Economics Commons^™

The State Of The Region: Hampton Roads 2013, James V. Koch, Vinod Agarwal, Kelly Brown, Chris Colburn, Vicky Curtis, Steve Daniel, Elizabeth Janik, Lian Feng, Sharon Lomax, Molinaro Janet, Ken Plum, Ayush Toolsidass, Gary Wagner, Shara Weber, Gilbert Yochum

Economics Faculty Books

This is Old Dominion University's 14th annual State of the Region report. While it represents the work of many people connected in various ways to the university, the report does not constitute an official viewpoint of Old Dominion or it's president, John R. Broderick. The report maintains the goal of stimulating thought and discussion that ultimately will make Hampton Roads an even better place to live. We are proud of our region's many successes, but realize that it is possible to improve our performance. In order to do so, we must have accurate information about "where we are" and a …

Spiral Notebook, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Handwritten notes on website updates and system redundancy, including references to POP port 995 and SMTP port 25 [Unpublished handwritten notes]. Personal collection.

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Sraffa’s own example [Unpublished handwritten notes with graph]. Personal collection.

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Handwritten notes on matrix algebra, rescaling market prices, and cosine similarity [Unpublished handwritten notes]. Personal collection.

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Handwritten notes on observed data, mean absolute weighted deviation (%MAWD), and vector calculations [Unpublished handwritten notes]. Personal collection.

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Handwritten notes on coefficient of variation and standard deviation [Unpublished …

Friedman Book Oup, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes,

• Letter regarding the publishing agreement for the book Milton Friedman: Contributions to economics and public policy. McClune, L. (2013, August 16). Correspondence concerning publishing terms and agreements. Oxford University Press.

• Contributor’s agreement for the chapter “Friedman and Phelps on the natural rate (of unemployment)—and Marx and Goodwin on the reserve army of labour”. Oxford University Press, Shaikh, A., PhD., & Velupillai, V. (n.d.). Unsigned publisher-issued contributor agreement. Unpublished manuscript.

• Contributor discount order form. Oxford University Press. (n.d.). Publisher-issued order form associated with contributor benefits. Unpublished manuscript.

• Contributor’s agreement with Oxford …

Ral, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes,

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (ca. 2013). Wages and unemployment: Discussing Keynes, the Phillips curve, and a classical approach to the relation between wages and unemployment [Manuscript].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Notes and diagrams on accumulation, growth, and the wage share curve, referencing Atkinson, Solow, and Flaschel [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Spanish-language exercise sheet: La ratita presumida [Manuscript].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Notes comparing Friedman’s natural rate of unemployment with Marx’s reserve army of labor (RAL) [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Notes outlining a discussion of a contemporary economic crisis [Handwritten …

Financial Development And Health Capital Accumulation, Gunakar Bhatta

Wayne State University Dissertations

This dissertation examines the interrelationship between financial development and health capital accumulation. While credit to GDP ratio, liquid liabilities to GDP ratio and market capitalization to GDP ratio are used as the proxies for financial development, health capital is represented by life expectancy, infant mortality and low birth weight. A simple static model in the utility maximization framework shows that financial development increases the medical care through income effect thus augmenting the health status. This is also supported by econometric analysis. Using various econometric models such as pooled OLS, fixed effect and instrumental variable approach, the study shows that higher …

Interests And Ideas: Industrialization And The Making Of Early American Trade Policy, 1789 - 1860, John Austin Moore

Wayne State University Dissertations

Trade policy was a prominent economic and political issue in the United States between 1789 and 1860, culminating in the Civil War. Many historians have characterized this period as pitting mutually exclusive economic systems, an industrializing, free-labor North and a slave-based agricultural South, against one another. The traditional interpretation is that the North eagerly supported tariffs and economic protection that they provided, while the South stood in opposition. The Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833 is frequently cited as evidence that the tariff was a sectional issue and some historians go so far as to describe the tariff as a significant cause …

Combinatorial Auction-Based Virtual Machine Provisioning And Allocation In Clouds, Sharrukh Zaman

Wayne State University Dissertations

Current cloud providers use fixed-price based mechanisms to allocate Virtual Machine (VM) instances to their users. But economic theory states that when there are large amount of resources to be allocated to large number of users, auctions are the most efficient allocation mechanisms. Auctions achieve efficiency of allocation and also maximize the providers' revenue, which a fixed-price based mechanism is unable to do. We argue that combinatorial auctions are best suited for the problem of VM provisioning and allocation in clouds, since they provide the users with the most flexible way to express their requirements. In combinatorial auctions, users bid …

Insurance Choice And The Demand For Prescription Drugs Among Individuals With Chronic Conditions, Chunyang Feng

Wayne State University Dissertations

This study explores insurance choice of the chronically ill non-elderly adults and their utilization and expenditures on prescription drugs. Discrete factor model is used to estimate an individual's probability of any drug use and the conditional level of utilization and associated out-of-pocket expenditures. Analyses on four subpopulation groups, i.e. hypertension, diabetes, asthma and depression, provide detailed insights into individuals' health insurance decision making and subsequent prescription drug filling behavior, given their health insurance status. The results indicate that only a few health risk factors are statistically significant in determining an individual's health insurance status, and that the direction of the …

Essays On The Effects Of Oil Price Shocks On The U.S. Stock Returns, Zeina Nashaat Alsalman

Wayne State University Dissertations

This research investigates the effect of changes in oil prices and oil price volatility on the U.S. stock returns. The first essay tests whether the sign and the size of oil price shocks matter for the U.S. stock returns. The results suggest a linear model provides a good approximation to the response of real stock returns to real oil price innovations. However, this is not the case when the model is specified in terms of the nominal price of crude oil.Using a modified structural VAR to accommodate GARCH-in-Mean errors, the second essay studies the direct effects of oil price uncertainty …

Eastern Migrations Vs Western Welfare States - (Un)Biased Fears, Kosta Josifidis, John B. Hall, Valérie Berenger

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This inquiry considers some effects of migration on the labour markets and the welfare systems found in the EU-15, and from the perspectives of sustainability of the current welfare state regimes. Our inquiry aims to determine whether and to what extent different approaches in regulation of migration flows between the new and old member states are compatible with related economic and demographic findings. Within this context, our research considers regulations affecting migration flows. Our findings suggest that some effects of migration from the EU8+2 on the labour markets and social protection systems found in the EU-15, both with respect to …

The Effectiveness Of Public Development Banks: Designing Good Impact Evaluations, Alessandro Maffioli, Cesar M. Rodriguez

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

PDB programs have become a fundamental ingredient of productive development policy strategies in most emerging economies. Although the overall need for these interventions is rarely questioned, academics and policymakers often debate their effectiveness, as well as the optimal approaches and instruments necessary to implement them. Therefore, the need to produce rigorous evaluations of PDBs has become increasingly relevant for both government and civil society (see Chapter 2).

This chapter presents the main concepts and operational arguments regarding the execution of indepth impact evaluations of PDB initiatives and instruments. For a more practical approach, these arguments are presented with examples of …

School Quality Capitalization Into Housing Prices In Minnesota And Pennsylvania, Jonathan Taylor Smith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation develops and estimates a spatial autoregressive with autoregressive errors model of housing prices that accounts for both the endogeneity of spatially-lagged housing prices and local school quality measured by performance on state standardized tests. Two datasets are used from Boyertown, PA and Minneapolis, MN. Homes are spatially weighted against each other using a k nearest-neighbor approach. School quality is thought to be endogenous because unobserved neighborhood amenities in the error term of a hedonic regression are very likely positively correlated with local elementary, middle, and high school quality. Following previous literature, the optimal instrument matrix is constructed as …

Three Essays On Odd-Lot Transactions, Hardy Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays on odd-lot transactions. The first essay investigates the role odd lot trades play in equity markets, as well as how this role has changed over three distinct time periods- 2010, 2007, and 2005. In each of these time periods, we document the determinants of the proportions of odd lot transactions, the price contribution of odd lot trades, and the characteristics of odd lot trading on an intraday and intraweek basis. We find that odd lot transactions make up 8% of volume and 20-22% of trades. We find that odd lot proportions as well as …

An Analysis Of Shift Work: Compensating Differentials And Local Economic Conditions, Mary Colene Trent

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The theory of compensating differentials asserts that workers facing undesirable work conditions, such as night shift work, should receive compensating wage differentials. The theory assumes that workers can easily find jobs with desirable characteristics; thus, compensating wages are necessary to induce workers to take jobs with undesirable characteristics. This dissertation considers a variation of the theory of compensating differentials in which labor markets are weak. If workers are more likely to work night shifts in areas with weak economic conditions and if firms are less likely to offer compensating differentials for night shift work in areas with weak economic conditions, …

A Study Of Corruption, Foreign Aid, And Economic Growth, Amanda Deerfield

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

Foreign aid donors increasingly demand that aid is used efficiently and effectively. This study examines the effect of corruption levels, measured by the Corruption Perceptions Index, within a recipient country on the levels of economic growth. A growing literature outlines the mechanisms through which corruption impedes economic growth and is summarized within. Additionally, as longevity gains may result from foreign aid but are not captured in economic growth, this study computes a variable called the Life Quality Indicator (LQI) that combines such gains with economic growth and examines corruption’s effect on LQI growth. As any windfall, foreign aid has been …

Three Essays On Local Government Debt, Robert Greer

Theses and Dissertations--Public Policy and Administration

The local government tax-exempt debt market is a growing, and complex, sector of public finance. As local governments turn to debt financing the factors that contribute to interest costs of that debt have become important considerations for local government officials and politicians. Governance at the local level involves a network of overlapping governments some of which share a tax base. This system of overlapping governments that share a tax base are subject to externalities that arise from taxation, expenditures, and debt. These externalities are usually analyzed in terms of tax or expenditure reactions, but there are implications for local government …

How Universal Is The Big Five? Testing The Five-Factor Model Of Personality Variation Among Forager-Farmers In The Bolivian Amazon, Michael Gurven, Christopher Von Rueden, Maxim Massenkoff, Hillard Kaplan, Marino Lero Vie

ESI Publications

The five-factor model (FFM) of personality variation has been replicated across a range of human societies, suggesting the FFM is a human universal. However, most studies of the FFM have been restricted to literate, urban populations, which are uncharacteristic of the majority of human evolutionary history. We present the first test of the FFM in a largely illiterate, indigenous society. Tsimane forager–horticulturalist men and women of Bolivia (n = 632) completed a translation of the 44-item Big Five Inventory (Benet-Martínez & John, 1998), a widely used metric of the FFM. We failed to find robust support for the FFM, based …

Economic And Psychological Consequences Of Long-Term Unemployment, Lauren D. Appelbaum

Employment Research Newsletter

No abstract provided.

John Kenneth Galbraith, Alexander J. Field

Economics

Galbraith, John Kenneth (15 Oct. 1908-29 Apr. 2006), economist and author, was born in Iona Station, Ontario, Canada, to Archibald Galbraith and Sarah Catherine Kendall. Galbraith, who advanced and reinterpreted institutionalist and Keynesian traditions in economics while promoting a liberal and progressive political agenda, was arguably the best-known and most influential economist and public intellectual of his generation. He published dozens of books, served in a number of high-level government positions, and, as a faculty member at Harvard University for more than a quarter of a century, advised every Democratic president from Franklin Roosevelt to Bill Clinton. Galbraith's political education …

Mellon Banks, Alexander J. Field

Economics

The Mellon banks were a group of financial institutions instrumental in the industrial development of the greater Pittsburgh area in Pennsylvania, as well as, to a lesser degree, of other regions of the United States. Mellon funding played important roles in the development of coal, fabricated (but not primary) steel, aluminum (in particular Pittsburgh Reduction, which became Alcoa), and oil (in particular Gulf). Other notable companies benefiting from Mellon funding and oversight were Carborundum, a maker of grinding materials, and Koppers, a maker of advanced coking ovens that captured rather than simply vented valuable by-product gases such as toluene and …

The Role Of Gender In Intergenerational Transmissions Of Education And Occupational Promotion, Si Wang

Theses and Dissertations

While several studies have suggested the importance of maternal schooling to children's outcomes during childhood, less is known about the role when the child is older. In the first chapter, I estimate the relationship between maternal education and children's college attendance. After developing a theoretical model to consider the transmission of education across generations, I use the NLSY79 Child and Young Adult Surveys for empirical analysis. College proximity is used as an instrument for mother's schooling. All else equal, results suggest that maternal schooling significantly increases a child's probability of attending college by about 2 to 3 percentage points. The …

Eco104 Ricardo Ii Ltv + Empirical, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection contains:

• Profit/wage ratios and fixed capital models, including labor theory of value calculations [Tables and figures]. (n.d.).

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2013, October 4). Ricardo on rent & FROP [Handwritten notes for GECO 104].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Ricardo on fiscal policy and taxes (Ricardian equivalence), including Say’s law [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (n.d.). Analytical structure of classical theory of price [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2013, September 19). Next: Ricardo example—data—Schwartz—IO—reprise of Smith [Handwritten notes].

• Shaikh, A., PhD. (2008, September 16). Lecture III: Ricardo on value & price [Handwritten notes for …

Cafio-Prg Develops Novel Approach To Policy Research, Konstantinos Giannakas

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln has received a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture under the Policy Research Centers Program. This grant has supported the establishment of a Policy Research Group (PRG) as part of the Center for Agricultural and Food Industrial Organization (CAFIO) in the Department of Agricultural Economics. CAFIO-PRG is led by the Project Director, Professor Konstantinos Giannakas, and its main focus is on the development of a novel, empirically relevant, integrated, multi-market framework of policy analysis.

Consumer Attitudes And Labeling Regime Key To The Market Potential Of Food Nanotechnology, Miah Tran, Amalia Yiannaka, Konstantinos Giannakas

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

Research shows that, even though most consumers lack knowledge and understanding of the technology, they nevertheless have strong opinions as to its potential risks and benefits. Advocates are determined to not repeat the mistakes of biotechnology. Understanding the factors determining the market acceptance of food nanotechnology and its potential impact on the different interest groups involved can inform the design of effective policies and strategies governing food nanotechnology innovations.

Country-Of-Origin-Labeling Creates Winners And Losers Among Consumers, Producers, And Retailers, Konstantinos Giannakas, Alejandro Plastina, Daniel Pick

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

Public Law 107-171, the United States Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002, required country-of-origin labeling (COOL) for beef, lamb, pork, fish, perishable agricultural commodities, and peanuts. While the aim is to benefit domestic consumers by allowing them to make informed decisions, the effects of COOL have been the subject of a heated on-going debate. Advocates of COOL argue the existence of an “overwhelming” consumer support for country of origin information and benefits that substantially outweigh the costs of this labeling regime. Opposing groups have expressed concerns about the potential competitive disadvantage that non-integrated producers might face due to …

Consumer-Oriented Gm Products Can Hurt Producers, Konstantinos Giannakas, Rim Lassoued

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

Despite their important agronomic benefits to agricultural producers, GM products (GMPs) have been facing a, rather strong, consumer opposition. This opposition varies significantly between countries and so does the countries’ regulatory response to products of biotechnology. While the US treats biotech products as substantially equivalent to their conventional counterparts and does not require their segregation and labeling, the European Union (EU), based on its “precautionary principle” and consumers’ “right to know,” has instituted a mandatory labeling regime that is regarded as the strictest in the world.

Food Labeling Standards Have Significant Welfare And Distributional Impacts, Konstantinos Giannakas, Nicholas Kalaitzandonakes, Alexandre Magnier

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

Discussions on the appropriate regulatory norms for genetically modified (GM) foods date back to the early 1980s. Thirty years later, a consensus on what such norms should be remains elusive. Some countries, including the United States and Canada, consider GM foods substantially equivalent to their conventional counterparts and do not require segregation and labeling of these products. Others, including the European Union, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, and China have introduced mandatory labeling regimes.

Empathy Nudging Increases Conservation Of Farming Land, Natalia V. Czap, Hans J. Czap, Gary D. Lynne, Mark E. Burbach

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

One of the major challenges of environmental policy with regard to conservation is that it must often rely on voluntary and non-selfish actions of individuals. Traditionally policy makers rely on direct regulation and financial incentives, but both approaches face problems. Regulations may lead to resentment and the costs of perfect enforcement are prohibitively high. Financial incentives can be perverse and may lead to unintended consequences, including crowding out of intrinsic motivation. In addition, behavioral economics and economic psychology studies demonstrate that the assumptions of the neoclassical economic models (such as self-interest only, rationality, and willpower) on which the policy design …

2013 Farm Bill: An Experimental Test Of The Senate And House Proposals, Natalia V. Czap, Hans J. Czap, Gary Lynne, Mark E. Burbach

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

The 2008 Farm Bill currently guides agricultural and related environmental/conservation policy. Versions proposed by the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, to be implemented in the 2013 Farm Bill after differences are resolved, aim to achieve environmental (and other food related) goals, while also seeking significant spending cuts. While both versions propose to eliminate the Direct Payments program, they differ with respect to how other crop supports should work and whether crop insurance subsidies should be linked to conservation practices. The Senate Bill supports a policy design based on cross‐compliance, that is, crop insurance subsidies are conditional on …

Three Essays On Mutual Fund Ratings, Wee Seng Ng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The incessant growth of the mutual fund industry has made the task of selecting mutual funds an increasingly challenging one. Unsophisticated investors turn to low-cost and readily available ratings to guide their investment decisions. Unsurprisingly, mutual fund ratings are hugely popular and influential. Anecdotal evidence and academic findings both suggest that investors gravitate towards top-rated funds. Rating is a double-edged sword. Although the use of rating simplifies the otherwise onerous job of evaluating mutual fund performance, it can lead to adverse consequences. Investors who invest only in top-rated funds are inadvertently assuming that good ratings indicate good future performance. However, …