Economics Commons^™

The Impact Of Class Size On Teacher Retention, 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.

A Monte Carlo Study Of Efficiency Estimates From Frontier Models, William C. Horrace, Seth Richards

Economics - All Scholarship

Parametric stochastic frontier models yield firm-level conditional distributions of inefficiency that are truncated normal. Given these distributions, how should one assess and rank firm-level efficiency? This study compares the techniques of estimating a) the conditional mean of inefficiency and b) probabilities that firms are most or least efficient. Monte Carlo experiments suggest that the efficiency probabilities are more reliable in terms of mean absolute percent error when inefficiency has large variation across firms. Along the way we tackle some interesting problems associated with simulating and assessing estimator performance in the stochastic frontier environment.

The Impact Of School-District Consolidation On Property Values, 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.

Informality And Productivity In The Labor Market: Peru 1986 - 2001, Alberto Chong, Jose Galdo, Jaime Saavedra-Chanduvi

Economics - All Scholarship

Peru has one of the highest informality rates in Latin America, with almost 60 percent of the urban labor force working at the margins of labor market legislation or in microenterprises that lack basic labor market standards (Marcouiller, Ruiz de Castilla, and Woodruff, 1997). This paper identifies two factors that can explain the variation in informality rates in the 1990s. First, Peru experienced a steady increase in employment allocation in traditionally “informal” sectors—in particular, retail trade and transport. Second, there was a sharp increase in nonwage labor costs, despite a reduction in the average productivity of the economy. In addition, …

Teacher Attrition In Upstate 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.

Understanding Declining Mobility And Interhousehold Transfers Among East African Pasoralists, 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. …

Middle Class Star, 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.

Offshoring And Unemployment, Devashish Mitra, Priya Ranjan

Economics - All Scholarship

In this paper, in order to study the impact of 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 even if the search cost is higher in the sector which experiences offshoring, the economywide …

Indian Manufacturing: A Slow Sector In A Rapidly Growing Economy, Devashish Mitra, Beyza P. Ural

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper investigates the determinants of productivity in Indian manufacturing industries during the period 1988-2000. Using two-digit industry level data for the Indian states, we find evidence of imperfect interindustry and interstate labor mobility as well as misallocation of resources across industries and states. Trade liberalization increases productivity in all industries across all states, and productivity is higher in the less protected industries. These effects of protection and trade liberalization are more pronounced in states that have relatively more flexible labor markets. Similar effects are also found in the case of employment, capital stock and investment. Furthermore, labor market flexibility, …

Earnings Effects Of Sexual Orientation Revisited: Evidence From The Cps, Clay Rehrig

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Objective. To measure the wage premium or penalty associated with sexual orientation of partnered lesbians and gays and to compare these estimates with those produced using smaller sample sizes and alternative definitions of homosexuality.

Data Source and Sampling Methods. Data are drawn from the Current Population Survey, produced by the U.S. Census Bureau. Extracting household information from the out-going March rotation provides a sample of 37,000 households interviewed in the years 1995 and 2000. Only workers living with a partner are included in the analysis.

Study Design. Following the methodology used by Black et al. (2003), this study uses a …

Temporary Shocks And Offshoring: The Role Of External Economies And Firm Heterogeneity, Devashish Mitra, Priya Ranjan

Economics - All Scholarship

We construct a model of offshoring with externalities and firm heterogeneity. Due to the presence of externalities, temporary shocks like the Y2K problem can have permanent effects, i.e., they can permanently raise the extent of offshoring in an industry. Also, the initial advantage of a country as a potential host for outsourcing activities can create a lock in effect, whereby late movers have a comparative disadvantage. Furthermore, the existence of firm heterogeneity along with externalities can help explain the dynamic process of offshoring, where the most productive firms offshore first and the others follow later. Finally, we work out some …

Production Functions And Cost Functions For Public Education, 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.

Secondary Markets, Risk, And Access To Credit Evidence From The Mortgage Market, Stuart S. Rosenthal, Stuart A. Gabriel

Economics - All Scholarship

Secondary markets for credit are widely believed to improve efficiency and increase access to credit. In part, this is because of their greater ability to manage risk. However, the degree to which secondary markets expand access to credit is virtually unknown. Using the mortgage market as an example, we begin to fill that gap. Our conceptual model suggests that secondary credit markets have potentially ambiguous effects on interest rates, but unambiguous positive effects on the number of loans issued. We focus our empirical analysis on the latter using 1992-2004 HMDA files for conventional, conforming, home purchase loans in conjunction with …

April 2007, Syracuse Department Of Economics

Economics - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Education Finance In California Part 3: Lessons, 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.

New York Camp Econometrics Ii Program, Center For Policy Research

Camp Econometrics-Programs

No abstract provided.

Education Finance In California Part 2: The Parcel Tax, 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.

Education Finance In California Part 1: Is California Unique?, 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.

Inequality And The Instability Of Polity And Policy, Pushan Dutt, Devashish Mitra

Economics - All Scholarship

In this paper, we create alternative measures of political instability, which capture movements only from dictatorship to democracy and vice versa (consistent with the recent theoretical work by Acemoglu and Robinson) but, unlike older, well known measures do not capture government changes that preserve the democratic or dictatorial structure of the country. Our empirical work clearly shows that inequality is positively correlated with our measures of political instability as well as with a well-known measure (used by Alesina and Perotti), but the impact of inequality on the latter is only through components of political instability as captured in our measures. …

Socio-Economics - An Overview, Robert Ashford

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Socio-Economics is a multi-disciplinary, holistic approach to economics that has gained growing acceptance in legal education and that is helpful in advocating economics justice. Socio-economics approaches economic understanding much as Adam Smith did (before there were separate disciplines) with a foundation based on natural and moral philosophy. Nevertheless, it explicitly acknowledges the powerful and pervasive influence of the neoclassical paradigm on contemporary thought. Recognizing that people first adopt paradigms of thought and then perform their inductive, deductive, and empirical analyses, socio-economists seek to examine the assumptions of the neoclassical paradigm, develop a rigorous understanding of its limitations, improve upon its …

Binary Economics: The Economic Theory That Gave Rise To Esops, Robert Ashford

College of Law - Faculty Scholarship

Many people know about Employee Stock Ownership Plans (ESOPs) which, along with profit-sharing and pension plans, are treated as deferred compensation plans under Section 401 and related sections of the Internal Revenue Code. ESOPs have been established by thousands of American corporations, including some of the largest, and cover millions of employees. There is a national trade association (The ESOP Association), that is now celebrating its 50th year in existence, and other organizations established to support employee ownership, including the Ohio Center for Employee Ownership that first published this article in its publication entitled Owners At Work (2006/2007) Most people …

Health Care And The Looming Fiscal Crisis In The United States, Michael J. Wasylenko

Economics - All Scholarship

The United States spends a sixth of its GDP on health care. The costs of Medicare and Medicaid have grown along with the cost of health care in general in the United States. The paper addresses the large budget gap that will emerge in Medicare and Medicaid in the decades to come. It describes program financing and some of their main features and explains the projections of the U.S. Congressional Budget Office as well as those of the U.S. appointed Board of Trustees of Social Security, Federal Hospital Insurance and Federal Supplementary Medical Insurance Trust Funds. Finally, the article discusses …

Growth And Convergence: A Profile Of Distribution Dynamics And Mobility, Esfandiar Maasoumi, Jeff Racine, Thanasis Stengos

Economics - All Scholarship

In this paper we focus primarily on the dynamic evolution of the world distribution of growth rates in per capita GDP. We propose new concepts and measures of “convergence,” or “divergence ” that are based on entropy distances and dominance relations between groups of countries over time. We update the sample period to include the most recent decade of data available, and we offer traditional parametric and new nonparametric estimates of the most widely used growth regressions for two important subgroups of countries, OECD and non-OECD. Traditional parametric models are rejected by the data, however, using robust nonparametric methods we …

Survive Then Thrive: Talent, Research Motivation, And Completing The Economics Ph.D., Wayne A. Grove, Donald H. Dutkowsky, Andrew Grodner

Economics - All Scholarship

This study investigates the completion of the Ph.D. in Economics. We use ex ante information, based solely upon reviewing a set of individual applications from former doctoral students. Estimation for determining success is done by logit, multinomial logit, and generalized ordered logit. We find that students need different skills and attributes to succeed at each distinct and sequential stage of the doctoral program. Significant determinants for passing the comprehensive exams include high GRE verbal and quantitative scores, a Masters degree, and a prior focus on economics. Research motivation and math preparation play significant roles in completing the dissertation, but having …

A Monte Carlo Study For Pure And Pretest Estimators Of A Panel Data Model With Spatially Auto Correlated Disturbances, Badi H. Baltagi, Peter Egger, Michael Pfaffermayr

Center for Policy Research

This paper examines the consequences of model misspecification using a panel data model with spatially auto correlated disturbances. The performance of several maximum likelihood estimators assuming different specifications for this model are compared using Monte Carlo experiments. These include (i) MLE of a random effects model that ignore the spatial correlation; (ii) MLE described in Anselin (1988) which assumes that the individual effects are not spatially auto correlated; (iii) MLE described in Kapoor et al. (2006) which assumes that both the individual effects and the remainder error are governed by the same spatial autocorrelation; (iv) MLE described in Baltagi et …

The Cfe Decision: A Cautionary Tale About The Use Of Numbers, 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.

A Monte Carlo Study Of Efficiency Estimates From Frontier Models, William Clinton Horrace, Seth O. Richards

Center for Policy Research

Parametric stochastic frontier models yield firm-level conditional distributions of inefficiency that are truncated normal. Given these distributions, how should one assess and rank firm-level efficiency? This study compares the techniques of estimated (a) the conditional means of inefficiency and (b) probabilities that firms are most or least efficient. Monte Carlo experiments suggest that the efficiency probabilities are more reliable in terms of mean absolute percent error when inefficiency has large variation across firms. Along the way we tackle some interesting problems associated with simulating and assessing estimator performance in the stochastic frontier environment.

Copula-Based Tests For Cross-Sectional Independence In Panel Models, Chihwa Kao, Giovanni Urga

Center for Policy Research

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Testing For Instability In Factor Structure Of Yield Curves, Dennis Philip, Chihwa Kao, Giovanni Urga

Center for Policy Research

A widely relied upon but a formally untested consideration is the issue of stability in actors underlying the term structure of interest rates. In testing for stability, practitioners as well as academics have employed ad hoc techniques such as splitting the sample into a few sub-periods and determining whether the factor loadings have appeared to be similar over all sub-periods. Various authors have found mixed evidence on stability in the actors. In this paper we develop a formal testing procedure to evaluate the factor structure stability of the US zero coupon yield term structure. We find the factor structure of …

Estimating Regional Trade Agreement Effects On Fdi In An Interdependent World, Badi H. Baltagi, Peter Egger, Michael Pfaffermayr

Center for Policy Research

Recent research on trade and multinationals highlights a novel issue with multinational firms. In particular, their integration strategies are complex and the degree of vertical integration varies in a multilateral world with many possible locations of activity. Multinationals may choose some plants to serve consumers locally only, whereas others engage in trade. Overall, this may explain the fact that a high percentage of world trade is actually controlled by multinational firms, although most of the foreign direct investment (FDI) occurs within the block of developed countries. The most important regional trade agreements (RTAs) are signed between members of the very …