Economics Commons^™

Covid-19 And The Us Safety Net, Robert A. Moffitt, James P. Ziliak

Economics Faculty Publications

We examine trends in employment, earnings and incomes over the last two decades in the United States, and how the safety net has responded to changing fortunes, including the shutdown of the economy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The US safety net is a patchwork of different programmes providing in-kind as well as cash benefits, and it had many holes prior to the pandemic. In addition, few of the programmes are designed explicitly as automatic stabilisers. We show that the safety net response to employment losses in the COVID-19 pandemic largely consists only of increased support from unemployment insurance …

Drug-Overdose Death Rates: The Economic Misery Explanation And Its Alternatives, Barbara Blake Gonzalez, Richard Cebula, James V. Koch

Economics Faculty Publications

‘Deaths of despair’ is the most commonly cited explanation for the 151% increase in drug-overdose deaths that occurred in the USA between 2010 and 2018. We use panel data describing 84 Virginia cities and counties to assess the validity of the deaths of despair hypothesis and alternate explanations that focus on disability rates, travel time to work, urban vs. rural location, educational attainment, racial and ethnic characteristics, the influence of other health conditions such as obesity, and supply-side factors that include pill availability and pharmacy market shares. We find deaths of despair to be only a partial explanation for the …

The Full Impact Of The Affordable Care Act On Political Participation, Charles J. Courtemanche, James Marton, Aaron Yelowitz

Economics Faculty Publications

This article examines the impact of both the Medicaid expansion and the private insurance-related components of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) on voter turnout and registration. We employ a difference-in-difference-in-differences identification strategy exploiting variation over time, state Medicaid expansion status, and within-state local area pre-ACA uninsured rates. Using data between 2006 and 2016 from the November Current Population Survey and the Census Bureau's Small Area Health Insurance Estimates, our results suggest little effect of the ACA on voter turnout or registration.

How Often Does Active Learning Actually Occur? Perception Versus Reality, Brandon J. Sheridan, Ben O. Smith

Economics Faculty Publications

I. Measuring Active and Passive Learning
There is now a robust literature touting the benefits of various active learning techniques relative to passive learning pedagogy such as lecturing (e.g., Freeman et al. 2014, Emerson and English 2016, Swoboda and Feiler 2016, Caviglia-Harris 2016). However, recent studies suggest that lecturing is still the dominant pedagogical choice in economics, even though most instructors believe that active learning methods are superior (Goffe and Kauper 2014, Watts and Schaur 2011). A limitation of these studies is that estimates of passive and active learning are based on instructors’ subjective, self-reported data.

Humanae Vitae At Fifty Years And The Economics Of The Pill, Andrew Beauchamp

Economics Faculty Publications

This article examines how economic analysis of the social consequences of the birth control pill dovetail with the predictions and pronouncements of Roman Catholic social teaching. Direct, equilibrium, and indirect consequences each, in turn, confirm that the advent of the pill has coincided with increased rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births alongside increased participation of women in the formal labor market. These findings lead to the conclusion that Pope Paul VI’s Humanae Vitae and other papal teachings on sex, marriage, and the family deserve to be revisited and reevaluated in light of this history.

Congenital Chagas Disease In The United States: The Effect Of Commercially Priced Benznidazole On Costs And Benefits Of Maternal Screening, Victoria Perez-Zetune, Stephanie R. Bialek, Susan P. Montgomery, Eileen Stillwaggon

Economics Faculty Publications

Chagas disease, caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, is transmitted by insect vectors, and through transfusions, transplants, insect feces in food, and mother to child during gestation. An estimated 30% of infected persons will develop lifelong, potentially fatal cardiac or digestive complications. Treatment of infants with benznidazole is highly efficacious in eliminating infection. This work evaluates the costs of maternal screening and infant testing and treatment for Chagas disease in the United States, including the cost of commercially available benznidazole. We compare costs of testing and treatment for mothers and infants with the lifetime societal costs without testing and consequent morbidity and …

Modern Money Theory (Mmt): A Critical Assessment And Recommendation From A Leftist-Keynesian And Marxian Perspective, Hee-Young Shin

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper critically assesses the main contribution made by Modern Money Theory(MMT) and evaluates the validity of its policy proposal from a leftist-Keynesian and Marxian perspective. The paper argues that there is no logical consistency between MMTers' analysis of the nature of modern fiat monetary system and their government's job guarantee proposal. It is also argued that the proponents of MMT often fail to pay due attention to various real and financial constraints imposed upon many developing economies nowadays, while exaggerating the universal applicability of the sovereign state's money creation process. In addition, MMTers tend to ignore the fundamental class …

Fast Poisson Estimation With High-Dimensional Fixed Effects, Sergio Correia, Paulo Guimarães, Thomas Zylkin

Economics Faculty Publications

In this paper we present ppmlhdfe, a new Stata command for estimation of (pseudo) Poisson regression models with multiple high-dimensional fixed effects (HDFE). Estimation is implemented using a modified version of the iteratively reweighted least-squares (IRLS) algorithm that allows for fast estimation in the presence of HDFE. Because the code is built around the reghdfe package, it has similar syntax, supports many of the same functionalities, and benefits from reghdfe’s fast convergence properties for computing high-dimensional least squares problems. Performance is further enhanced by some new techniques we introduce for accelerating HDFE-IRLS estimation specifically ppmlhdfe also implements a novel and …

Does Starting School Before Labor Day Affect High School Retention And Graduation: Evidence From Virginia's Kings Dominion Law, Timothy M. Komarek, Jay K. Walker

Economics Faculty Publications

Several states have required K-12 public schools to start after Labor Day in an effort to aid the tourism and hospitality industry. However, little is known about how these policies impact educational outcomes. We examine the impact of Virginia's post-Labor Day school start law on high school retention and graduation rates. We use a difference-in-differences model to exploit exogenous variation in school division start dates. Our results show small differences of up to three weeks have little effect on high school dropout and graduation rates. Our findings inform the debate on post-Labor Day school start laws and compulsory attendance age …

Trouble In The Tails? What We Know About Earnings Nonresponse 30 Years After Lillard, Smith, And Welch, Christopher R. Bollinger, Barry T. Hirsch, Charles M. Hokayem, James P. Ziliak

Economics Faculty Publications

Earnings nonresponse in household surveys is widespread, yet there is limited knowledge of how nonresponse biases earnings measures. We examine the consequences of nonresponse on earnings gaps and inequality using Current Population Survey individual records linked to administrative earnings data. The common assumption that earnings are missing at random is rejected. Nonresponse across the earnings distribution is U-shaped, highest in the left and right tails. Inequality measures differ between household and administrative data due in part to nonresponse. Nonresponse biases earnings differentials by race, gender, and education, particularly in the tails. Flexible copula-based models can account for nonrandom nonresponse.

Chinese Household Saving And Dependent Children: Theory And Evidence, Steven Lugauer, Jinlan Ni, Zhichao Yin

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper examines the impact of family size on household saving. We first study a theoretical life-cycle model that includes finite lifetimes and saving for retirement and in which parents care about the consumption by their dependent children. The model implies a negative relationship between the number of dependent children in the family and the household saving rate. Then, we test the model's implications using new survey data on household finances in China. We use the differential enforcement of the one-child policy across counties to address the possible endogeneity between household saving and fertility decisions in a two-stage least squares …

Revisions To Pce Inflation Measures: Implications For Monetary Policy, Dean Croushore

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper examines the characteristics of the revisions to the inflation rate as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index both including and excluding food and energy prices. These data series play a major role in the Federal Reserve's analysis of inflation. We examine the magnitude and patterns of revisions to both PCE inflation rates. We can forecast data revisions in real time from the initial release to the annual revision released in the following year. Policymakers should account for this predictability in setting monetary policy.

The Cost-Effectiveness Of Neonatal Versus Prenatal Screening For Congenital Toxoplasmosis, Christine Binquet, Catherine Lejeune, Valérie Seror, François Peyron, Anne-Claire Bertaux, Olivier Scemama, Catherine Quantin, Sophie Béjean, Eileen Stillwaggon, Martine Wallon

Economics Faculty Publications

Congenital Toxoplasmosis (CT) can have severe consequences. France, Austria, and Slovenia have prenatal screening programs whereas some other countries are considering universal screening to reduce congenital transmission and severity of infection in children. The efficiency of such programs is debated increasingly as seroprevalence among pregnant women and incidence of congenital toxoplasmosis show a steady decrease. In addition, uncertainty remains regarding the effectiveness of pre- and postnatal treatments.

Subnational Home Market Bias In Vietnam: Evidence From Enterprise‐Level Data, Catherine Y. Co, Thu Kim Nguyen, Que Nguyet Tran, Tung Nhu Nguyen

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper contributes to the home (market) bias literature where administrative or political borders limit trade across borders. Home bias is well documented at the national and subnational level. To sort out macro (e.g., location characteristics) and micro (e.g., enterprise characteristics) factors behind home bias, we use small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) data from Vietnam. Using the fractional multinomial logit model, we find that the proportion of SME sales outside of their home markets is positively associated with enterprise size, age, number of business association memberships and the distance of SMEs' most important supplier. In contrast, the proportion of SME …

Prevention And Mitigation Of Congenital Toxoplasmosis: Economic Costs And Benefits In Diverse Settings, Branko Bobić, Isabelle Villena, Eileen Stillwaggon

Economics Faculty Publications

Congenital toxoplasmosis (CT), the result of a primary infection of pregnant women with Toxoplasma gondii which was transmitted to the fetus, may result in mild to deep injuries occurring in the newborn or later in its development or in adolescence. The visual and cognitive impairment that can result imposes substantial economic costs on the individual and society. Numerous observational studies favor the conclusion that, with preventive measures currently available, it is possible to reduce the incidence of infections in pregnant women, the incidence of fetal infection by preventing transplacental transmission, and the gravity of injury in infected newborns. Treatment of …

An Economic Growth Analysis Of Native American Reservations In California, Mahsa Ashabi

Economics Faculty Publications

A history of institutional oppression and genocide has shaped Native American communities across the United States today, reflected in large disparities of socioeconomic outcomes and productivity. Due to a lack of comprehensive data and macroeconomic research, alternative forms of spatial data and theories regarding human settlement develop a lens of understanding of this stagnation.In our efforts to better understand growth on Native American reservations, we utilize nighttime lights data to proxy for economic output in these geographic areas, measuring the settlement characteristics of reservations themselves and against surrounding U.S. regions. Through a series of log-log regressions that focus on Zipf’s …

March Madness: Ncaa Tournament Participation And College Alcohol Use, Dustin R. White, Benjamin W. Cowan, Jadrian J. Wooten

Economics Faculty Publications

While athletic success may improve the visibility of a university to prospective students and thereby benefit the school, it may also increase risky behavior in the current student body. Using the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study, we find that a school's participation in the NCAA Basketball Tournament is associated with a 47% increase in binge drinking by male students at that school. Additionally, we find evidence that drunk driving increases by 5% among all students during the tournament. (JEL I12, I23, Z28)

The Border Effects Of Domestic Trade In Transitional China: Local Governments’ Preference And Protectionism, Yongliang Zhao, Jinlan Ni

Economics Faculty Publications

Following a two-region border effect model with consumption preference of local governments, this article examines the segmentation of the Chinese domestic market as well as its determinants. Through empirical tests, we find that the average border effect of domestic trade among provinces in China showed an upward trend from 1997–2002 and 2002–2010. The significant difference of border effects between western and eastern areas of China indicate more regional trade barriers in the western areas than in the eastern areas. In addition, compared to agricultural products, there are less trade barriers on industrial products. This partially verifies that there is more …

The Three-Year Impact Of The Affordable Care Act On Disparities In Insurance Coverage, Charles J. Courtemanche, James Marton, Benjamin Ukert, Aaron Yelowitz, Daniela Zapata, Ishtiaque Fazlul

Economics Faculty Publications

Objective
To estimate the impact of the major components of the ACA (Medicaid expansion, subsidized Marketplace plans, and insurance market reforms) on disparities in insurance coverage after three years.

Data Source
The 2011-2016 waves of the American Community Survey (ACS), with the sample restricted to nonelderly adults.

Design
We estimate a difference-in-difference-in-differences model to separately identify the effects of the nationwide and Medicaid expansion portions of the ACA using the methodology developed in the recent ACA literature. The differences come from time, state Medicaid expansion status, and local area pre-ACA uninsured rates. In order to focus on access disparities, we …

Maternal Work Hours And Childhood Obesity: Evidence Using Instrumental Variables Related To Sibling School Eligibility, Charles J. Courtemanche, Rusty Tchernis, Xilin Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

This study exploits plausibly exogenous variation derived from the youngest sibling’s school eligibility to estimate the effects of maternal work on the weight outcomes of older children. We first show that mothers’ work hours increase gradually along both the extensive and intensive margins as the age of the youngest child rises, whereas mothers’ spouses’ work hours do not appear to be responsive. We develop an instrumental-variables model that shows that mothers’ work hours lead to larger increases in children’s body mass index z-scores and probabilities of being overweight/obese than those identified in previous studies. Subsample analyses find that the …

Antecedents To The Crisis: Mandeville, Smith, And Keynes, Jonathan B. Wight

Economics Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to present the methods of teaching about the global financial crisis (GFC) from a social economic perspective. Using primary texts from the history of economic thought, the moral underpinnings for collective social action are examined in times of economic depression. The deregulation of financial markets raises two questions: to what extent is deregulation the result of a misunderstanding about human nature and the behavioral lessons of social economics; and to what extend does deregulation ignore the moral lessons of Adam Smith’s invisible hand?

50 Years Of Economic Instruction In The Journal Of Economic Education, Gail M. Hoyt, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick

Economics Faculty Publications

With 2019 marking the fiftieth year of publication of the Journal of Economic Education (JEE), it seems fitting to examine the evolution of economic instruction as portrayed in the Journal. Born of the American Economic Association (AEA), and first edited by members of the AEA’s Committee on Economic Education (Saunders 2012), it is not surprising that the Journal’s focus as chronicler, proponent, and outlet for economic education activity reflects the educational component of the American Economic Association’s mission. The creation of the Journal signaled a self-awareness in the discipline that we needed to be more deliberate in …

Did Dr-Cafta Affect The Exports Of The Dominican Republic To The United States?, Maria Ivanova Reyes Peguero, Asger V. Hansen

Economics Faculty Publications

This article evaluates the impact the Dominican Republic and Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA) had on the exports of the Dominican Republic (DR) to the United States. We estimate a gravity model for the DR exports to the 109 trade partners of the country from 1990 to 2014. This model quantifies the effect of the DR-CAFTA since 2007, when the agreement was ratified, and finds that the DR-CAFTA negatively affected DR exports to the US. We conduct further analysis of factors that could explain the decline in exports, in spite of the ratification of the agreement. We find that …

Teaching Courses In Macroeconomics And Monetary Policy With Bloomberg Analytics, Dean D. Croushore, Hossein S. Kazemi

Economics Faculty Publications

In this article, the authors illustrate the use of Bloomberg for analyzing topics in macroeconomics and monetary policy in economics and finance courses. The hands-on experience that students gain from such a course has many benefits, including deeper learning and clearer understanding of data. The authors describe goals and learning objectives, then compare Bloomberg with Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED). In addition, they provide examples of how to use Bloomberg in the classroom, describe how to have students perform sector analysis, show how Bloomberg tools are useful for analyzing monetary policy, discuss how to use Bloomberg to analyze the financial …

Setting An Agenda For The Future, Sam Allgood, Kimmarie Mcgoldrick

Economics Faculty Publications

Anniversaries are a time for reflection and planning for the future. The fiftieth year of the Journal of Economic Education motivated us to invite those who have been intimately involved with the Journal to provide reflections, which appear within this symposium. In addition to providing a wealth of information about the past, they set the stage for initiatives that support the path forward.

Currency Unions And Trade: A Ppml Re-Assessment With High-Dimensional Fixed Effects, Mario Larch, Joschka Wanner, Yoto V. Yotov, Thomas Zylkin

Economics Faculty Publications

Recent work on the effects of currency unions (CUs) on trade stresses the importance of using many countries and years in order to obtain reliable estimates. However, for large samples, computational issues associated with the three-way (exporter-time, importer-time, and country-pair) fixed effects currently recommended in the gravity literature have heretofore limited the choice of estimator, leaving an important methodological gap. To address this gap, we introduce an iterative Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimation procedure that facilitates the inclusion of these fixed effects for large data sets and also allows for correlated errors across countries and time. When applied to a …

On The Widely Differing Effects Of Free Trade Agreements: Lessons From Twenty Years Of Trade Integration, Scott L. Baier, Yoto V. Yotov, Thomas Zylkin

Economics Faculty Publications

We develop a novel two stage methodology that allows us to study the empirical determinants of the ex post effects of past free trade agreements (FTAs) as well as obtain ex ante predictions for the effects of future FTAs. We first identify 908 unique estimates of the effects of FTAs on different trading pairs for the years 1986-2006. We then employ these estimates as our dependent variable in a “second stage” analysis characterizing the heterogeneity in these effects. Interestingly, most of this heterogeneity (∼ 2/3) occurs within FTAs (rather than across different FTAs), with asymmetric effects within pairs (on exports …

Improving Student Performance Through Loss Aversion, Ben O. Smith, Rebekah Shrader, Dustin R. White, Jadrian J. Wooten, Steve Nath, Michael O'Hara, Nan Xu, Robert Rosenman

Economics Faculty Publications

Framing an outcome as a loss causes individuals to expend extra effort to avoid that outcome (Tversky & Kahneman, 1991). Since classroom performance is a function of student effort in search of a higher grade, we seek to use loss aversion to encourage student effort. This field quasi-experiment endows students with all of the points in the course upfront, then deducts points for each error throughout the semester. Exploiting two course sequences in the business school of a Midwestern university, a control for domain-specific knowledge, this study examines the impact of loss aversion when controlling for the student’s knowledge in …

Teaching International Microenterprise Development: An Interdisciplinary Experiential Learning Approach, Catherine Y. Co, Jonna L. Holland

Economics Faculty Publications

In this article, the authors describe the core elements of an integrative economics-marketing course on international microenterprise development. The course covers issues related to poverty, market approaches to poverty alleviation, various methods to elicit willingness to pay, market segmentation, market research techniques, fair trade, and other topics. Students apply concepts and methods learned to a live case study. Assignments and in-class activities are designed to turn the handicraft work of four groups of ethnic minority women in a mountainous region of Vietnam into a viable and sustainable microenterprise.

Financial Education And Financial Literacy By Income And Education Groups, Jamie Wagner

Economics Faculty Publications

This study examines associations between financial education and financial literacy among people with different levels of education and income using a large, national data set, the 2015 National Financial Capability Study. This study estimates whether financial education in high school, college, or through an employer, is associated with a person 's financial literacy score. Results show that people who received any financial education are likely to have higher financial literacy scores compared to those without financial education. Financial education has larger predicted probabilities for those with lower education and income, suggesting that financial education is especially important for this demographic …