Economics Commons^™

Estimated Age Effects In Baseball, Ray C. Fair

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Age effects in baseball are estimated in this paper using a nonlinear fixed-effects regression. The sample consists of all players who have played 10 or more “full-time” ’ years in the major leagues between 1921 and 2004. Quadratic improvement is assumed up to a peak-performance age, which is estimated, and then quadratic decline after that, where the two quadratics need not be the same. Each player has his own constant term. The results show that aging effects are larger for pitchers than for batters and larger for baseball than for track and field, running, and swimming events and for chess. …

Changes In Student Attitudes Toward The Market System And The Introductory Microeconomics Course, Charles Breeden, Noreen Lephardt

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

House Prices In The Measurement Of Inflation: An Application Using Irish Data, Róisín O'Sullivan

Economics: Faculty Publications

This paper illustrates the impact on Irish inflation of including a house-price series with the current components of the harmonised index of consumer prices (HICP). We construct a dynamic factor index of inflation that weights the individual price series according to the strength of their signal about the common trend in prices. As the relatively noisy house-price series attracts a weight of only 3 per cent in the index, the inclusion of house prices in this way does not hugely alter the recent pattern of inflation for Ireland, despite house prices exhibiting much stronger growth on average than the current …

Gentrification And Neighborhood Housing Cycles: Will America's Future Downtowns Be Rich?, Jan K. Brueckner, Stuart S. Rosenthal

Economics - All Scholarship

This paper identifies a new factor, the age of the housing stock, that affects where high- and low-income neighborhoods are located in U.S. cities. High-income households, driven by a high demand for housing services, will tend to locate in areas of the city where the housing stock is relatively young. Because cities develop and redevelop from the center outward over time, the location of these neighborhoods varies over the city's history. The model predicts a suburban location for the rich in an initial period, when young dwellings are found only in the suburbs, while predicting eventual gentrification once central redevelopment …

Predicting The Path To Recovery From Hurricane Katrina Through The Lens Of Hurricane Andrew And The Rodney King Riots, Robert Baade, Robert Baumann, Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

Hurricane Katrina caused the greatest damage of any hurricane in American history. We look at the rebuilding effort in New Orleans through the lens of two other disasters that occurred in 1992: Hurricane Andrew in Miami and the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles. The rebuilding effort in New Orleans shares similarities with both events, combining the impact of a hurricane on infrastructure and private businesses, and the prospect of an uneven recovery biased against racial minorities and the economically disadvantaged. Using the experience of the King riots, our concern is that the rebuilding effort will be modest at best …

Peace In Unity: 19th Century Irenic Motivations In European Unification, Robert Taft Keele

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The Hauptargumenten of politicians and citizens concerning the advantages and disadvantages of the EU are almost exclusively economic or political in nature: lower tariffs; loss of monetary instruments; immigration; disenfranchisement; etc. The object of my thesis is to remind everyone, amid the flurry of speculation and uncertainty prevalent in Europe since the French rejection of the EU constitution, that a major benefit of the European integration is peace, on a continent that has been ravaged by war for centuries. I prove that the establishment of peace was a major element in European unification by confirming links between peace movements and …

Unintended Consequences Of Property Tax Relief: New York's Star Program, Tae Ho Eom, William Duncombe, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

New York’s School Tax Relief Program, STAR, provides state-funded property tax relief for homeowners. Like a matching grant, STAR changes the price of public services, thereby altering the incentives of voters and school officials and leading to unintended consequences. Using data for New York State school districts before and after STAR was implemented, we find that STAR resulted in small increases in student performance along with significant decreases in the efficiency with which this performance is delivered and significant increases in school spending and property tax rates. These tax-rate increases magnify existing inequities in New York State’s education finance system.

Social Interactions In Labor Supply, Andrew Grodner, Thomas J. Kniesner

Center for Policy Research

Our research examines the effect of interdependence on estimation and interpretation of earnings/labor supply equations. We consider the cases of (1) a positive spillover from others’ labor supplied and (2) a need for conformity with others’ labor supplied. Qualitative and quantitative comparative statics results with a Stone-Geary utility function demonstrate how spillover effects increase labor supply uniformly. Alternatively, conformity effects move labor supplied toward the mean of the reference group so that, in the limit, labor supply becomes perfectly inelastic at the reference group average. When there are un-modeled exogenous social interactions, conventional wage elasticities are still relatively well estimated …

Bond Yield Compression In The Countries Converging To The Euro, Lucjan T. Orlowski, Kirsten Lommatzsch

WCBT Faculty Publications

We demonstrate that bond yield compression is under way in the countries converging to the euro and that German yields are significant drivers of local currency yields. Based on the evidence from Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, we conclude that these new ...Member States of the European Union are ready to adopt the euro without risking a disruptive shock to their financial stability. This message transpires from investigating the daily volatility dynamics of local bond yields as a function of German yields, conditional on changes in local term spreads, exchange rates and adjustments to central bank reference rates. Similar …

Net Impact Estimates For Services Provided Through The Workforce Investment Act, Kevin Hollenbeck, Daniel Schroeder, Christopher T. King, Wei-Jang Huang

External Papers and Reports

Researchers working under the auspices of the Administrative Data Research and Evaluation (ADARE) Project are conducting a series of research and evaluation projects examining participation in, services provided through, and outcomes from the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) and related federal programs in nine states. This paper reports on the net impacts, or "value-added," of WIA services on employment, earnings, and other outcomes of interest using administrative data from seven of the nine ADARE states: Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Missouri, Texas and Washington State.

How To Pay For Education Finance Reform, 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.

Ranking Inequality: Applications Of Multivariate Subset Selection, William C. Horrace, Joseph T. Marchand, Timothy M. Smeeding

Center for Policy Research

Inequality measures are often presented in the form of a rank ordering to highlight their relative magnitudes. However, a rank ordering may produce misleading inference, because the inequality measures themselves are statistical estimators with different standard errors, and because a rank ordering necessarily implies multiple comparisons across all measures. Within this setting, if differences between several inequality measures are simultaneously and statistically insignificant, the interpretation of the ranking is changed. This study uses a multivariate subset selection procedure to make simultaneous distinctions across inequality measures at a pre-specified confidence level. Three applications of this procedure are explored using country-level data …

The State, The Market, Economic Growth And Poverty In China, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The People’s Republic of China is often cited as an unprecedented success story as far as rural poverty is concerned. Despite recent reports of sometimes violent protests in rural areas over illicit land seizures and pollution, since implementing reforms in 1978, China has seen rural poverty rates fall from xxx to yyy, as economic growth increased zzz on average each year, according to World Bank estimates. Some have ascribed liberal policy prescriptions based on open markets and pro-market government policies as are largely responsible, even as they forwent expensive, large-scale mass welfare programs. Starting with their initial round of fundamental …

The Role Of Malagasy Women In Community Development: Analyzing The Potential For The Creation Of A Women’S Association For Alternative Livelihoods In Ifaty, Amanda Fencl

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Integrated Conservation and development projects (ICDPs) have increased in number worldwide as conservation organizations have to come to terms with the importance of involving and addressing the needs of local human populations to order to achieve their conservation goals. Madagascar’s unique biodiversity, environmental degradation, and plaguing poverty has made ICDPs crucial in achieving national goals of tripling the area of natural heritage conserved and poverty reduction through socially, economically, and ecologically sustainable development. In order to understand how such sustainable development can be achieved, it is essential to spend time enhancing one’s understanding of the local mentality and worldview. On …

Net Impact Estimates For Services Provided Through The Workforce Investment Act, Kevin Hollenbeck, Christopher T. King, Wei-Jang Huang, Daniel Schroeder

Reports

No abstract provided.

Institutions, Wages, And Inequality: The Case Of Europe And Its Periphery (1500-1899), Davin Chor

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper explores the long-run relationship between institutions and wage outcomes in Europe and its periphery. I find that cities that exercised stronger institutional protection of private property experienced: (i) higher levels of both skilled and unskilled real wages, as well as (ii) lower levels of inequality as measured by the skilled-unskilled wage ratio. While the first result corroborates existing work on the positive growth effects of better institutions, the second finding is more novel to the literature. Some explanations are proposed for how stronger institutions can cause an increase in the relative supply of skilled workers, thus lowering wage …

The Optimal Design Of Fallible Organizations: Invariance Of Optimal Decision Criterion And Uniqueness Of Hierarchy And Polyarchy Structures, Winston T. H. Koh

Research Collection School Of Economics

We present a general framework to study the project selection problem in an organization of fallible decision-makers. We show that when the organizational size and the majority rule for project acceptance are optimized simultaneously, the optimal quality of decision-making, as determined by the decision criterion, is invariant, and depends only on the expertise of decision-makers. This result clarifies that the circumstances under which the decision-making quality varies with the organizational structure are situations where the organizational size or majority rule is restricted from reaching the optimal level. Moreover, in contrast to earlier findings in the literature that the hierarchy and …

A New Approach To Robust Inference In Cointegration, Sainan Jin, Peter Phillips, Yixiao Sun

Research Collection School Of Economics

A new approach to robust testing in cointegrated systems is proposed using non-parametric HAC estimators without truncation. While such HAC estimates are inconsistent, they still produce asymptotically pivotal tests and, as in conventional regression settings, can improve testing and inference.

Cross-Validation In Nonparametric Regression With Outliers, Denis H. Y. Leung

Research Collection School Of Economics

A popular data-driven method for choosing the bandwidth in standard kernel regression is cross-validation. Even when there are outliers ill the data, robust kernel regression can be used to estimate the unknown regression curve [Robust and Nonlinear Time Series Analysis. Lecture Notes in Statist. (1984) 26 163-184]. However, Under these Circumstances Standard cross-validation is no longer a satisfactory bandwidth selector because it is unduly influenced by extreme prediction errors caused by the existence of these Outliers. A more robust method proposed here is a cross-validation method that discounts the extreme prediction errors. In large samples the robust method chooses consistent …

Q-Convergence With Interquartile Ranges, Sung Jin Kang, Myoung-Jae Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

We introduce a new convergence concept ‘Q-convergence’ which defines convergence in national incomes as a shrinking interquartile range (IQR) of the national income distribution. Compared with the other convergence definitions in the literature, Q-convergence has the following advantages. First, IQR, which represents dispersion and inequality of the income distribution, is also closely linked to the two-group clustering with the lower and upper quartiles being the ‘centers’ of the two groups. Second, IQR is equivariant to increasing transformations and thus reconciles better conflicting empirical findings using level or log data. Third, IQR is insensitive to outliers, leading to robust statistical inferences. …

Growth Is Good For Whom, When, How?, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Economic growth often helps the poor, but what about the many cases when it does not? The consensus that economic growth reduces poverty, encapsulated by two World Bank economists in the above-quoted article entitled Growth is Good for the Poor, leaves many important questions unanswered. What help does the knowledge that economic growth can reduce poverty provide for economies with few realistic prospects for robust, sustained growth? What hope does the understanding that growth reduces poverty on average provide for poor families that are excluded from prosperity? How should we respond when economic growth undermines the market positions of the …

Future Targets And Multiple Equilibria, Ashok S. Guha, Brishti Guha

Research Collection School Of Economics

Multiple Pareto-rankable equilibria may obtain in an overlapping generations model where consumers save to reach a fixed target. Existence and uniqueness conditions are discussed. The model displays excess consumption sensitivity to current income and perfect old-age insurance.

Determinants Of Job Turnover Intentions: Evidence From Singapore, Xiaolin Xing, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper explores both observable and unobservable variables that would affect employed workers’ decisions on job change. We find that age, job satisfaction, satisfaction with working environment or job security, and firm size are among the major factors determining workers’ intentions of job-to-job mobility. Younger workers and workers in smaller firms are more likely to look for other jobs. We also find that men are more likely to consider a change in job than women, but when “actually looking for another job” is concerned, men and women do not differ. Furthermore, monthly income and working sector contribute significantly to looking …

The Accuracy And Manipulability Of Lost Profits Damages Calculations: Should The Trier Of Fact Be "Reasonably Certain"?, Jonathan T. Tomlin, David Merrell

ExpressO

The accuracy and manipulability of calculations for lost profits damages are critical determinants of the ability of harmed parties to receive just compensation in a wide range of legal cases including antitrust, fraud, false advertising, intellectual property infringement, and breach of contract. They are also important determinants of the deterrent effects of the law. Using a sample of over 5,000 U.S. firms, we show that simple damages methods are capable of being substantially inaccurate. We also show that damages methods in general are highly susceptible to manipulation. In the absence of reasonable justifications for why particular data sets and methods …

New Mexico Labor Market Review 09-30-2005, New Mexico Department Of Labor

Historic Publications

The New Mexico Labor Market Review is a monthly publication presenting statistical data and analysis on labor market conditions throughout New Mexico. Issues examine statewide and regional trends in employment, unemployment, labor force estimates, industry activity, wages, occupational demand, and related economic conditions, often accompanied by feature articles on topics affecting the state’s economy. This issue covers August 2005.

Tax Reform: What Are The Options?, James Simeone, Ruth Ann Friedberg, Diego Mendez-Carbajo

Roundtables

This roundtable used the claim-objection-rejoinder format to address the strengths and weaknesses of tax policy reforms brought before the public in 2005. Using a liberal arts format, the discussion aimed to help citizens understand the principles, values and tradeoffs at stake in the tax policy debate.

An Economic Assessment Of Damage Caps In Medical Malpracitce Litigation Imposed By State Laws And The Implications For Federal Policy And Law, Paul Wazzan

ExpressO

Many states have implemented laws which limit non-economic (e.g., pain and suffering) damages as a result of medical malpractice. These laws are seen by proponents as reducing medical malpractice insurance costs and preserving access to health care – especially for lower income individuals. Opponents believe that individuals are harmed through being prevented from seeking a full measure of redress for medical malpractice incidents, by reducing access to the court system, and that these laws simply enrich insurance companies and doctors.

Federal lawmakers are currently studying the potential effect of uniform medical malpractice damage limits at the national level. It is …

Organizational Form As Status And Signal, Kimberly D. Krawiec

ExpressO

In this Article, the author analyzes the reactions of 147 New York City law firms to the 1994 enactment of the New York Limited Liability Partnership statute, which provided New York law firm partners with the first convenient mechanism to limit their personal liability for partnership debts. Using both quantitative and qualitative evidence, she evaluates whether the behavior of New York law firms supports the signaling theory of organizational form—that is, the theory that firms use the partnership form to signal to the marketplace that they provide high quality legal services, due to either superior monitoring or to profit sharing. …

Culture, Ethics, And Values In The Banking System, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Talks, Speeches, & Discourse

When I addressed you for the first time on March 25, 2000, we were in a despondent and gloomy mood. The economy was stagnant, external debt payment difficulties were pervasive and the financial soundness indicators of the banking system in Pakistan were quite worrisome. Public sector owned and managed banks dominated the system with its peculiar bureaucratic culture, indifferent service standards, laid back and lethargic business practices and narrow product range. The Government of Pakistan was underwriting the losses of these banks out of its scarce budgetary resources. Average lending rates hovered around 15 to 16 percent, credit growth to …

Bankruptcy Abuse: An Empirical Study Of Consumer Exemptions Cases, Bernard Trujillo

ExpressO

On April 20, 2005, the President of the United States signed a sweeping legislative overhaul of the consumer bankruptcy system. The bankruptcy reform legislation is based on an empirical assertion: that sophisticated debtors with the means to re-pay their debts were instead filing for bankruptcy and acquiring a discharge, thereby abusing the bankruptcy system.

This Article presents the results of an empirical study of bankruptcy court doctrine in consumer exemptions proceedings over a twenty-year period. The findings suggest a serious empirical flaw in the premise of the bankruptcy reform legislation. The study shows that the bankruptcy system minimizes abuse by …