrium model in which labor is mobile across the two sectors, and unemployment is caused by search frictions. We find that, contrary to general perception, wage increases and sectoral unemployment decreases due to offshoring. This result can be understood to arise from the productivity enhancing (cost reducing) effect of offshoring. If the search cost is identical in the two sectors, or is higher in the sector which experiences offshoring, the economywide rate of unemployment decreases. When we modify the …

Understanding Declining Mobility And Interhousehold Transfers Among East African Pastoralists, Marieke Huysentruyt, Christopher B. Barrett, John G. Mcpeak

Economics - All Scholarship

We model interhousehold transfers between nomadic livestock herders as the state-dependent consequence of individuals' strategic interdependence resulting from the existence of multiple, opposing externalities. A public good security externality among individuals sharing a social (e.g., ethnic) identity in a potentially hostile environment creates incentives to band together. Self-interested interhousehold wealth transfers from wealthier herders to poorer ones may emerge endogenously within a limited wealth space as a means to motivate accompanying migration by the recipient. The distributional reach and size of the transfer are limited, however, by a resource appropriation externality related to the use of common property grazing lands. …

Why A Property Tax Cap Is A Bad Idea For New York, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

It’s Elementary is a series of essays on topics in education and education policy. The main focus is on education finance in New York State, but general research findings in education and education policy issues in several other states are also discussed. John Yinger, Professor of Economics and Public Administration at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University is the author of most of these essays, although a few are written by or co-authored with other scholars.