Economics Commons^™

Consumer Rights Screening Tool For Domestic Violence Advocates And Lawyers, Leah A. Plunkett, Erica A. Sussman

Law Faculty Scholarship

The information is this document is intended for use by advocates and attorneys working with survivors of domestic violence in understanding the common types of consumer problems faced by the survivors. The document provides an overview of the common consumer issues faced by survivors and offers solid guidance on how advocates and attorneys can identify these issues when working the survivors. The report begins with an overview of the role of economic abuse in cases of domestic violence. This is followed by a brief look at common consumer issues faced by survivors that include managing household income and expenses, credit …

Counterfeits, Copying And Class, Ann Bartow

Law Faculty Scholarship

Consumers who want to express themselves by wearing contemporary clothing styles should not have to choose between expensive brands and counterfeit products. There should be a clear distinction in trademark law between illegal, counterfeit goods and perfectly legal (at least with respect to trademark law) "knockoffs," in which aesthetically functional design attributes have been copied but trademarks have not. Toward that end, as a normative matter, the aesthetic features of products should not be registrable or protectable as trademarks or trade dress, regardless of whether they have secondary meaning, just as functional attributes of a utilitarian nature are not eligible …

Finanzkapital And Consumers: How Financialization Shaped Twentieth Century Marketing, Nikhilesh Dholakia

College of Business Faculty Publications

Purpose – By tracing the history of the links of financialization to consumer behaviors and marketer actions in the twentieth century, this paper aims to show that consumer market phenomena are often shaped by the imperatives of finance.

Design/methodology/approach – The paper employs selective historical overviews, mainly focusing on the USA, of four tranches of the past century: the run up to the Great Depression; from post-Depression to the Second World War; the post-Second World War Bretton Woods system and its collapse in the 1970s; and the increasingly risk-charged last three post-Bretton Woods decades of the twentieth century.

Findings – …

U.S. Monetary Policy Announcements And Foreign Exchange Market Behavior, Qianyi Yang

Economics Honors Projects

This paper examines the time-varying and currency-dependency nature of exchange rate responses following the U.S. monetary policy announcements. Using high frequency exchange rate data in the past decade, we find that the exchange rates of most major currencies against the US Dollar respond negatively to the monetary surprises in the 2001 recession, while the response becomes positive during the 2008 recession. Meanwhile, the JPY has the opposite response than the other major currencies in the 2008 recession. These results further confirm the nonlinearity in the relationship between exchange rate dynamics and fundamental news announcements.

Technology Generators In The Dayton Region: Leveraging Regional Assets For Economic Recovery, Kim Frazier, Jane Dockery

Economic Development

The Dayton Region shows tremendous promise in becoming an area known for its technology and innovation with a strong concentration of research and development and a capacity for innovative manufacturing. Yet to become an innovative leader, the Dayton Region must transform its culture and realign investments that will promote its technology capability and strengthen the economy. The old ways of doing business and training the workforce are no longer sufficient to become a player in the global economy. This report compares the Dayton Region to other regions across the country, points out gaps in various innovation and economic indicators, and …

Cadbury Twenty Years On, Cally Jordan

Faculty Papers & Publications

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of the publication of the Cadbury Report, one of the most significant events in modern corporate governance. The Cadbury Report, and its simple two page 'best practices', triggered a global debate on corporate governance. 'Cadbury' codes of corporate governance spread like wildfire. The legacy of the Cadbury Report lives on in the UK with no diminution in the appeal of its voluntary code/comply or explain approach to corporate governance. But there are several clouds looming on the horizon. Comply or explain and voluntary codes of corporate governance appear to have run their course elsewhere …

The "Great Moderation" In A Dual Exchange Rate Regime, Sven W. Arndt

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

In the early nineties, the U.S. economy was emerging from a brief slump, monetary policy was easy, and economic activity recovered quickly during the decade, with GDP eventually reaching and then passing the consensus full employment level. Yet aggregate inflation remained surprisingly subdued. This moderation in prices at the aggregate level persuaded policy makers to allow the easy-money stance to continue in spite of the presence of inflation in non-tradables and in housing and construction in particular. This paper uses a flex-price, mixed-exchange rate model to examine some of the major contributing factors to economic developments in the two-decade period …

Caught In A Poverty Trap? Testing For Single Vs. Multiple Equilibrium Models Of Growth, Cameron Shelton, Francisco R. Rodriguez

CMC Faculty Publications and Research

We look for permanent effects to per capita GDP from exogenous, temporary shocks. Our shocks are temporary changes to the export revenues of small, open economies. We find no evidence that even the largest of these temporary shocks, in excess of 9.7% of GDP, produce permanent effects to the growth path of per capita GDP. The inability to reject a single-equilibrium world with shocks of this magnitude suggests that multiple-equilibria, if they exist, are too widely separated to be policy-relevant. Current aid initiatives, which are of a similar magnitude, are not likely to deliver transition to a higher growth path.

Health Insurance Exchanges: A Panacea Or A Band-Aid?, Luisa Sanchez De Tagle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In 2010, the 111th Congress passed the first national health care reform in the United States, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). This landmark legislation is intended to "fix" a health care system renowned for decreasing access and escalating costs. This paper examines one of the principal reforms in the ACA, the state health insurance exchanges. The author finds theoretical and empirical evidence to support the exchanges' potential (in conjunction with other relevant ACA reforms) to increase access, decrease insurers' excess profits and shift health care costs away from those least able to afford them. The exchanges fall …

Tackling Tax Evasion: Transfer Price Manipulation, Extractive Natural Resources And A Strategy For The Southern African Customs Union, Patrick Grant Mclennan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An increase in the number of multinational enterprises (MNEs) has increased the attention on cross-border challenges, such as transfer price manipulation (TPM). TPM is a development issue - it undermines institutions as well as siphons money from government revenues that could be directed towards programs for human development. Pervasive corruption in the natural resource sector supports an environment where TPM can flourish. This paper develops a strategy for combating TPM within the countries of the Southern African Customs Union. It does this by 1) defining the terrain of illicit flows, both generally and specifically to the abuse of transfer pricing …

Credit Rationing With Behavioral Foundations: Revisiting Stiglitz And Weiss, Alessandra Cassar, Bruce Wydick

Economics Faculty Publications

The seminal credit market model of Stiglitz and Weiss (1981) proposes that asymmetric information between borrowers and lenders creates a moral hazard in which borrowers to have an incentive to invest in risky projects, creating the basis for a rationing equilibrium in credit markets. Other recent behavioral work, argues that a different type of behavior is more central to credit market risk: the temptation for borrowers to use borrowed capital to meet short-term consumption needs rather than for productive investment (Banerjee and Mullainathan, 2010). In this note, we present a simple model that is able to explain credit rationing where …

Some Possible Consequences Of A U.S. Government Default, Jeffrey Rogers Hummel

Faculty Publications

The U.S. government faces a looming fiscal crisis. A default on Treasury securities appears inevitable. The short-run consequences for the economy will be painful. But the long-run consequences, both economic and political, could be beneficial. The most important long-run political benefit would be the imposition of fiscal discipline. The long-run economic benefit would be the alleviation of the future tax liabilities required to service the national debt, irrespective of whether those liabilities are correctly anticipated or not. A historical examination of the state government defaults of the 1840s provides one case study where the long-run consequences were indeed salutary.

A Decision-Support Framework For Using Value Capture To Fund Public Transit: Lessons From Project-Specific Analyses, Shishir Mathur, Adam Smith

Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning

No abstract provided.

Risk Management: Bankruptcy Prediction Models For Banks, Ponkala Anand Vaseekhar Manuel

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this study is to determine the causes for financial distress which lead to bankruptcy and identify which of the five models used in this paper is more accurate in forecasting bankruptcy. It analyzes the changes in market, policy, economy, and political influence which leads to bankruptcy. Methodologies chosen to investigate financial distress and bankruptcy in this paper are Moody's, Standard and Poor's, Vaziri's, Z-score Model, and Logit Model. Data was collected from various websites to perform the analysis.

Fragmenting Forests: The Double Edge Of Effective Forest Monitoring, Andrew R. Bell, Rick L. Riolo, Jacqueline M. Doremus, Daniel G. Brown, Thomas P. Lyon, John Vandermeer, Arun Agrawal

Economics

The link between ineffective forest monitoring and forest degradation is well known. Under REDD+, monitoring stands to become more important as a means of maintaining incentive. Little attention however has been paid to the possible adverse consequences of forest monitoring. Our research develops a spatially explicit, agent-based model (ABM) of timber extraction in a Congo Basin forest concession to investigate the potential conservation impact of more effective monitoring. We modeled the building of access roads, and logging of legal timber and illegal timber, where illegal timber may be interpreted broadly to include prohibited species, smaller trees, or trees in areas …

The Political Economy Of Good Governance 2012-13, Department Of Economics

Werner Sichel Lecture Series

The Werner Sichel Lecture Series began in 1963, directed by long-time WMU Professor of Economics Dr. Werner Sichel, who retired in 2004. Since its beginning, the series has attracted eminent scholars from throughout the world, including 12 Nobel Laureates in Economics. This year's Sichel Series is co-directed by Dr. Sisay Asefa and Dr. Wei-Chiao Huang and is co-sponsored by the Department of Economics, the College of Arts and Sciences, the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, the Center for African Development Policy Research, the Diether H. Haenicke Institute for Global Education, and the Timothy Light Center for Chinese Studies.

No. 60: Linking Migration, Food Security And Development, Jonathan Crush

Southern African Migration Programme

Two issues have recently risen to the top of the international development agenda: (a) Food Security; and (b) Migration and Development. Each has its own global agency champions, international gatherings, national line ministries and body of research. Global and regional discussions about the relationship between migration and development cover a broad range of policy issues including remittance flows, the brain drain, the role of diasporas and return migration. Strikingly absent from these discussions is any systematic discussion of the relationship between population migration and food security. If the global migration and development debate sidelines food security, the current international food …

The Joireman Collection, Evangelical Advocacy: A Response To Global Poverty

Bibliographies

The Joireman collection is a list of bibliographic resources gathered by political scientists to examine the relationship between religion and politics as seen from within several Christian traditions: Evangelical, Pentecostals, Anglican, Reformed, Lutheran, and Roman Catholic. The list comes from the book Church, State, and Citizen: Christian Approaches to Political Engagement edited and contributed by Sandra F. Joireman.

Modeling The Effects Of Air Transport Liberalization On The Airline Industry, Pukar Kc

Economics Honors Papers

The thesis develops theoretical models to examine the effects of air transport liberalization on the airline industry. The models make use of Nash non cooperative, Stackelberg and Cournot game models to illustrate how the airline industry is impacted when liberalization in the form of granting air traffic rights and antitrust immunity to airlines is implemented. Beginning with the discussion of regulation in the airline industry, the thesis goes on to study the spread of air transport liberalization in several parts of the world. The effects of liberalization are analyzed in context of air fares, route operation structure, and strategic behavior …

The Effect Of Homeownership On Household Savings In The United States, Jacquelyn Ammirato

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper examines the effect of changes in house prices on the saving patterns of households in the United States of America. The paper uses data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics. Three empirical models are run, one for 2009, one for 2005 and one for 1999 data, to account for differences in household income, age of the head of household, employment status, and mortgage information. The results indicate that whether the home is owned or rented has a significant impact on household savings in each year.

Gender Discrimination: What Factors Influence The Level Of Gender Discrimination Facing U.S. Workers?, Joshua Ballance

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper uses previous research conducted by the author which analyzes gender discrimination at the state level. Using state level discrimination coefficients, this paper looks to analyze why discrimination varies significantly across the United States. The empirical model is constructed using a panel data set over the past twenty years to develop a model that explains why variations in the level of gender discrimination faced by U.S. workers has persisted despite the fact that the level of gender discrimination has decreased over this period.

Offshoring And The Effects On American It Workers, Kristen Bousquet

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper will use an existing model from Amiti and Wei (2009) to illustrate the potentially positive effects that offshoring will have on the productivity of American IT workers and the IT industry. The inputs that will be used to measure productivity are labor, capital, materials, service inputs, and the offshoring of materials and services and were collected from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Based on a previous study from Amiti and Wei (2009), the results may suggest that there is a positive correlation from offshoring and productivity.

Power, Race, And The Neglect Of Science: The Hiv Epidemics In Sub-Saharan Africa, Eileen Stillwaggon, Larry Sawers

Economics Faculty Publications

This work addresses racial stereotyping and the effect it has in distorting AIDS policy for sub-Saharan Africa.

Tax Facts, Tom Dunne

Articles

Tom Dunne Clarifies the issues surrounding different forms of property tax

Mauritius As A Success Story For Fdi: What Strategy And Policy Lessons Can Emerging Markets Learn?, Brinda Sooreea-Bheemul, Rajeev Sooreea

Barowsky School of Business | Faculty Scholarship

This study uses a policy approach to examine the role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the ‘Mauritian economic miracle’ years of 1970-2000. In the early stage of industrialization, the Mauritian government turned the island into an Export Processing Zone. The objective was to attract foreign direct investors in the textile and clothing industry who would then export the finished manufactured products to European and North American markets. This study analyzes how the spillover and linkage effects between FDI, productivity, domestic investment, and exports impacted economic growth. The results indicate that it was FDI stock, rather than FDI inflows, that …

Does Proximity To Wind Farms Affect The Value Of Nearby Residential Properties? Evidence From Washington And New York States, Natalie Camplair

Award Winning Economics Papers

The rapid growth of wind farms across rural communities in the U.S. has spurred concerns over the effect of wind turbines on residential property values. This paper presents a hedonic regression analysis of property values using a partial panel of properties from two counties in the United States. A total of 24 models are estimated. This paper compares the results of market and county-assessed data, interaction terms, and varying assumptions about the effect of wind turbines. This study finds weak evidence that property values near wind turbines are lower than nearby areas, but given methodological limitations and likely endogeneity bias …

No. 59: The Third Wave: Mixed Migration From Zimbabwe To South Africa, Jonathan Crush, Abel Chikanda, Godfrey Tawodzera

Southern African Migration Programme

Migration from Zimbabwe to South Africa has been extremely well-documented by researchers. In this paper, we suggest that there is a need to periodize these migration flows in order to understand how and why they have changed over time, not simply in terms of the volume of migration but the changing drivers of migration and the shifting nature of the migrant stream. Few previous studies have taken a longitudinal approach to Zimbabwean migration, primarily because most research takes place at one point in time. SAMP is in the fortunate position of having a large database at its disposal which allows …

An Attempt To Reshape Capitalism’S Image, Ross A. Nichols

Gettysburg Economic Review

John Stuart Mill claimed to be a disciple of both Jeremy Bentham and David Ricardo. This was a strange proclamation because each man advocated a competing theory of value; Bentham’s utilitarianism laid the foundation for the utility theory of value and Ricardo developed the labor theory of value. Mill’s goal in attempting to unify these theories of value was to provide a solution for the growing class conflict that plagued capitalism. Class conflict arose as feudalism was phased out and industrial capitalism replaced merchant capitalism as the dominant economic system. The Corn Laws symbolized this competition between classes. Capitalists were …

The Environmental Kuznets: For High, Middle And Low Income Latin American Countries, Allia Afifi

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates the relationship between environmental quality and economic development through the use of the Environmental Kuznets Curve. The study will examine the effect of economic development on the environmental quality for selected high, middle and low income Latin American countries. The model will look at emission levels (CO2 emissions in metric tons per capita) in Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Columbia, Honduras and Nicaragua as affected by changes in Gross Domestic Product. The results show that there is an inverted U-shaped curve representing the relationship between environmental degradation (CO2 emissions per capita) and GDP per capita, supporting the EKC hypothesis.

An Analysis On The Factors Affecting Fertility Rates Across The U.S., Britany St. Sauveur

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper analyzes the fertility rate or the number of live births per 1,000 women aged 15-44 years old. The research is based off of census data from the Statistical Abstract of the United States from 1990 to 2009. The purpose of researching fertility and birth rates is to explain the slight fluctuations during this time frame. This study looks into the factors as to why this change has occurred, such as race, education, marital status, economic impact, age, and region. The results from over the past 20 years have proven that these demographic and geographic factors have both affected …