Economics Commons^™

Competition In Hong Kong’S Banking Industry, Lai Yee Chu, Yue Cui, Nan Ye, Yuelin Yan

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

This paper tests the competition structure of Hong Kong’s banking industry using the Panzar-Rosse approach and a panel dataset of the largest 20 banks in Hong Kong from 1998 to 2011. The estimation results showed that the competitive pressures were equal across time and across the different sizes of the banks in Hong Kong’s banking industry. Competitive pressures may heighten in the near future as banks will seek to gain competitive edge and they can do so through mergers and acquisitions. Regulations are also slowly being relaxed after the financial crisis in order to boost the economy and more advances …

Assess The Crisis Management Effort Following The Outbreak Of The Subprime Crisis, Yuchen Luo

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

In this paper, I employ a linear regression model to examine the effectiveness of four microeconomic variables, namely government debt, GDP growth rate, household consumption growth rate and government spending growth rate, in stimulating economic growth. In order to test the effectiveness of expansionary fiscal policy in different macro-environments, countries were first partitioned into low and high government debt categories. In addition, raw dataset was partitioned into two time periods, respectively, representing normal macroeconomic years and recession years. My results suggest that countercyclical government spending has been an effective stimulation tool but its effect was more significant in countries of …

Can The Euro Rival The United States Dollar And Become The World Currency?, Kar Wai Man, Feissal Thomas Germais Mombo Paraga Apengue, Weixin Zhang, Yiqing Tu, Yuan Yuan

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Due to the outstanding performance of the Euro since its advent, the public may wonder whether the Euro would, one day, replace the US dollar (USD) which has all along been a force to be reckoned with all around the world. By tracing the chain of contributions the USD (the United States of America) and the Euro (European Union) have made to the world economy in the past and at present, we hope to arrive at some conclusions. However, the paper will give primacy to predicting the future trends for them separately.

Democracy And Economic Growth: A Perspective Of Cooperation, Menghan Yang, Li Zhang

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Does democracy cause higher economic growth? We build a model taking culture and interpersonal cooperation into account and find that democracy increases economic productivity through giving people more equal rights, which allows people to build a larger interpersonal network so that they can reduce investment risk and employ high-productivity (high-risk) methods in production.

Does Okun’S Law Still Hold Today?, Michael Jeffrey White, Lai Yee Chu

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Arthur Okun claimed that when a country’s unemployment rate fell, the GDP expanded. This paper investigates the claim of Arthur Okun and the effect of unemployment rates and GDP of a country on each other. Data from three countries, namely, USA, Japan, and France, were tested to see if there was a causal link between the two variables. It was found that the proposed law of Arthur Okun did not hold. In the USA, there was a two way causality link but different directions of effect. France and Japan did not have a causal link between the two variables.

Impact Of Change In Exchange Rate On Foreign Direct Investment: Evidence From China, Weifeng Jin, Qing Zang

Lingnan Journal of Banking, Finance and Economics

Based on the monthly data of foreign direct investment (FDI) in China and the index of real effective exchange rate (REER) of RMB during Jan 1997 to Sep 2012, we develop a statistical model in this paper to test the impact of changes in exchange rate in the host country on FDI, with reference to international and domestic research. According to the results of the empirical test, the appreciation of RMB promotes FDI after the reforms in the exchange rate regime in 2005 and this phenomenon is a result from the change in the type of FDI into China in …

Age Of First Marriage And Economic Outcomes, Riley Wilson, Dr. Joseph Price

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Research has consistently found that marriage is associated with a number of positive economic, social and health outcomes (Korenman and Neumark, 1991; Loh, 1996). However, despite the many observed benefits of marriage at a point in time, there is a general belief that economic outcomes will be even higher if young adults wait until they are older to get married. This has led to a dramatic increase over the last decade in the average age of first marriage. Census data shows that the median age of first marriage in the United States United States from 1971 to 2011 increased dramatically …

Public Health Services & Systems Research: Concepts, Methods, And Emerging Findings, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

The field of public health services & systems research (PHSSR) increasingly is addressing the question of how to assess the value of investments in public health programs, infrastructure, and delivery systems. Progress in quasi-experimental research designs, measurement, estimation techniques, and data sources are yielding important insight.

Agent External Loss Aversion, David Gordon

Journal of Undergraduate Research

There is a vast body of literature that documents the seemingly irrational phenomena called loss aversion, a subset of prospect theory. Loss aversion is the idea that losses loom larger than otherwise equivalent gains, making it so that an agent would be unwilling to give up something currently in their consumption bundle for something else not currently in their consumption bundle, even though in the absence of both goods and faced with the choice between the two the agent would be indifferent between the two goods. Loss aversion has been shown to be responsible for irrational behavior in a variety …

Blood In The Water: Where Do Loan Sharks Locate?, Taylor Canann, Dr. Richard Evans

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Short-term consumer credit lenders, in particular payday, pawn, and car title lenders, are seen as lenders that prey on the weak of society. This study uses a two-stage negative binomial regression to examine the “chum in the water,” determinants of the locations, of these “loan sharks,” payday and car title lenders. Using zip code level data for the state of Utah I find that the number of payday and car title lenders increase with young, single, middle income, English speaking, Hispanic populations. But I also found that these “loan sharks” locate near pawn shops. My findings indicate that these lenders …

Issue Brief: Auditing Your Town's Development Code For Barriers To Sustainable Water Management, New England Environmental Finance Center

Sustainable Communities Capacity Building

This issue brief is intended for town officials who want to understand how development regulations in their community affect local water resources. Municipal development codes – the set of regulations that control the built environment – can have a great influence on the availability of clean and healthy water for drinking, recreation, and commercial uses. This in turn affects the community’s social, environmental, and economic vitality.

Comprehensive plans, zoning codes, and building standards are just a few examples of regulations that intentionally or unintentionally regulate the way water is transported, collected and absorbed. Regulations that produce dispersed development or large …

Issue Brief: Saving By Mitigating, University Of Louisville, New England Environmental Finance Center

Sustainable Communities Capacity Building

Natural disasters can cause loss of life, inflict damage to buildings and infrastructure, and have devastating consequences for a community’s economic, social, and environmental well-being. Hazard mitigation means reducing damages from disasters.

Local governments have the responsibility to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens. Proactive mitigation policies and actions help reduce risk and create safer, more disaster-resilient communities. Mitigation is an investment in your community’s future safety, equity, and sustainability.

Why Are So Many Americans On Food Stamps? The Role Of The Economy, Policy, And Demographics, James P. Ziliak

University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research Discussion Paper Series

1 in 7 Americans received assistance from SNAP in FY2012, which is a rate 141 percent higher than in FY2000, but only 59 percent higher than in FY1980. In this chapter I describe the socioeconomic and policy climate in recent decades that had bearing on SNAP participation, along with a formal empirical analysis of those determinants and detailed simulations of the relative contributions of the economy, policy, and demographics to changes in SNAP participation over time. The results suggest that SNAP is operating effectively as an automatic fiscal stabilizer—nearly 50 percent of the increase in participation from 2007-2011 is due …

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

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Do Tax Implications Change The Fisher Effect For The Turkish Economy?, Kenan Lopcu, Nuran Coşkun, Süleyman Değirmen

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

This study investigates the validity of both the conventional and tax-adjusted Fisher effects using time series methods such as the ARDL bounds test, and Gregory-Hansen (G-H) cointegration test. To compare the conventional and tax-adjusted Fisher effects, we use two different time series data for interest rates: 1) interest rates adjusted for taxes, and 2) interest rates not adjusted for taxes. Using monthly changes in quarterly and annual interest and inflation rates, both the G-H and ARDL bound tests support the conventional and tax-adjusted Fisher effects. However, the magnitude of the inflation coefficient in the long-run relationship tends to decline for …

Price Convergence And Globalization: Evidence From Selected Countries, Fatma Dogruel, A. Suut Dogruel

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

MENA countries have been confronted with major social, economic and political changes during the last two decades. During this period some emerging countries and transition economies also experienced similar transformation at varying degrees. The transformation of the economic system has affected not only relative domestic prices but also the gap between domestic and international price levels. The paper focuses on how deviation of domestic prices from international market prices is affected by openness in the selected countries. The difference between domestic and international price level is calculated by employing purchasing power parity (PPP). The factors that may have an effect …

The Impact Of Household Labor Supply Structure On Poverty, Serkan Değirmenci, Ipek Ilkkaracan

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

Research mostly in the context of developed economies shows that the transformation of household structure from single male breadwinner families to dual earner families is associated with decreasing rates of poverty as well as lower levels of income inequality. This paper uses micro data from Turkish household income and budget surveys for 2003 and 2010 to examine to what extent household labor supply structure has an impact on family income, poverty and income inequality. We classify married couple households by labor supply of husbands and wives and explore any differentials in household income levels, poverty rates as well as income …

Gender Inequality In The Mena: Myths Versus Facts, Nezahat Kucuk

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

The study uses a cross-sectional data set for 209 countries in order to examine the relationship between gender inequality and its determinants, such as the economic development, information communication technology (ICT), education, and institutions in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. We test whether the regulation of social life by Islamic norms and values is related to gender inequality and whether the impacts differ for the MENA countries, as well as Arab and Muslim majority countries. The study finds that the impact of gender inequality differs for the MENA, Arab and Muslim majority countries only when control variables …

Financial Services Liberalization In A Natural Resource Rich Economy, Hatem Samman, Sheikh Shahnawaz

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

One objective of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) is to achieve financial services liberalization in member countries. We assess the implications of such liberalization in the banking sectors of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. After providing an overview of the GCC banking sector, we discuss the GATS provisions relevant to financial services and present liberalization commitments and exemptions of these countries under the agreement. Using the observation that spikes in oil prices are accompanied with expansion in credit availability, we develop a simple model to formally explore the consequences of …

Age-Independent Increases In Male Salivary Testosterone During Horticultural Activity Among Tsimane Forager-Farmers, Benjamin C. Trumble, Daniel K. Cummings, Kathleen A. O'Connor, Darryl J. Holman, Eric A. Smith, Hillard Kaplan, Michael D. Gurven

ESI Publications

Testosterone plays an important role in mediating male reproductive trade-offs in many vertebrate species, augmenting muscle and influencing behavior necessary for male-male competition and mating-effort. Among humans, testosterone may also play a key role in facilitating male provisioning of offspring as muscular and neuromuscular performance are deeply influenced by acute changes in testosterone. This study examines acute changes in salivary testosterone among 63 Tsimane men ranging in age from 16–80 (mean 38.2) years during one-hour bouts of treechopping while clearing horticultural plots. The Tsimane forager-horticulturalists living in the Bolivian Amazon experience high energy expenditure associated with food production, have high …

Does A Weak Social Fabric Fuel The Predatory Lending Industry? The Link Between Payday Lending Activity And Community Trust, Alyssa H. Curran

Master's Theses - Economics

The purpose of this paper is to address a gap in theory pertaining to the relation between payday lending activity in each state and the level of trust and social capital in that state. This research has been motivated by the fact that no study has explicitly looked at the association between predatory financial institutions and the overall level of trust and social capital in a community. Nor has a nation-wide study been done. Multiple years of data is employed in this study to examine both the concentration of payday lenders in each state and the volume of payday activity …

The Internet In Kentucky: Life In The Slow Lane, Michael T. Childress

Issue Brief on Topics Affecting Kentucky’s Economy

No abstract provided.

Latinas In New York City: A Comparison Of Education And Income, 1990 – 2010, Justine Calcagno

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Introduction: This study examines demographic and socioeconomic factors regarding Latinos in New York City between 1990 and 2010 – particularly education and income rates among Hispanic females.

Methods: Data on Latinos and other racial/ethnic groups were obtained from the U.S. Census Bureau American Community Survey, reorganized for public use by the Minnesota Population Center, University of Minnesota, IPUMSusa. Cases in the dataset were weighted and analyzed to produce population estimates.

Results: From 1990 to 2010 Latinas’ educational attainment and income levels both rose. Disparities between Latinas and Latinos in yearly personal income have persisted. From 1990 to 2010, women earned …

The Evolution Of ‘Theory Of Mind:’ Theory And Experiments, Erik O. Kimbrough, Nikolaus Robalino, Arthur Robson

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper provides an evolutionary foundation for our capacity to attribute preferences to others. This ability is intrinsic to game theory, and is a key component of “Theory of Mind,” perhaps the capstone of social cognition. We argue here that this component of theory of mind allows organisms to efficiently modify their behavior in strategic environments with a persistent element of novelty. Such environments are represented here by multistage games of perfect information with randomly chosen outcomes. “Theory of Mind” then yields a sharp, unambiguous advantage over less sophisticated, behavioral approaches to strategic interaction. In related experiments, we show the …

Correlated Equilibrium And The Comparison Of Information Structures In Games, Dirk Bergemann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A game of incomplete information can be decomposed into a basic game and an information structure. The basic game defines the set of actions, the set of payoff states the payoff functions and the common prior over the payoff states. The information structure refers to the signals that the players receive in the game. We characterize the set of outcomes that can arise in Bayes Nash equilibrium if players observe the given information structure but may also observe additional signals. The characterization corresponds to the set of (a version of) incomplete information correlated equilibria which we dub Bayes correlated equilibria. …

The Evolution Of ‘Theory Of Mind’: Theory And Experiments, Erik O. Kimbrough, Nikolaus Robalino, Arthur Robson

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper investigates the evolutionary foundation for our capacity to attribute preferences to others. This ability is intrinsic to game theory, and is a key component of “Theory of Mind,” perhaps the capstone of social cognition. We argue here that this component of theory of mind allows organisms to efficiently modify their behavior in strategic environments with a persistent element of novelty. Our notion of “Theory of Mind” ’ (ToM) yields a sharp, unambiguous advantage over less sophisticated approaches to strategic interaction because agents with ToM extrapolate to novel circumstances information about opponents’ preferences that was learned previously. We then …

Testing The Martingale Hypothesis, Peter C.B. Phillips, Sainan Jin

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose new tests of the martingale hypothesis based on generalized versions of the Kolmogorov-Smirnov and Cramér-von Mises tests. The tests are distribution free and allow for a weak drift in the null model. The methods do not require either smoothing parameters or bootstrap resampling for their implementation and so are well suited to practical work. The paper develops limit theory for the tests under the null and shows that the tests are consistent against a wide class of nonlinear, non-martingale processes. Simulations show that the tests have good finite sample properties in comparison with other tests particularly under conditional …

Unit Roots In Life — A Graduate Student Story, Peter C.B. Phillips

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This is a graduate student story. It mixes personal reflections with recollections of the extraordinary New Zealanders who shaped my thinking as a graduate student and beginning researcher — people who have had an enduring impact on my work and career as an econometrician. The story traces out these human initial conditions and unit roots that figure in my early life of teaching and research.

Functional Coefficient Nonstationary Regression, Jiti Gao, Peter C.B. Phillips

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper studies a general class of nonlinear varying coefficient time series models with possible nonstationarity in both the regressors and the varying coffiecient components. The model accommodates a cointegrating structure and allows for endogeneity with contemporaneous correlation among the regressors, the varying coefficient drivers, and the residuals. This framework allows for a mixture of stationary and non-stationary data and is well suited to a variety of models that are commonly used in applied econometric work. Nonparametric and semiparametric estimation methods are proposed to estimate the varying coefficient functions. The analytical findings reveal some important differences, including convergence rates, that …

Testing For Multiple Bubbles: Historical Episodes Of Exuberance And Collapse In The S&P 500, Peter C.B. Phillips, Shu-Ping Shi, Jun Yu

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Recent work on econometric detection mechanisms has shown the effectiveness of recursive procedures in identifying and dating financial bubbles. These procedures are useful as warning alerts in surveillance strategies conducted by central banks and fiscal regulators with real time data. Use of these methods over long historical periods presents a more serious econometric challenge due to the complexity of the nonlinear structure and break mechanisms that are inherent in multiple bubble phenomena within the same sample period. To meet this challenge the present paper develops a new recursive flexible window method that is better suited for practical implementation with long …