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Economics Faculty Publications

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Articles 301 - 330 of 546

Full-Text Articles in Economics

U Should Separate From Fairview And Hook Up With Mayo, Louis D. Johnston Apr 2013

U Should Separate From Fairview And Hook Up With Mayo, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Sequestration, Deficit, Debt? Our Real Problem Is The Future ‘Fiscal Gap’, Louis D. Johnston Apr 2013

Sequestration, Deficit, Debt? Our Real Problem Is The Future ‘Fiscal Gap’, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Connecting Social Provisioning And Functional Finance In A Post-Keynesian – Institutional Analysis Of The Public Sector, Zdravka Todorova Apr 2013

Connecting Social Provisioning And Functional Finance In A Post-Keynesian – Institutional Analysis Of The Public Sector, Zdravka Todorova

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper establishes connections between the frameworks of social provisioning and functional finance, and discusses a post-Keynesian–Institutionalist theory of the public sector that emerges out of these linkages. The concept of social provisioning has emerged out of Institutional economics, and has been further developed by institutional and other heterodox economists. Its potential as a methodological foundation that connects various heterodox approaches has received some growing attention. Such discussions have not referred in an analytical manner to functional finance. On the other hand, the principles of functional finance have been elaborated and developed outside an explicit grounding in a social provisioning …


Pay In Nonprofits, Kevin F. Hallock Apr 2013

Pay In Nonprofits, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

In the US, April 21-April 27 is National Volunteer Week, a time to recognize all those who work without pay to support important missions or causes championed by nonprofits. Many of the issues that come up when designing pay systems in for-profits (strategy, internal equity, performance, motivation, fairness, transparency, etc.) are as important to consider in nonprofits as they are in for-profits. But some of the facts and issues differ. Using a sample of data from the 2000 US Census of Population about approximately 3 million people between the ages of 16 and 65 who worked full year and full …


Minnesota Needs An Economic Report To The Governor — Just Like The President Gets, Louis D. Johnston Mar 2013

Minnesota Needs An Economic Report To The Governor — Just Like The President Gets, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Narayana Kocherlakota’S Evolution As A Central Banker, Louis D. Johnston Mar 2013

Narayana Kocherlakota’S Evolution As A Central Banker, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Valuing Employee Stock Options, Kevin F. Hallock Mar 2013

Valuing Employee Stock Options, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

It helps to remember that employee options and market-traded options are quite different. The difference between them makes valuing employee options more complicated, but it also offers a lesson about how the employer's cost for a given piece of the total rewards package may not be the same as its value to a given employee. Organizations too often miss this and, as a result, can find themselves leaving money on the table. A stock option is the right to buy a share of stock at a specific price (called the strike or exercise price) at some point in the future. …


Raising Minimum Wage Seems Best Anti-Poverty Option, Given Political Realities, Louis D. Johnston Feb 2013

Raising Minimum Wage Seems Best Anti-Poverty Option, Given Political Realities, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Walker Vs. Dayton Smackdown: Which Governor Has The Better Economy?, Louis D. Johnston Feb 2013

Walker Vs. Dayton Smackdown: Which Governor Has The Better Economy?, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Pay And Relative Income Within Couples, Kevin F. Hallock Feb 2013

Pay And Relative Income Within Couples, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

In "U.S. Labor Market Challenges Over the Longer Term," labor economist David Autor shows that the fraction of young adults who are currently married plummeted, dropping by 30% to 70% depending on gender, education and race/ethnicity (paper prepared for the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 2010). At the same time, women's labor earnings have steadily increased. An interesting and provocative new working paper, "Gender Identity and Relative Income Within Households", by Marianne Bertrand, Emir Kamenica and Jessica Pan (working paper, November 2012), tries to determine how these two trends are related. One of the things Bertrand, Kamenica and Pan focus …


Evaluating The Economic Assumptions Of Dayton’S Budget, Louis D. Johnston Jan 2013

Evaluating The Economic Assumptions Of Dayton’S Budget, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Lessons To Learn From Dayton Brothers’ Fateful Decision In St. Paul, Louis D. Johnston Jan 2013

Lessons To Learn From Dayton Brothers’ Fateful Decision In St. Paul, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


The Effects Of College Education On Career Earnings In The Nba, George Langelett, Kuo-Liang Chang, Michael Haupert Jan 2013

The Effects Of College Education On Career Earnings In The Nba, George Langelett, Kuo-Liang Chang, Michael Haupert

Economics Faculty Publications

The purpose of our research is to investigate whether the high school basketball player is better off attending or forgoing his college career to enter the NBA directly out of high school. We measure "better off' by total salary earned in the first ten years of a player's NBA career. Using both OLS and a Heckit model, to control for possible sample selection bias, our results suggest that although college is an investment period for athletes, rational athletes do understand the opportunity cost of each year spent in college, with the most talented players forgoing their college education altogether.


Keeping The Doctor Away: Experimental Evidence On Investment In Preventative Health Products, Jennifer Meredith, Jonathan Robinson, Sarah Walker, Bruce Wydick Jan 2013

Keeping The Doctor Away: Experimental Evidence On Investment In Preventative Health Products, Jennifer Meredith, Jonathan Robinson, Sarah Walker, Bruce Wydick

Economics Faculty Publications

Household investment in preventative health products in developing countries is typically low even though the returns to such products are high. In this paper, we experimentally estimate demand curves for health products and test whether (1) information about health risk, (2) cash liquidity, (3) peer effects, and (4) intra-household differences in preferences affect demand. In our main experiment in Kenya involving children’s shoes - critical for preventing hookworm infection - price is by far the most important predictor of purchase. Providing liquidity and targeting women also increased demand. Information had no effect even though we find that genuine learning occurred. …


Does International Child Sponsorship Work? A Six-Country Study Of Impacts On Adult Life Outcomes, Bruce Wydick, Paul Glewwe, Laine Rutledge Jan 2013

Does International Child Sponsorship Work? A Six-Country Study Of Impacts On Adult Life Outcomes, Bruce Wydick, Paul Glewwe, Laine Rutledge

Economics Faculty Publications

Child sponsorship is a leading form of direct aid from wealthy country households to children in developing countries. Over 9 million children are supported through international sponsorship organizations. Using data from six countries, we estimate impacts on several outcomes from sponsorship through Compassion International, a leading child sponsorship organization. To identify program effects, we utilize an age-eligibility rule implemented when programs began in new villages. We find large, statistically significant impacts on years of schooling; primary, secondary, and tertiary school completion; and the probability and quality of employment. Early evidence suggests that these impacts are due, in part, to increases …


Rethinking The Connections Between Female Empowerment And Gender Bias In Child Births And Survival In Urban India, Sucharita Sinha Mukherjee Jan 2013

Rethinking The Connections Between Female Empowerment And Gender Bias In Child Births And Survival In Urban India, Sucharita Sinha Mukherjee

Economics Faculty Publications

Notwithstanding improvements in female work and educational achievements persistent and increasing female survival disadvantage is a feature of urban India’s demography. A temporal and cross sectional analysis of most recent available data from the Census of India while reaffirming the positive association between female work and the birth and survival of more female children, fails to reconfirm the oft emphasized positive connection between female education and increased survival of girl children. Relatively high levels of female education, by being indicative of household socioeconomic status may be associated with increased ability to discriminate especially in the presence of cultural biases resulting …


Private Philanthropy In Financing Public Universities: Fundraising Stochastic Frontier And Efficiency Evaluations, G. Thomas Sav Jan 2013

Private Philanthropy In Financing Public Universities: Fundraising Stochastic Frontier And Efficiency Evaluations, G. Thomas Sav

Economics Faculty Publications

This study provides stochastic frontier analyses of private philanthropy in financing public universities in the United States. Panel data estimates of private giving –fundraising production frontiers and inefficiency effects are provided for an aggregate of 353 universities and separately for research intensive, doctoral granting, and master level institutions over the 2006-09 academic years. Inefficiency effects are modeled as set of university specific covariates, including medical schools, hospitals, executive employment and a time trend to capture potential effects of the global financial crisis on university fundraising efficiency. Efficiency scores are estimated across university levels and indicate that mean efficiencies range from …


Four-Stage Dea Efficiency Evaluations: Financial Reforms In Public University Funding, G. Thomas Sav Jan 2013

Four-Stage Dea Efficiency Evaluations: Financial Reforms In Public University Funding, G. Thomas Sav

Economics Faculty Publications

Financial reforms in U.S. public higher education are well underway and are progressively replacing university enrollment based funding formulas with performance based models driven, in part, by graduation rates. Doing so, however, fails to account for the internal resource constraints and managerial efficiencies associated with production. Moreover, graduation rates are affected by external factors beyond the control of university decision-makers. This paper addresses these issues and uses a four-stage data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to evaluate university graduation rate performance. The four-stage DEA efficiencies correct for both environmental and statistical noise effects on university operations. Efficiency estimates control for the …


Social Reproduction In The Time Of Neoliberalization: The Role Of The Employment Guarantee In India, Sirisha C. Naidu Jan 2013

Social Reproduction In The Time Of Neoliberalization: The Role Of The Employment Guarantee In India, Sirisha C. Naidu

Economics Faculty Publications

Privatization and informalization of production, land fragmentation and the agrarian crisis in India has forced a significant fraction of rural households to underconsume and widened the income gap at a time of relatively high economic growth. Despite the significant role of the state in precipitating and intensifying this crisis, and in vindicating Polanyi’s notion of a double movement, the state has also invested in social schemes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). Seven years after this scheme was first implemented, there is growing evidence of a seemingly contradictory picture of the NREGS. This paper reviews current literature …


Economics As Applied Ethics: Value Judgements In Welfare Economics By Wilfred Beckerman (Book Review), Jonathan B. Wight Jan 2013

Economics As Applied Ethics: Value Judgements In Welfare Economics By Wilfred Beckerman (Book Review), Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

This is a well-written textbook geared to advanced undergraduate or graduate students of economics, many of whom are largely and regrettably innocent of the ethical problems inherent in conventional economic analysis. It compares with Daniel M. Hausman and Michael S. McPherson’s Economic analysis, moral philosophy, and public policy (2006) and Johan J. Graafland’s Economics, ethics, and the market: introduction and applications (2007). The book presupposes a fair amount of knowledge in both economics and ethics (it does not intend to be a primer in either). The author is professor emeritus at Balliol College, Oxford and honorary visiting professor of economics …


Presidential Pay, Kevin F. Hallock Jan 2013

Presidential Pay, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Last month, the author wrote about athletes' pay relative to CEOs' pay and he invoked Babe Ruth's famous line justifying being paid more than Pres Herbert Hoover because Ruth had had "a better year." This month, Pres Barack Obama will be sworn in for a second term. His annual salary will be $400,000. Of course, compensation is about a lot more than wages and salaries in most jobs, and it is no different for the president of the US. Consider that the president enjoys a $50,000 "expense allowance" that is not taxed. There are also rewards after leaving office. Again, …


Data Improvement And Labor Economics, Kevin F. Hallock Jan 2013

Data Improvement And Labor Economics, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

The expansion of available data for research has transformed empirical labor economics over the past generation. This paper briefly highlights some of the changes and describes a few examples of papers that illustrate the advances. It also documents the changing ways data have been used in the Journal of Labor Economics over the past 30 years, including a trend toward a higher fraction of papers using any data and, among those papers using any data, a higher fraction using nonpublic data, a higher fraction using international data, and more frequent use of multiple data sources. Finally, this paper describes work …


The Choice Of Technology And Rural-Urban Migration In Economic Development, Haiwen Zhou Jan 2013

The Choice Of Technology And Rural-Urban Migration In Economic Development, Haiwen Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper studies a general equilibrium model of rural-urban migration in which manufacturing firms engage in oligopolistic competition and choose increasing returns technologies to maximize profits. Urban residents incur commuting costs to work in the Central Business District. Surprisingly a change in the size of the population or an increase in the exogenously given wage rate will not affect a manufacturing firm’s choice of technology. This helps to explain why firms in developing countries may not adopt labor intensive technologies even under abundant labor supply. An increase in the number of manufacturing firms increases both the employment rate and the …


Economic Theory Gives Us Two 'Weapons' To Combat Gun Violence, Louis D. Johnston Dec 2012

Economic Theory Gives Us Two 'Weapons' To Combat Gun Violence, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Top Athlete Pay, Kevin F. Hallock Dec 2012

Top Athlete Pay, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

The US has a history of discussing the pay of the relatively well-paid. This is partly because pay levels of some are revealed publicly (e.g., CEOs of publicly traded companies). Americans are also characterized as being celebrity-obsessed. So discussing the pay of superstars seems inevitable. However, they do not have quality data on the compensation of the relatively highly paid in many organizations and professions. When the author speaks about compensation in front of large groups, someone (and in many cases, many people) gets incensed over what they term "outrageous" or "egregious" levels of executive compensation. Athletes are rarely mentioned. …


The Economics Of Black Friday And Buy Nothing Day, Louis D. Johnston Nov 2012

The Economics Of Black Friday And Buy Nothing Day, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Why Do We Have A State Budget Mess? Think Ventura Years And Baby Boomers, Louis D. Johnston Nov 2012

Why Do We Have A State Budget Mess? Think Ventura Years And Baby Boomers, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Economic Effects Of The Minimum Wage, Kevin F. Hallock Nov 2012

Economic Effects Of The Minimum Wage, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

The US minimum wage, at almost 75 years old, remains the topic of many academic studies and much policy debate despite the fact that only about 5% of hourly employees are currently paid at or below the federal minimum. There are many possible and interesting economic effects of the minimum wage. The issue that has received by far the most attention is whether increasing the minimum wage has a negative effect on employment, and if so, for whom and by how much. Economists first approach this question through the basic theory of a perfectly competitive labor market where all workers …


Why Not Some Fiscal Therapy And Go Over The Cliff?, Louis D. Johnston Oct 2012

Why Not Some Fiscal Therapy And Go Over The Cliff?, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.


Long Memory Regressors And Predictive Regressions: A Two-Stage Rebalancing Approach, Alex Maynard, Aaron Smallwood, Mark E. Wohar Oct 2012

Long Memory Regressors And Predictive Regressions: A Two-Stage Rebalancing Approach, Alex Maynard, Aaron Smallwood, Mark E. Wohar

Economics Faculty Publications

Predictability tests with long memory regressors may entail both size distortion and incompatibility between the orders of integration of the dependent and independent variables. Addressing both problems simultaneously, this paper proposes a two-step procedure that rebalances the predictive regression by fractionally differencing the predictor based on a first-stage estimation of the memory parameter. Extensive simulations indicate that our procedure has good size, is robust to estimation error in the first stage, and can yield improved power over cases in which an integer order is assumed for the regressor. We also extend our approach beyond the standard predictive regression context to …