Economics Commons^™

A Normative Analysis Of Gambling Tax Policy, Kahlil S. Philander

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

This article surveys the application of normative tax theory to gambling tax policy. The analysis suggests that fixed license based taxes may be preferable to taxes on gross gaming revenue. Where output based taxes are used, the types of gambling whose demand is more price sensitive, and the types that have positive links to other industries, should be taxed at comparatively lower rates. Sin-based taxes are noted to increase economic welfare, but only when applied with a rate commensurate to harm that is external to the gambler and the operator. Finally, inter-jurisdictional competition is identified as an important consideration in …

Mcmeasuring Diplomacy: Modeling Determinants Of International Public Opinion Toward The United States, Luke A. Petach

Student Scholarship - College of Business

This paper is concerned with modeling the extent to which external factors affect political attitudes toward the United States. The data is concerned with how economic, governance, and cultural factors impact attitudes regarding the favorability of the United States in the eyes of the world, and testing the empirical implications of Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.

The results suggest a strong negative relationship between a country being a Muslim majority country and the favorability of the United States in that country, a positive relationship between the perceived “Voice and Accountability” of a country and the favorability of …

Growth, Development, And The Natural Resource Curse: Understanding The Asymmetric Gains Of Trade, Low Iishan

Student Scholarship - College of Business

Trade is an essential component of a country’s economy. The flow of goods and services across national boundaries has become emblematic of the modern global economy. Yet, the effects of trade are not constant across countries. Instead, gains from trade have been observed to be asymmetric across the diverse landscape of political economies. Sharma and Morrissey (2005) for example, suggest that while trade liberalization is generally desirable, it does not guarantee growth. Instead, any impact of trade on an economy is conditional upon the initial economic structure and prevailing policy. This makes sense since countries often differ in terms of …

Don’T Judge The S&P 500 By Its Cover: When Expectations Meet Regression, Daniel Freitag

Student Scholarship - College of Business

This study aims to answer whether the health of the United States equities market is a representation of the well-being of the macro-economy. There are two primary goals in this study. The first is to model the determinants of fluctuating stock prices in the short-run. For this reason, data is collected in monthly units intended to represent short-term fluctuations in the S&P price over time. The second is to model the expected impact of recessionary pressures on the performance of equities.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- December 2013, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program And Food Insecurity, Christian Gregory, Matthew P. Rabbitt, David C. Ribar

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

This chapter reviews recent theory and empirical evidence regarding the effect of SNAP on food insecurity and replicates the modelling strategies used in the empirical literature. The authors find that recent evidence suggesting an ameliorative effect of SNAP on food insecurity may not be robust to specification choice or data. Most specifications mirror the existing literature in finding a positive association of food insecurity with SNAP participation. Two-stage least squares and control function methods do show that SNAP reduces food insecurity, but effects are not consistent across sub-populations and are not always statistically significant.

Gmm Estimation Of Spatial Autoregressive Models With Autoregressive And Heteroskedastic Disturbances, Osman Dogan, Süleyman Taşpınar

Economics Working Papers

We consider a spatial econometric model containing a spatial lag in the dependent variable and the disturbance term with an unknown form of heteroskedasticity in innovations. We first prove that the maximum likelihood (ML) estimator for spatial autoregressive models is generally inconsistent when heteroskedasticity is not taken into account in the estimation. We show that the necessary condition for the consistency of the ML estimator of spatial autoregressive parameters depends on the structure of the spatial weight matrices. Then, we extend the robust generalized method of moment (GMM) estimation approach in Lin and Lee (2010) for the spatial model allowing …

Developing, Refining, And Validating A Survey To Measure Stereotypes And Biases That Women Face In Industry, Erin D. Webb

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

Almost any woman who has worked in a male dominated industry has faced a gender stereotype or bias of some type. Some of these women have even developed coping mechanisms to counteract these biases and make day-to-day interactions at work tolerable. Gathering information to reveal these stereotypes and biases can pose a distinctive challenge. Many women do not want to reveal the challenges that they have faced in their careers, and the vastness of types of challenges makes asking the correct questions very difficult. Through testing, this study has developed a valid data collection instrument that can be used to …

The Effect Of Public Debt On Growth In Multiple Regimes, Andros Kourtellos, Thanasis Stengos, Chih Ming Tan

Economics & Finance Faculty Publications

We employ a structural threshold regression methodology to investigate the heterogeneous effects of debt on growth using public debt as a threshold variable as well as several other plausible variables. Our methodology allows us to address parameter heterogeneity that characterizes cross-country growth data and at the same time account for endogeneity. We find strong evidence for threshold effects based on democracy, which implies that higher public debt results in lower growth for countries in the Low-Democracy regime. Our results are consistent with the presence of parameter heterogeneity in the cross-country growth process due to fundamental determinants of economic growth proposed …

Do Market Incentives Crowd Out Charitable Giving?, Cary Deck, Erik O. Kimbrough

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Donations and volunteerism can be conceived as market transactions with a zero explicit price. However, evidence suggests people may not view zero as just another price when it comes to pro-social behavior. Thus, while markets might be expected to increase the supply of assets available to those in need, some worry such financial incentives will crowd out altruistic giving. This paper reports laboratory experiments directly investigating the degree to which market incentives crowd out large, discrete charitable donations in a setting related to deceased organ donation. The results suggest markets increase the supply of assets available to those in need. …

The Wage Gap Vs. The Total Compensation Gap, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Clearly, most organizations seek to have fair and objective pay practices. And, as a check, they sometimes take a data-driven look inside their companies to consider whether employees of different demographic characteristics are paid similarly or if there is some pay gap. But most organizations only consider wages or salaries in looking for such gaps. Existing research on pay preferences, however, shows that employees can value differently different kinds of pay. There are many massive demographic surveys of individuals which record, along with wage and salary earnings, information on individuals' schooling, gender, race, work hours, occupation, geographic location, etc. These …

Short-Term Inflation Forecasting Models For Nigeria, Sani I. Doguwa, Sarah O. Alade

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

Short-term inflation forecasting is an essential component of the monetary policy projections at the Central Bank of Nigeria. This paper proposes four short-term headline inflation forecasting models using the SARIMA and SARIMAX processes and compares their performance using the pseudo-out-of-sample forecasting procedure over July 2011 to September 2013. According to the results the best forecasting performance is demonstrated by the model based on the all items CPI estimated using the SARIMAX model. This model is, therefore, recommended for use in short-term forecasting of headline inflation in Nigeria. The forecasting performance up to eight months ahead, of the models based on …

How Global Is Globalization?, Jac C. Heckelman, Andrew T. Young

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

We examine a balanced panel of globalization indices for 129 countries over the years 1991- 2010. We report evidence of cross-country sigma convergence in the overall globalization index. Sigma convergence also holds for each of the economic, political, and social globalization indices, as well as each sub-index within these indices. However, the evidence for stochastic convergence, based on panel unit root tests, is only strong for the political globalization index. Regarding the economic and social dimensions of globalization, respectively, we find evidence for stochastic convergence only in the flows and cultural proximity sub-indices. For the OECD subsample, evidence supports stochastic …

Do School District Bond Guarantee Programs Matter?, Michael Cirrotti

Economics Student Scholarship

The State of Washington enacted a school district bond credit enhancement program in 1999. Oregon did the same in 1998. I use data from the National Center for Education Statistics for a representative sample of states in order to examine whether or not these programs increased the likelihood that school districts in Washington and Oregon issued bonds. I isolate the programs’ impact in Washington and Oregon through difference-in-differences analysis to control for other variation in the data in ten other representative states during the same time period. The results suggest that state-level school district bond guarantee programs increase the likelihood …

Intergenerational Mobility Across Three Generations In The United States From 1880-1920, Amber Schrubey

All Theses

This thesis studies the transmission of human capital across generations. Intergenerational mobility explains the link between parent and child outcomes and is analyzed in this study using the human capital transmission models of Becker and Tomes (1986, 1979) and Solon (2012); and the child labor and school attendance model of Orazem and Funnarsson (2004). Data for this study comes from the IPUMS Linked Representative Sample years 1880-190 where school attendance and occupation were analyzed for the primary linked male as well as their father, mother spouse, and children. Analysis of the data suggests significant determinants of a child attending school …

Mental Healthcare And Violent Crime: A Case Study Of New York State, Juliana Carattini

All Theses

New York State has been among the leaders of mental healthcare since the 19th century and today the state continues to promote innovative thinking in this system. Due to budgetary concerns across the nation New York has compiled a three-year plan to decrease Inpatient costs and increase community-based care. This is the second wave of rapid deinstitutionalization that has occurred in the state and the effect of deinstitutionalization on violent crime is still a major concern to the public. In the past the connection between mental illness and violent crime has at best been established as weak association and is …

Uncertain Growth And The Value Of The Future, Jaume Masoliver, Miquel Montero, John Geanakoplos, J. Doyne Farmer

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

For environmental problems such as global warming future costs must be balanced against present costs. This is traditionally done using an exponential function with a constant discount rate, which reduces the present value of future costs. The result is highly sensitive to the choice of discount rate and has generated a major controversy as to the urgency for immediate action. We study analytically several standard interest rate models from finance and compare their properties to empirical data. From historical time series for nominal interest rates and inflation covering 14 countries over hundreds of years, we find that extended periods of …

Information And Volatility, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

In an economy of interacting agents with both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, we examine how the information structure determines aggregate volatility. We show that the maximal aggregate volatility is attained in a noise free information structure in which the agents confound idiosyncratic and common components of the payoff state, and display excess response to the common component, as in Lucas (1972). The upper bound on aggregate volatility is linearly increasing in the variance of idiosyncratic shocks, for any given variance of aggregate shocks. Our results hold in a setting of symmetric agents with linear best responses and normal uncertainty. We …

Truthful Equilibria In Dynamic Bayesian Games, Johannes Hörner, Satoru Takahashi, Nicolas Vieille

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper characterizes an equilibrium payoff subset for dynamic Bayesian games as discounting vanishes. Monitoring is imperfect, transitions may depend on actions, types may be correlated and values may be interdependent. The focus is on equilibria in which players report truthfully. The characterization generalizes that for repeated games, reducing the analysis to static Bayesian games with transfers. With independent private values, the restriction to truthful equilibria is without loss, except for the punishment level; if players withhold their information during punishment-like phases, a folk theorem obtains.

Uniform Consistency Of Nonstationary Kernel-Weighted Sample Covariances For Nonparametric Regression, Degui Li, Peter C.B. Phillips, Jiti Gao

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We obtain uniform consistency results for kernel-weighted sample covariances in a nonstationary multiple regression framework that allows for both fixed design and random design coefficient variation. In the fixed design case these nonparametric sample covariances have different uniform convergence rates depending on direction, a result that differs fundamentally from the random design and stationary cases. The uniform convergence rates derived are faster than the corresponding rates in the stationary case and confirm the existence of uniform super-consistency. The modelling framework and convergence rates allow for endogeneity and thus broaden the practical econometric import of these results. As a specific application, …

Information, Interdependence, And Interaction: Where Does The Volatility Come From?, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We analyze a class of games with interdependent values and linear best responses. The payoff uncertainty is described by a multivariate normal distribution that includes the pure common and pure private value environment as special cases. We characterize the set of joint distributions over actions and states that can arise as Bayes Nash equilibrium distributions under any multivariate normally distributed signals about the payoff states. We characterize maximum aggregate volatility for a given distribution of the payoff states. We show that the maximal aggregate volatility is attained in a noise-free equilibrium in which the agents confound idiosyncratic and common components …

Information And Volatility, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

In an economy of interacting agents with both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, we examine how the structure of private information influences aggregate volatility. The maximal aggregate volatility is attained in a noise free information structure in which the agents confound idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, and display excess response to the aggregate shocks, as in Lucas [14]. For any given variance of aggregate shocks, the upper bound on aggregate volatility is linearly increasing in the variance of the idiosyncratic shocks. Our results hold in a setting of symmetric agents with linear best responses and normal uncertainty. We establish our results by …

Promises And Expectations, Florian Ederer, Alexander Stremitzer

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We investigate why people keep their promises in the absence of external enforcement mechanisms and reputational effects. In a controlled laboratory experiment we show that exogenous variation of second-order expectations (promisors’ expectations about promisees’ expectations) leads to a significant change in promisor behavior. We provide evidence that a promisor’s aversion to disappointing a promisee’s expectation leads her to behave more generously. We propose and estimate a simple model of conditional guilt aversion that is supported by our results and nests the findings of previous contributions as special cases.

Emissions, Humberto Llavador, John E. Roemer, Joaquim Silvestre

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Mankind must cooperate to reduce GHG emissions to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperature. How can the necessary costs of reducing GHG emissions be allocated across regions of the world, within the next few generations, and simultaneously address growth expectations and economic development? We postulate a two-region world and, based on sustainability and egalitarian criteria, calculate optimal paths in which a South, like China, and a North, like the United States, converge in welfare per capita to a path of sustained growth of 1% per year by 2080, while global CO2 emissions are restricted to the Representative Concentration Pathway …

Truthful Equilibria In Dynamic Bayesian Games, Johannes Hörner, Satoru Takahashi, Nicolas Vieille

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper characterizes an equilibrium payoff subset for Markovian games with private information as discounting vanishes. Monitoring is imperfect, transitions may depend on actions, types be correlated and values interdependent. The focus is on equilibria in which players report truthfully. The characterization generalizes that for repeated games, reducing the analysis to static Bayesian games with transfers. With correlated types, results from mechanism design apply, yielding a folk theorem. With independent private values, the restriction to truthful equilibria is without loss, except for the punishment level; if players withhold their information during punishment-like phases, a “folk” theorem obtains also.

Estonia's Post-Soviet Agricultural Reforms: Lessons For Cuba, Mario A. Gonzalez-Corzo

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Subsidizing Non-Polluting Goods Vs. Taxing Polluting Goods For Pollution Reduction, Robert S. Main

Scholarship and Professional Work - Business

Pigovian taxes on polluters are politically unpopular, but subsidies for non-polluting sources are politically attractive. This paper presents a linear demand and supply model and numerical example to explore the trade-offs between taxing polluting sources of a good versus subsidizing non-polluting sources of the same good. While the model (along with the associated numerical example) shows the optimality of Pigovian taxes, it also shows how much welfare is reduced if subsidies for nonpolluters are employed instead. Further, it shows the optimal tax, given any level of subsidy and the optimal subsidy, given any level of tax.

Extractive Versus Productive Economy: A Case Study Comparison Of Peru And South Korea, Rubén Berríos

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

There are striking contrasts between a productive and an extractive economy. South Korea and Peru are used as examples. Korea is not a resource-rich country but has developed remarkably fast. Pem, on the other hand, is a resource-rich country but has shown uneven rates of growth and has had a lackluster development performance because it has relied on extractive industries that have brought boom and bust. Korea is a high performing economy that achieved high rates of growth implementing policies that emphasized productivity and promoted industrialization and free trade. Korea's success is explained in terms of its policies promoting the …

Culture And Innovation In Peru From A Management Perspective, Gregory J. Scott, Ian Chaston

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

Political stability, macro-economic caution, and the aggressive pursuit of free trade have enabled Peru to emerge as one of the fastest growing economies in Latin America. This economic expansion has created heightened interest in the evolution of corporate culture and its influence on firm performance. This paper examines organizational performance in relation to the influence of cultural values on innovation by means of a survey of upper level managers. Analysis of the survey results indicates that there was a positive relation between innovation and power distance and uncertainty. Survey findings show no relationship between innovation and individualism nor innovation and …

More Trouble For The New York State Education Finance System, 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.