Economics Commons^™

Pareto Improving Taxes, John Geanakoplos, Heracles M. Polemarchakis

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We show that in almost every economy with separable externalities, every competitive equilibrium can be Pareto improved by a package of anonymous commodity taxes that causes prices to adjust and markets to reclear at different levels of individual consumption. This constrained suboptimality of competitive allocations might provide a rationale for economic policy in economies with externalities. It shows that policy makers should look for good tax packages that help everybody, rather than thinking taxes must inevitably be bad for some lobby that will oppose them.

Overlapping Generations Models Of General Equilibrium, John Geanakoplos

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The OLG model of Allais and Samuelson retains the methodological assumptions of agent optimization and market clearing from the Arrow-Debreu model, yet its equilibrium set has different properties: Pareto inefficiency, indeterminacy, positive valuation of money, and a golden rule equilibrium in which the rate of interest is equal to population growth (independent of impatience). These properties are shown to derive not from market incompleteness, but from lack of market clearing “at infinity;” they can be eliminated with land or uniform impatience. The OLG model is used to analyze bubbles, social security, demographic effects on stock returns, the foundations of monetary …

Spatial Patterns Of Foreign Direct Investment: Do Agglomeration Effects Explain The Spatial Pattern Of Fdi In Latin America And Asia: A Spatial Econometric Analysis, Kaitlyn Orr

Economics Honors Projects

Emerging economic theory attempts to explain multinational enterprises' decisions to locate foreign direct investment in certain countries at the expense of others. Recent literature explores the reasons why FDI into a host country may depend on FDI in neighboring countries. This paper extends the previous research by employing an econometric model that measures the relationship between one country's FDI and other geographically-proximate countries' FDI. I conduct a comparative study between the emerging countries of Latin America and Asia to test whether positive agglomeration externalities exist across country borders. By studying agglomeration externalities, I address the question: does the level of …

Evaluating Long Term Political Consequences Of Economic Restructuring Programs, James Mcgee

Senior Honors Projects

Development assistance loans provided by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are accompanied by structural adjustment programs that must be implemented as a condition of receiving the loan. These economic reforms often include currency devaluation, inflation control, increased taxation, market liberalization, decreased expenditure, and a decrease in the size of government. Populations within countries are drastically effected by these structural economic reforms as social welfare programs are often cut, government workers laid off, and the domestic economy struggles to compete in the global marketplace. The implementation of restructuring programs also constrains the policy options that are available to the …

Determinants Of The Distribution Of Congressional Earmarks Across States, Melissa Boyle, Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

Congressional earmarks have been the subject of significant political debate in recent years. Also known as “pork barrel spending,” earmarks are budgetary requests made by a single legislator that typically circumvent the traditional competitive bidding process designed to ensure the efficient use of public dollars. Utilizing annual state-level estimates of pork barrel spending, we briefly examine the factors influencing states’ receipt of earmarked funds from Congress. Results indicate that on average smaller states receive the largest amount of per capita earmarked funding, most likely as a result of their disproportionate influence in the Senate. In addition, the presence of a …

Smoothing Local-To-Moderate Unit Root Theory, Peter C.B. Phillips, Tassos Magdalinos, Liudas Giraitis

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A limit theory is established for autoregressive time series that smooths the transition between local and moderate deviations from unity and provides a transitional form that links conventional unit root distributions and the standard normal. Edgeworth expansions of the limit theory are given. These expansions show that the limit theory that holds for values of the autoregressive coefficient that are closer to stationarity than local (i.e. deviations of the form = 1 + (c/n), where n is the sample size and c < 0) holds up to the second order. Similar expansions around the limiting Cauchy density are provided for the mildly explosive case.

Reforming Social Security With Progressive Personal Accounts, John Geanakoplos, Stephen P. Zeldes

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The heated debate about how to reform Social Security has come to a standstill because the view of most Democrats (that Social Security must be a defined benefits plan similar in spirit to the current system) seems irreconcilable with the proposals supported by many Republicans (to create a defined contribution system of personal accounts holding marketed assets). We describe a system of “progressive personal accounts” that preserves the core goals of both parties, and that is self-balancing on an ongoing basis. Progressive personal accounts have two critical features: (1) accruals into the personal accounts would be exclusively in a new …

Essays On Wage Inequality And Economic Growth, Jin-Tae Hwang

All Dissertations

This thesis is about the relationship between wage inequality and minimum wage, and then about parental choice and the impact of this on economic growth. First, it empirically examines the relation between wage inequality and the federal minimum wage. Then it develops a theory of how a parent of children with heterogeneous abilities makes choices on (a) investments in education for her children and (b) on the number of children she will have. Parental choices on these margins are shown to affect the rate of economic growth.
Chapter 1 briefly introduces my studies for the dissertation. In Chapter 2, I …

Household Access To Microcredit And Child Work In Rural Malawi, Gautam Hazarika, Sudipta Sarangi

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

This paper examines the effect of household access to microcredit upon work by 7–11-year-old children in rural Malawi. Given that microcredit organizations foster household enterprises wherein much child labor is engaged, this paper aims to discover whether access to microcredit might increase work by children. It is found that, in the season of peak labor demand, household access to microcredit, measured as self-assessed credit limits at microcredit organizations, raises the probability of child work in households with average landholdings and retail sales enterprises.

Montana Nonresident Traveler Quarterly Travel Comparison: 2007, Melissa Dubois

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

This report shows the 2007 quarterly visitation and length of stay data for nonresident travelers to Montana. It also displays average daily spending for various expenditure categories, as well as total expenditures for those categories.

Preference Heterogeneity And Insurance Markets: Explaining A Puzzle Of Insurance, David M. Cutler, Amy Finkelstein, Kathleen Mcgarry

Dartmouth Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Cultural Advantage For Cities: An Alternative For Developing Countries, Florentin Smarandache, Victor Christianto

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

No abstract provided.

The Preliminary Report Of The New York Commission On Property Tax Relief, 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.

Banking On Uncertainty: The Effects Of Institutional Quality On Commercial And Consumer Credit In Russian Regions, Katherine Ollenburger

Economics Honors Projects

Accompanying the recent credit market developments in Russia, banks have shifted their portfolios to a higher proportion of retail lending relative to commercial credit. This paper offers a microeconomic approach to explain this phenomenon, unsatisfactorily addressed in the literature. It focuses on the role of institutions in the rapid increase of individual lending. Using oblast level data from the Central Bank of Russia, it develops a model of lending decisions and uses time fixed effects to estimate the correlation between variations in institutional quality and increased loans to individuals.

Determinants Of The Non-Profit Sector Size: Cross-Countries Empirical Analysis, Subeycha Shrestha

Economics Honors Projects

The majority of studies on the growth of the nonprofit sector have focused only on the demand for nonprofit organizations. This paper attempts to understand the factors that create a demand for and supply of nonprofit organization. We cannot explain the recent increase in the number of nonprofits between countries without understanding the supply factors that facilitate or hinder their formation and operation. I examine the size of the nonprofit sector in 31 countries using supply side variables (government support, legal institutions and social capital) and traditional demand side factors (religious fractionalization, income per capita and government expenditure).

Patenting By Cleveland's Inventors: Critical Areas And Knowledge Flows, Iryna Lendel, Songpyo Kim

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

Regional competitive advantages can be created by deploying processes, product innovations, and/or improving the performance of companies. The concept of increasing returns to scale due to technology advances and the modern growth theory suggest that knowledge spillovers are passed through networks of people. Dense co-location of companies different from industries in large urban areas creates an environment for deploying new knowledge and increasing productivity of companies. Although the presence of mature industries is more often considered to be a burden than a resource of regional growth, a fair judgment about their true influence on economic development can be made if …

Northwest Ohio Manufacturing Brief, Jill S. Taylor

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

No abstract provided.

Planning And Financial Literacy: How Do Women Fare?, Annamaria Lusardi, Olivia S. Mitchell

Dartmouth Scholarship

Many older US households have done little or no planning for retirement, and there is a substantial population that seems to undersave for retirement. Of particular concern is the relative position of older women, who are more vulnerable to old-age poverty due to their longer longevity. This paper uses data from a special module we devised on planning and financial literacy in the 2004 Health and Retirement Study. It shows that women display much lower levels of financial literacy than the older population as a whole. In addition, women who are less financially literate are also less likely to plan …

Law, Biology, And Property: A New Theory Of The Endowment Effect, Owen D. Jones, Sarah F. Brosnan

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

Recent work at the intersection of law and behavioral biology has suggested numerous contexts in which legal thinking could benefit by integrating knowledge from behavioral biology. In one of those contexts, behavioral biology may help to provide theoretical foundation for, and potentially increased predictive power concerning, various psychological traits relevant to law. This Article describes an experiment that explores that context.

The paradoxical psychological bias known as the endowment effect puzzles economists, skews market behavior, impedes efficient exchange of goods and rights, and thereby poses important problems for law. Although the effect is known to vary widely, there are at …

Judicial Checks On Corruption, Adriana Cordis

All Dissertations

Judicial oversight is widely regarded as an important check and balance on the abuse of governmental power. The literature identifies two important components of this oversight function: judicial independence and constitutional review. However, recent work using country-level data indicates that the effectiveness of constitutional review is largely determined by the rigidity of the constitution. My dissertation builds on this work by investigating whether judicial independence and constitutional review are deterrents to a specific type of abuse of power by government officials: corruption in office. Since the appropriate way to measure corruption, which is defined as the abuse of public office …

Essays On International Trade, Volha Baranava

All Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of two essays. The first uses the gravity equation and data on bilateral trade to investigate colonial patterns. The second also uses bilateral trade and the gravity model. The inquiry in the second essay concerns the causal relation between trade and government expenditures. In addition to bilateral trading pattern, data on tariffs and trade tax revenues is also examined.

The Turn In Recent Economics And Return Of Orthodoxy, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

This paper examines change on the economics research frontier, and asks whether the current competition between new research programmes may be supplanted by a new single dominant approach in the future. The paper discusses whether economics tends to be dominated by a single approach or reflect a pluralism of approaches, and argues that, historically, it has alternated between the two. It argues that orthodoxy usually emerges from heterodoxy, and interprets the division between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in terms of a core–periphery distinction. Regarding recent economics, the paper maps out two different types of combinations of new research programmes as being …

Northeast Ohio Manufacturing Brief, Jill S. Taylor

All Maxine Goodman Levin School of Urban Affairs Publications

No abstract provided.

(Wp 2008-01) A Model Of Religious Investment To Explain The Success Of “Megachurches”, Marc Von Der Ruhr, Joseph P. Daniels

Economics Working Papers

Despite their non-traditional approach, megachurches have grown significantly in the United States since 1980. This paper constructs a model of religious investment to examine how “seeker”-oriented megachurches succeed in attracting and retaining new members. The model illustrates that megachurches have been able to encourage additional religious investment through group-based activities. Hence, these activities may be viewed as a subsidy for religious investment. As a result, individuals associated with megachurches increase their religious investment relative to individuals associated with non-megachurches. Data from the FACT2000 survey provide evidence that megachurches employ groups to help subsidize individuals’ religious investment, and that the resulting …

Montana Nonresident Traveler Expenditure Trends: 1997-2007, Kara Grau

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

This report shows the nonresident traveler expenditure trends for visitors of Montana from 1997-2007. It also displays the total actual expenditures and the total inflation-adjusted expenditures.

Montana Nonresident Traveler Expenditure Profiles: 2007, Kara Grau

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

This report examines spending profiles of nonresident travelers to Montana. It displays the average daily expenditures by purpose of trip for different spending categories during 2007.

Boom And Gloom, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

The popular discourse on the economy of Pakistan has swung all of a sudden from one extreme to the other. The previous discourse was set in a tone of self-congratulation and loud pronouncements that everything was honky and dory while the discussion these days is marked by a sense of alarm, blame game, doubts about the veracity of the statistics and an accusatory tone. Both these approaches are highly flawed and leave most Pakistanis in a state of daze, confusion and anger. They do not know as to what the real state of the economy is, what the factual position …

Crossing Borders: Mexican Immigration Into The United States, Ewelina L. Dzieciolowski

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

Immigration has been one of the major political and economic topics debated by governments in the world. In the United States, migration legislation is debated in the Senate, and impacts every industry throughout the country. Therefore, with further research in this field more answers for why migration occurs can be found. Although various disciplines focus on this phenomenon, each offers reasons specific to the discipline which is searching for an explanation. This thesis acknowledges that economic factors, social aspects, push and pull influences are some of the reasons for immigration, but it also proposes that there are other forces behind …

Transportation And Quality Adjusted Basis: Does The Law Of One Price Hold For Feeder Cattle?, Chad Harris

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Beef cattle and calves are raised in all areas of the United States. Since beef cattle are scattered throughout the US, there are many different types of cattle with numerous different quality characteristics which are valued differently. Many calves raised until weaning age across the US are then sent to cattle feeding areas primarily located in Texas, Kansas, Colorado, and Nebraska. The prices that are offered for beef calves vary considerably based on quality and location. The theory of the law of one price suggests that prices in areas that trade should not differ by more than the cost of …

An Assessment Of Housing Affordability In Cache County, Utah, Melanie Jewkes

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Multiple housing affordability indexes are used to measure and assess housing affordability. Each index has its own definition of affordability, causing varying viewpoints on what is to be considered affordable or unaffordable. Four indexes were used in this study: two from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), one from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), and the last from the National Low Income Housing Coalition. The indexes were applied to Census data to assess the housing affordability situation of both homeowners and renters in the census tracts of Cache County, Utah. The measures together show distinct differences in …