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2011

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Full-Text Articles in Economics

Spousal Labor Market Effects From Government Health Insurance: Evidence From A Veterans Affairs Expansion, Melissa A. Boyle, Joanna N. Lahey Aug 2011

Spousal Labor Market Effects From Government Health Insurance: Evidence From A Veterans Affairs Expansion, Melissa A. Boyle, Joanna N. Lahey

Economics Department Working Papers

Although government expansion of health insurance to older workers leads to labor supply reductions for recipients, there may be spillover effects on the labor supply of affected spouses who are not covered by the programs. In the simplest model, health insurance on the job is paid for in terms of lower compensation on the job. Receiving health insurance exogenous to employment is akin to a positive income shock for the household, causing total household labor supply to drop. However, it is not clear within the household whether this decrease in labor supply will be borne by both spouses or by …


The Economics Of Lotteries: An Annotated Bibliography, Kent Grote, Victor Matheson Aug 2011

The Economics Of Lotteries: An Annotated Bibliography, Kent Grote, Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

This paper presents an annotated bibliography of all papers relating to the economics of lotteries as of early to mid 2011. All published scholarly papers that could be identified by the authors are included along with the published abstract where available.


The Economics Of Lotteries: A Survey Of The Literature, Kent Grote, Victor Matheson Aug 2011

The Economics Of Lotteries: A Survey Of The Literature, Kent Grote, Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

Lotteries represent an important source of government revenues in many states and countries, so they are of interest to public finance economists. In addition, lotteries provide researchers interested in microeconomic theory and consumer behavior with a type of experimental lab that allows economists to explore these topics. This paper surveys the existing literature on lotteries organized around these two central themes. The first section examines the microeconomic aspects of lotteries including consumer decision-making under uncertainty, price and income elasticities of demand for lottery tickets, cross-price elasticities of lottery ticket to each other and to other gambling products, consumer rationality and …


International Women's Soccer And Gender Inequality: Revisited, Joshua Congdon-Hohman, Victor Matheson Aug 2011

International Women's Soccer And Gender Inequality: Revisited, Joshua Congdon-Hohman, Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

A number of authors have identified the determinants of success in international sporting competitions such as the Olympics and soccer’s World Cup. This paper serves to update past work on international women’s soccer performance given the rapid development of the game over the past decade. We compare the determinants of men’s international soccer team performance with that of their female counterparts and find that a different set of variables are important in explaining success for the two genders. While economic and demographic influences hold for both, the impacts of specific political and cultural factors diverge. In particular, Latin heritage predicts …


Gender Differences In Competitive Balance In Intercollegiate Basketball, Jaret Treber, Rachel Levy, Victor Matheson Aug 2011

Gender Differences In Competitive Balance In Intercollegiate Basketball, Jaret Treber, Rachel Levy, Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

This paper adds to the literature on competitive balance in college sports by comparing men's and women's NCAA basketball. Using data from the Division I National Championships, we find evidence consistent with the idea that women’s college basketball is less competitively balanced than men’s college basketball. We argue that this difference may be explained by a theory of player ability borrowed from evolutionary biology first promulgated by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and subsequently utilized in Berri (2004). An implication of this idea is that competitive balance in women’s NCCA basketball will naturally improve over time. This is good news for …


No. 25: Complex Movements, Confused Responses: Labour Migration In South Africa, Jonathan Crush Aug 2011

No. 25: Complex Movements, Confused Responses: Labour Migration In South Africa, Jonathan Crush

Southern African Migration Programme

The end of apartheid undermined the rationale for apartheid-era immigration. Immigration from Europe (which had been declining in the 1980s) dwindled to almost nothing as the new government dissociated itself from the racist immigration policies of the apartheid era. At the same time, downsizing and mine closures in the 1990s led to a dramatic decline in employment opportunities for African migrants in the mining industry. Tens of thousands of local and foreign migrants were retrenched. Although the industry has recovered somewhat, and continues to employ some foreign workers, the overall numbers of temporary migrant workers remain far below the levels …


Structural And Reduced-Form Models: An Evaluation Of Current Modeling Criteria In Econometric Methods, Ashley M. Funk Aug 2011

Structural And Reduced-Form Models: An Evaluation Of Current Modeling Criteria In Econometric Methods, Ashley M. Funk

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This paper evaluates the structural form model of John Rust's 1987 paper, Optimal Replacement of GMC Bus Engines: An Empirical Model of Harold Zurcher, by using reduced-form models to evaluate the same data and interpret the results. The question is whether reduced-form modeling such as probit and logit models can be as useful as structural models for prediction.


Publicly Vs. Privately Controlled Higher Education Costs: Panel Data Estimates, G. Thomas Sav Aug 2011

Publicly Vs. Privately Controlled Higher Education Costs: Panel Data Estimates, G. Thomas Sav

Economics Faculty Publications

More so now than ever, budgetary problems and widespread reforms are generating questions regarding higher education costs among publicly controlled compared to privately controlled colleges and universities. Past studies have offered scale and scope estimates anchored in 1995 and earlier cross sectional data that could contain omitted variable biased. In contrast, this paper employs panel data spanning the 2005 through 2009 years to estimate a multiproduct cost function and scale and scope economies separately for public and private sector colleges and universities. The two-way fixed effects results indicate the presence of significant institutional and time effects. Overall, the findings suggest …


Supply Chain Performance Of The Australian Beef Industry: Comparing The Industry Structure, Inter-Firm Relationships And Knowledge Systems Of Western Australia And Queensland, Mohammad Nasir Uddin,, Nazrul Islam, Mohammed Quaddus Aug 2011

Supply Chain Performance Of The Australian Beef Industry: Comparing The Industry Structure, Inter-Firm Relationships And Knowledge Systems Of Western Australia And Queensland, Mohammad Nasir Uddin,, Nazrul Islam, Mohammed Quaddus

Books & book chapters

The meat and livestock industry in Australia accounts for more than 45 per cent of Australia’s total value of agricultural production, within which beef is the largest industry in value terms (Nossal, Sheng and Zhao 2008). But the industry is experiencing a long-term decline in terms of trade, and has lagged behind other industries in rates of productivity improvement (MLA 2008). As it is critical for the economy that the beef industry maintains profitability and sustainability, it is believed that the performance, competitiveness and success of the industry depends on improving cost efficiency and productivity of the whole supply chain …


Price Discrimination Among Different Strengths Of The Same Drugs, Shanshan Ni Aug 2011

Price Discrimination Among Different Strengths Of The Same Drugs, Shanshan Ni

All Theses

This thesis studies the price discrimination through the drug's market. Using the data from the USA and Chinese drugs' markets, we are looking for the factors what might affect the price discrimination. Counting the price per mg/ml and classifying the drugs by the diseases, we find that the price discrimination of the anti-infective drugs is the smallest in both countries, the drugs' prices are positively related to the price discrimination, and the standard deviation of the American drug's prices is smaller than the standard deviation of the Chinese drug's prices.


The Trend Of The Returns To Educations In Urban China During 1988 To 2002, Shuang Zheng Aug 2011

The Trend Of The Returns To Educations In Urban China During 1988 To 2002, Shuang Zheng

All Theses

China underwent a significant social and economic transformation starting from the 1980s. The transition to market oriented economy brought change to the market of human capital. Using Mincer-type equation, we analyzed the returns to education in China using the data from the Chinese Household Income Project Survey conducted in the years 1988, 1995 and 2002, which covers the most interesting period. Although the returns to education were found generally lower than world average, a significant and steady increase in the returns was observed. Actually, the returns to each schooling year were more than doubled in the fourteen years. This increase …


Marketing Margins Of Strawberries 2006-2010 Shipping Point-Terminal-Retail Price, Matej Mikle Barat Aug 2011

Marketing Margins Of Strawberries 2006-2010 Shipping Point-Terminal-Retail Price, Matej Mikle Barat

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines vertical price relationships for fresh strawberries. Specifically, the focus is on three stages of the vertical chain. The first stage is the shipping point. Shipping points represent major strawberry production regions and are the closest price point to the farm. The second stage is the terminal market. Terminal markets are wholesale markets in major US cities. The third stage is the retail level. Retail level prices are measured as average supermarket prices in the same cities for which terminal market prices are available. Using weekly data, markup equations are estimated from upstream to downstream levels of the …


Generic Results For Establishing The Asymptotic Size Of Confidence Sets And Tests, Donald W.K. Andrews, Xu Cheng, Patrik Guggenberger Aug 2011

Generic Results For Establishing The Asymptotic Size Of Confidence Sets And Tests, Donald W.K. Andrews, Xu Cheng, Patrik Guggenberger

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper provides a set of results that can be used to establish the asymptotic size and/or similarity in a uniform sense of confidence sets and tests. The results are generic in that they can be applied to a broad range of problems. They are most useful in scenarios where the pointwise asymptotic distribution of a test statistic has a discontinuity in its limit distribution. The results are illustrated in three examples. These are: (i) the conditional likelihood ratio test of Moreira (2003) for linear instrumental variables models with instruments that may be weak, extended to the case of heteroskedastic …


Similar-On-The-Boundary Tests For Moment Inequalities Exist, But Have Poor Power, Donald W.K. Andrews Aug 2011

Similar-On-The-Boundary Tests For Moment Inequalities Exist, But Have Poor Power, Donald W.K. Andrews

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper shows that moment inequality tests that are asymptotically similar on the boundary of the null hypothesis exist, but have poor power. Hence, existing tests in the literature, which are asymptotically non-similar on the boundary, are not deficient. The results are obtained by first establishing results for the finite-sample multivariate normal one-sided testing problem. Then, these results are shown to have implications for more general moment inequality tests that are used in the literature on partial identification.


A Conditional-Heteroskedasticity-Robust Confidence Interval For The Autoregressive Parameter, Donald W.K. Andrews, Patrik Guggenberger Aug 2011

A Conditional-Heteroskedasticity-Robust Confidence Interval For The Autoregressive Parameter, Donald W.K. Andrews, Patrik Guggenberger

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper introduces a new confidence interval (CI) for the autoregressive parameter (AR) in an AR(1) model that allows for conditional heteroskedasticity of general form and AR parameters that are less than or equal to unity. The CI is a modification of Mikusheva’s (2007a) modification of Stock’s (1991) CI that employs the least squares estimator and a heteroskedasticity-robust variance estimator. The CI is shown to have correct asymptotic size and to be asymptotically similar (in a uniform sense). It does not require any tuning parameters. No existing procedures have these properties. Monte Carlo simulations show that the CI performs well …


A Conditional-Heteroskedasticity-Robust Confidence Interval For The Autoregressive Parameter, Donald W.K. Andrews, Patrik Guggenberger Aug 2011

A Conditional-Heteroskedasticity-Robust Confidence Interval For The Autoregressive Parameter, Donald W.K. Andrews, Patrik Guggenberger

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper introduces a new confidence interval (CI) for the autoregressive parameter (AR) in an AR(1) model that allows for conditional heteroskedasticity of general form and AR parameters that are less than or equal to unity. The CI is a modification of Mikusheva’s (2007a) modification of Stock’s (1991) CI that employs the least squares estimator and a heteroskedasticity-robust variance estimator. The CI is shown to have correct asymptotic size and to be asymptotically similar (in a uniform sense). It does not require any tuning parameters. No existing procedures have these properties. Monte Carlo simulations show that the CI performs well …


The Demonetization Of Gold: Transactions And The Change In Control, Thomas Quint, Martin Shubik Aug 2011

The Demonetization Of Gold: Transactions And The Change In Control, Thomas Quint, Martin Shubik

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Three models of a monetary economy are considered, in order to show the effects of a gold demonetization: the first with a gold money, the second with demonetized gold but no central bank, and the third with demonetized gold, but with a central bank. The distinctions between ownership and control are discussed.


Similar-On-The-Boundary Tests For Moment Inequalities Exist, But Have Poor Power, Donald W.K. Andrews Aug 2011

Similar-On-The-Boundary Tests For Moment Inequalities Exist, But Have Poor Power, Donald W.K. Andrews

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper shows that moment inequality tests that are asymptotically similar on the boundary of the null hypothesis exist, but have very poor power. Hence, existing tests in the literature, which are asymptotically non-similar on the boundary, are not deficient. The results are obtained by first establishing results for the finite-sample multivariate normal one-sided testing problem. Then, these results are shown to have implications for more general moment inequality tests that are used in the literature on partial identification.


Information Aggregation, Investment, And Managerial Incentives, Elias Albagli, Christian Hellwig, Aleh Tsyvinski Aug 2011

Information Aggregation, Investment, And Managerial Incentives, Elias Albagli, Christian Hellwig, Aleh Tsyvinski

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We study the interplay of share prices and firm decisions when share prices aggregate and convey noisy information about fundamentals to investors and managers. First, we show that the informational feedback between the firm’s share price and its investment decisions leads to a systematic premium in the firm’s share price relative to expected dividends. Noisy information aggregation leads to excess price volatility, over-valuation of shares in response to good news, and undervaluation in response to bad news. By optimally increasing its exposure to fundamental risks when the market price conveys good news, the firm shifts its dividend risk to the …


Irving Fisher, Debt Deflation And Crises, Robert J. Shiller Aug 2011

Irving Fisher, Debt Deflation And Crises, Robert J. Shiller

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

It is the 100th anniversary of Irving Fisher’s 1911 book The Purchasing Power of Money . But, more important than that, it is a good time, during the current financial turmoil, to reconsider some of his theories again, in light of current events. And I think that some of his theories about variations in the purchasing power of money are very important today, have been underappreciated, and are worthy of considering anew.


Robust Mechanism Design: An Introduction, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris Aug 2011

Robust Mechanism Design: An Introduction, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This essay is the introduction for a collection of papers by the two of us on “Robust Mechanism Design” to be published by World Scientific Publishing. The appendix of this essay lists the chapters of the book. The objective of this introductory essay is to provide the reader with an overview of the research agenda pursued in the collected papers. The introduction selectively presents the main results of the papers, and attempts to illustrate many of them in terms of a common and canonical example, the single unit auction with interdependent values. In addition, we include an extended discussion about …


Risky Curves: From Unobservable Utility To Observable Opportunity Sets, Daniel Friedman, Shyam Sunder Aug 2011

Risky Curves: From Unobservable Utility To Observable Opportunity Sets, Daniel Friedman, Shyam Sunder

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Most theories of risky choice postulate that a decision maker maximizes the expectation of a Bernoulli (or utility or similar) function. We tour 60 years of empirical search and conclude that no such functions have yet been found that are useful for out-of-sample prediction. Nor do we find practical applications of Bernoulli functions in major risk-based industries such as finance, insurance and gambling. We sketch an alternative approach to modeling risky choice that focuses on potentially observable opportunities rather than on unobservable Bernoulli functions.


The Effect Of Language On Economic Behavior: Evidence From Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, And Retirement Assets, Keith M. Chen Aug 2011

The Effect Of Language On Economic Behavior: Evidence From Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, And Retirement Assets, Keith M. Chen

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically, I find that speakers of such languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This holds both across countries and within countries when comparing demographically similar native households. The evidence does not support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss implications for theories of intertemporal choice.


Ncaa Division I Football Bowl Subdivision: The Importance Of Recruiting And Its Relationship With Team Performance, Nathan S. Lloyd Aug 2011

Ncaa Division I Football Bowl Subdivision: The Importance Of Recruiting And Its Relationship With Team Performance, Nathan S. Lloyd

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Talent wins college football games. Wins bring in money. Colleges, fans and media hype up the recruiting season as the key to success in the college football season. Is it though? Athletic programs spend large sums of capital and resources to recruit the most talented players possible. This paper explores the relationship between recruited talent and team performance using a simultaneous equations model. Higher players’ talent leads to better team performance and a recruiting class has its biggest impact immediately following signing. A team’s performance, especially of the most recent season, impacts its ability to recruit. Talent and success experience …


Natural Resource Curse In Nepal With Emphasis On Deforestation And Violence, Abhinav Pathak Aug 2011

Natural Resource Curse In Nepal With Emphasis On Deforestation And Violence, Abhinav Pathak

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

For many decades, economists have discussed the role of agricultural productivity and natural resources in economic development. By the late 20th century, various studies showed the poor growth experience of resource-rich countries in the post- world war-II period. Doppellhofer (2000) concluded that none of the countries with extremely abundant natural resources in 1970 grew rapidly for the next 20 years, with the exception of Malaysia, Mauritius and Iceland. Other studies that yielded similar conclusions include Auty (1990), Gelb (1988), Sachs and Warner (1995, 1999), and Gylfason et al. (1999). This phenomenon of lower economic growth among resource abundant countries is …


Three Essays On Opacity, Corporate Governance, And Credit Ratings, Yiwen Gu Aug 2011

Three Essays On Opacity, Corporate Governance, And Credit Ratings, Yiwen Gu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In the first essay, utilizing a more recent and expanded 20-year sample 1991-2010 of dual-rated bonds issued, I confirm Morgan's (2002) finding that banks are relatively more opaque than nonbanks. The likelihood of a rating split is higher, and the magnitude of the rating gap is larger, for banks than nonnbanks. Moreover, rating agency disagreements are more significant for banks with relatively higher loan and trading securities holdings and maintain lower capital, and for banks engaged in mortgage securitization. Importantly, I find that rating agency disagreements reflect market proxies of information uncertainty. Further, opacity makes external financing more costly. Equity …


Losers And Losers: Some Demographics Of Medical Malpractice Tort Reforms, Andrew I. Friedson, Thomas J. Kniesner Aug 2011

Losers And Losers: Some Demographics Of Medical Malpractice Tort Reforms, Andrew I. Friedson, Thomas J. Kniesner

Center for Policy Research

Our research examines individual differences in the effects of medical malpractice tort reforms on pre-trial settlement speed and settlement amounts by age and most likely settlement size. Findings of note include that, unlike previously assumed, both absolute and percentage losses from tort reform are small for infants in an asset value sense and that the prime-aged working population is the group most negatively affected by tort reform. Maximum entropy quantile regressions highlight the robustness of our conclusions and reveal that the settlement losses most informative for policy evaluation differ greatly from mean regression estimates.


An Evaluation Of The Economic Impact Of National Football League Mega-Events, Robert Baade, Victor Matheson Aug 2011

An Evaluation Of The Economic Impact Of National Football League Mega-Events, Robert Baade, Victor Matheson

Economics Department Working Papers

This paper evaluates the magnitude and the economic impact of NFL mega-events including the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl. The paper also reviews the theory behind the usual findings that the observed economic benefits of mega-events are almost always a fraction of the benefits claimed a priori.


Optimal Capital Taxation And Consumer Uncertainty, Justin Svec Aug 2011

Optimal Capital Taxation And Consumer Uncertainty, Justin Svec

Economics Department Working Papers

This paper analyzes the impact of consumer uncertainty on optimal fiscal policy in a model with capital. The consumers lack confidence about the probability model that characterizes the stochastic environment and so apply a max-min operator to their optimization problem. An altruistic fiscal authority does not face this Knightian uncertainty. It is shown analytically that the government, in responding to consumer uncertainty, no longer sets the expected capital tax rate exactly equal to zero, as is the case in the full-confidence benchmark model. However, our numerical results indicate that the government does not diverge far from this value. Even though …


An Impact Evaluation Of U.S. Arms Export Controls On The U.S. Defense Industrial Base An Interrupted Time-Series Analysis, Aaron Condron Aug 2011

An Impact Evaluation Of U.S. Arms Export Controls On The U.S. Defense Industrial Base An Interrupted Time-Series Analysis, Aaron Condron

HIM 1990-2015

The United States Defense Industrial Base (USDIB) is an essential industry to both the economic prosperity of the US and its strategic control over many advanced military systems and technologies. The USDIB, which encompasses the industries of aerospace and defense, is a volatile industry - prone to many internal and external factors that cause demand to ebb and flow widely year over year. Among the factors that influence the volume of systems the USDIB delivers to its international customers are the arms export controls of the US. These controls impose a divergence from the historical US foreign policy of furthering …