Economics Commons^™

Investigating The Impact Of Tax Increases On Net Exports: An Empirical Approach, Daniel Bennett, Dr. Richard Evans

Journal of Undergraduate Research

The purpose of this research is to verify the implications of common economic models which predict that increases in taxation will lead to increases in net exports. I find that tax increases have a positive impact on net exports, but that the estimated impact is likely unreliable due to imperfect estimation methods and the simplicity of the model. The initial attempt revealed several difficulties some of which could be overcome and others requiring further research. This report will explain my model, how the data for the estimation was obtained, the process of estimation, and my conclusions.

Understanding The Uninsured: A Descriptive Study Of The U.S. Uninsured Population, Michael Barnett, Dr. Eric Eide

Journal of Undergraduate Research

My initial research topic was to determine whether individuals who needed longterm care dispersed their assets in order to qualify for Medicaid coverage. In doing this, I hoped to identify the existence of a relationship between asset dispersion and longterm Medicare claims and then quantify the affect of this relationship. However, as is often the case with research, my mentor and I ran into problems. The main problem was that we did not gain access to the newly released data set that linked the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services data with the Panel Study of Income Dynamics data. Because …

Hospital Contributions To Public Health Activities Before And After Aca: Incentives, Constraints & Crowd-Out, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Research Objective: The Affordable Care Act created enhanced IRS requirements for not-for-profit hospitals regarding the provision of community benefits, potentially stimulating new approaches to community health needs assessment, priority setting, and engagement with public health agencies and other community stakeholders. Yet the economic downturn has constrained hospital earnings and increased demand for uncompensated care, potentially crowding out hospital contributions to public health activities. This study uses data from 1998-2012 on a national cohort of communities to examine: (1) the extent and nature of change in hospital contributions to public health activities; and (2) the economic, institutional, and policy-related factors that …

Bricks & Mortar: Tax Policy Swings To Those Who Rent Homes, Tom Dunne

Articles

A major change in Ireland in recent years has been the rapid fall in home ownership, down from 75pc of households in 2006 to 70pc at present.

This brings Ireland more into line with home ownership rates in the US and UK, lower than those of southern Europe but higher than the prosperous economies of northern Europe where long-term renting is very common.

In the public mind, however, this lower level of owner occupancy is seen as temporary and symptomatic of a distressed economy where buyers have difficulty obtaining mortgages and in any event are content to stand off a …

Mexico Consensus Economic Forecast, Volume 16, Number 2, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Adam G. Walke

Departmental Papers (E & F)

No abstract provided.

Impact Of Eu Crisis On Saarc Countries, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Talks, Speeches, & Discourse

It is a matter of honour and privilege for me to be invited to share my thoughts with this august gathering of SAARC Governors. I wish to thank the Governor State Bank of Pakistan Mr. Yasin Anwar for providing me this opportunity. I would like to begin by briefly tracing the origin of the crisis of 2008/09 and then presenting the evidence about the changing role of Emerging and Developing Economies (EDEs) in the aftermath of the crisis. I would then turn to the subset of SAARC countries and see as to how much they were affected by this crisis. …

Blue Growth In The Middle Kingdom: An Analysis Of China’S Ocean Economy, Rui Zhao, Stephen Hynes, Guang Shun He

Working Papers

This paper builds on the work carried out by OEAS in China, which established the framework of ocean economy accounting in China. It also demonstrates how it is possible to compile ocean economy data, from the existing government databases in China. The Chinese ocean economy was divided into two separate parts for the purpose of the analysis presented; the ocean industry and ocean-related industry. Data was collected for 12 major ocean industries. Using a similar methodology to that developed in previous international studies, it was found that the major ocean industries produced US$239.09 billion in value added output in 2010 …

Growth And Government Transfers, Benjamin Tengelsen, Dr. Richard Evans

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Government transfers to households take many forms, including unemployment benefits, food stamps, social security, and cash handouts to households to stimulate consumption. Generally, these transfer programs act as “automatic stabilizers” due to the way they naturally increase (decrease) when economies are weak (strong). Often policy-makers suggest increasing these programs beyond their natural expansion during economic down-turns to bolster consumption. For example, Australia spent around 80% of its stimulus funds in the form of government checks to eligible citizens (Kennedy, 2009). Borrowing the methodology of Alesina and Ardagna(2009), we show that although many assume a positive correlation between government transfers and …

Analyzing Return On Investment In Public Health: Implications And Future Directions, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Return on investment (ROI) analyses of public health programs, policies, and services are being undertaken with increasing frequency to provide assessments of the value of these activities. This presentation reviews current initiatives and future directions for improving the quality of ROI studies and their application to real-world public health policy and administrative decisions.

Examining The Essential Employability Attributes From Different Perspectives, Deanna To Lau, Charles Chan, Kelvin Chan, George Cheung, Oscar Ng, Shuk Yi, Ivy Liu, Po Lung, Prosper Chan

Practical Social and Industrial Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

Harnessing The Power Of Public Health Systems For Injury Prevention & Control, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Efforts to improve population health hinge on a vast yet diffuse constellation of government agencies, health care providers, and community organizations that assume responsibilities in implementing prevention programs and policies across the U.S. Realizing the full health and economic benefits of injury prevention and control initiatives requires mobilizing and managing these complex and heterogeneous public health delivery systems. This session will explore the emerging science of public health delivery systems and what it tells us about improving injury prevention and control amid policy and economic change.

Expenditure, Confidence, And Uncertainty: Identifying Shocks To Consumer Confidence Using Daily Data, Marta Lachowska

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

The importance of consumer confidence in stimulating economic activity is a disputed issue in macroeconomics. Do changes in confidence represent autonomous fluctuations in optimism, independent of information on economic fundamentals, or are they a reflection of economic news? I study this question by using high-frequency microdata on spending and consumer confidence, and I find that consumer confidence contains information relevant to predicting spending, independent from other indicators. The exogenous movements in consumer confidence lead to very short fluctuations in consumer spending, consistent with the hypothesis that more consumer confidence reflects less uncertainty about the future.

Public Health Delivery Systems And Population Health, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Despite high overall health expenditures, the U.S. continues to fall behind other high-income countries on many measures of population health. While health care delivery systems are now studied intensively for solutions to U.S. cost and quality problems, the nation's delivery systems for public health programs and policies are only now becoming the subject of rigorous empirical study. This presentation examines recent studies of public health delivery systems and important directions for future inquiry.

Does Size Matter? Scaling Of Co2 Emissions And U.S. Urban Areas, Michail Fragkias, José Lobo, Deborah Strumsky, Karen C. Seto

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Urban areas consume more than 66% of the world’s energy and generate more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. With the world’s population expected to reach 10 billion by 2100, nearly 90% of whom will live in urban areas, a critical question for planetary sustainability is how the size of cities affects energy use and carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions. Are larger cities more energy and emissions efficient than smaller ones? Do larger cities exhibit gains from economies of scale with regard to emissions? Here we examine the relationship between city size and CO₂ emissions for U.S. …

Endogenous Group Formation Via Unproductive Costs, Jason A. Aimone, Laurence R. Iannaccone, Michael D. Makowsky, Jared Rubin

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Sacrifice is widely believed to enhance cooperation in churches, communes, gangs, clans, military units, and many other groups. We find that sacrifice can also work in the lab, apart from special ideologies, identities, or interactions. Our subjects play a modified VCM game—one in which they can voluntarily join groups that provide reduced rates of return on private investment. This leads to both endogenous sorting (because free-riders tend to reject the reduced-rate option) and substitution (because reduced private productivity favours increased club involvement). Seemingly unproductive costs thus serve to screen out free-riders, attract conditional cooperators, boost club production, and increase member …

Are Volatile Coffee Prices Important To Economic Inequality?, Kwame D. Fynn

The Macalester Review

Historically, developing countries have been heavily dependent on natural resources as a major source of national income. Despite their large resource endowments, countries have been subject to volatile commodity prices which might affect the economic development of a nation. A salient measure of development is the inequality that persists within an economy as it portrays relative levels of income distribution. In this paper, using an econometric approach I seek to analyze the impact volatile coffee prices has on income inequality within a country or in a particular geographic region.

An Econometric Analysis On Pricing And Market Structure In The U.S. Airline Industry, Jiajun Liang

The Macalester Review

This paper examines the relationship between market power and airfares in the U.S. aviation industry. I performed Hausman-Taylor and random effects estimation techniques on quarterly data of the top one thousand most heavily traveled city pairs from 2009 to 2012. Overall, the regression results may be interpreted in such way that while higher concentration at a route level increases ticket prices, it nonetheless reduces average airfare at the airport level. For policy implications, it may suggest that higher market concentration has at least some merits to the consumers, most likely caused by the cost saving due to economic use of …

Transition To Full-Fledged Inflation Targeting: A Proposed Programme For Implementation By The Central Bank Of Nigeria, Michael O. Ojo

CBN Occasional Papers

This paper attempts to provide an input into addressing these issues, especially as regards resolving the technical, administrative and practical problems for a transition to inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policy in Nigeria. Specifically, the main purpose of this paper is to outline proposals that would permit the CBN transit successfully to full-fledged inflation targeting (FFIT) for its monetary policy operations. Following the introduction (Section 1), the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 examines the conceptual framework, focusing on the essential elements and modalities of different monetary policy frameworks. Section 3 contains an overview of the experiences …

Sustainability In Zambia, Africa: Examining Partnership Of An Agricultural Business And A Non-Profit Organization, Kaitlin Grace O'Leary

Ethnic Studies

The purpose of my study is examining the ways in which agricultural

business is currently supporting and benefitting a non-profit organization.

Through participation of an international agricultural business, Plant Sciences Inc.

(PSI) and a Christian non-profit organization, Lifesong for Orphans, this study

has been a collaborative effort and process, observing agriculture as a means of

sustainability for a non-profit organization. This study has revealed the necessity

of not only updated technology and resources, but has also discovered a continued

necessity of dedicated personnel to the field. A major theme from my

observations was cross-cultural relations, and the ways in which …

An Analysis Of The Monetary Policy Transmission Mechanism And The Real Economy In Nigeria, Eddy C. Ndekwu

CBN Occasional Papers

The study is an empirical analysis which seeks to explain the monetary policy transmission mechanism to the real economy in Nigeria. It examines the process by which the interest rate policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria actually affects the structure of interest rates, credit, aggregate demand and output production and, hence, changes in inflation rate. In the analysis, we review the paradigm of the channels of monetary policy transmission mechanism by studying over two and-half dozen cases of empirical studies in the economic literature. By applying vector auto-regression (VAR) with dynamic logarithmic form and the ordinary least squares (OLS) …

The Disparate Neighborhood Impacts Of The Great Recession: Evidence From Chicago, Sonya Williams, George C. Galster, Nandita Verma

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

We advance scholarship about how macroeconomic forces differentially manifest themselves across local spaces by developing a holistic conceptual framework and empirical analyses involving multilevel change modeling. Unlike prior work, we examine differential rates of change in neighborhood indicators. We illustrate our approach with Chicago data measuring the crime, housing, and economic domains of neighborhood quality- of-life over the 2000-2009 period. We find that the local dynamic manifestations of macroeconomic cycles were far more nuanced than have been previously observed. Neighborhood indicators moved along distinct trajectories, sometimes but not necessarily tracking each other or the overall business cycle, and they changed …

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

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Impacts Of The Federal Farm And Ranch Lands Protection Program: An Assessment Based On Interviews With Participating Landowners, J. Dixon Esseks, Brian J. Schilling, Alexander Hahn

Center for Great Plains Studies: Staff and Fellows Publications

Focus of the Study

From mid-February to mid-May 2012, a research team at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln surveyed 506 owners whose agricultural land was protected from development through conservation easements that were funded in part by USDA’s Farm and Ranch Lands Protection Program (FRPP). This program “provides matching funds to help purchase development rights to keep productive farm and ranchland in agricultural uses. Working through existing programs, USDA partners with State, tribal, or local governments and non-governmental organizations to acquire conservation easements or other interests in land from landowners, USDA provides up to 50 percent of the fair market easement …

The Organic Beauty Industry: A Gendered Economic Review, Brianna D. Connelly

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Organic beauty has grown to a $6 billion dollar industry supplying consumers with products that align with unique social consumption preferences. This thesis explores the historical economic perspective of the traditional beauty industry and the development of the organic beauty industry. Capitalism influenced the traditional beauty industry during the pursuit for profits that lead to jeopardizing customer and environmental safety. Consumers responded to this behavior by founding an organic beauty industry that not only considered social issues, but negated gendered beauty standards in the process. Organic product efficacy has emerged as an issue that must be dealt with by regulation …

The Status Costs Of Subordinate Cultural Capital: At-Home Fathers' Collective Pursuit Of Cultural Legitimacy Through Capitalizing Consumption Practices, Gokcen Coskuner-Balli, Craig J. Thompson

Business Faculty Articles and Research

Consumer researchers have primarily conceptualized cultural capital either as an endowed stock of resources that tend to reproduce socioeconomic hierarchies among consumer collectivities or as constellations of knowledge and skill that consumers acquire by making identity investments in a given consumption field. These studies, however, have given scant attention to the theoretical distinction between dominant and subordinate forms of cultural capital, with the latter affording comparatively lower conversion rates for economic, social, and symbolic capital. To redress this oversight, this article presents a multimethod investigation of middle-class men who are performing the emergent gender role of at-home fatherhood. Our analysis …

Love, Toil, And Health Insurance: Why American Husbands Retire When They Do, Joshua Congdon-Hohman

Economics Department Working Papers

The provision of health insurance has previously been shown to be an important determinant of retirement timing among older Americans, but the existing literature has largely ignored some aspects of the inter-spousal dependence of health insurance benefits. Specifically, the literature examines only how retirement may affect the health insurance available to the potential retiree but not how it might affect a spouse's options. Using data from the Health and Retirement Study, I find that the impact a husband's retirement might have on a wife's health insurance options has a statistically significant impact on a husband's rate of retirement that is …

Economic Growth And The Optimal Level Of Entrepreneurship, Catherine Bampoky, Luisa Blanco, Aolong Liu, James Prieger

School of Public Policy Working Papers

What is the “growth penalty” when a country’s entrepreneurship deviates from its optimal level? We use data on entrepreneurship for a panel of developed and developing countries over 2003-2011 to estimate growth equations. We treat the impact of entrepreneurship on real GDP growth as heterogeneous across countries. The methodology accounts for unobserved heterogeneity among countries in the optimal entrepreneurship rate and other factors affecting growth. In less developed countries, there is not enough entrepreneurship, and increases in the entrepreneurship rate have a sizeable positive effect on growth. In high income countries, entrepreneurship appears to be close to the optimum. We …

Tax Reform : Toward A Simpler, More Pro-Growth Tax Regime, Lok Sang Ho

Centre for Public Policy Studies : CPPS Working Paper Series

This paper proposes that tax reform should take the direction of focusing on economic rent as the tax base. Since personal incomes that are very high typically carries a large component of economic rent, even very high marginal tax rates may not have much adverse effect on effort provided that the tax bands are wide enough so that, say, 90% of the working population will enjoy very low marginal tax rates. From this perspective, the author proposes to abolish the profits tax altogether, but to treat dividends and capital gains (net of inflationary gains) the same as labor income.

(Ir)Rational Exuberance: Optimism, Ambiguity And Risk, Anat Bracha, Donald J. Brown

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The equilibrium prices in asset markets, as stated by Keynes (1930): “…will be fixed at the point at which the sales of the bears and the purchases of the bulls are balanced.” We propose a descriptive theory of finance explicating Keynes’ claim that the prices of assets today equilibrate the optimism and pessimism of bulls and bears regarding the payoffs of assets tomorrow. This equilibration of optimistic and pessimistic beliefs of investors is a consequence of investors maximizing Keynesian utilities subject to budget constraints defined by market prices and investor’s income. The set of Keynesian utilities is a new class …

Adverse Selection And An Individual Mandate: When Theory Meets Practice, Martin B. Hackmann, Jonathan T. Kolstad, Amanda E. Kowalski

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop a model of selection that incorporates a key element of recent health reforms: an individual mandate. We identify a set of key parameters for welfare analysis, allowing us to model the welfare impact of the actual policy as well as to estimate the socially optimal penalty level. Using data from Massachusetts, we estimate the key parameters of the model. We compare health insurance coverage, premiums, and insurer average health claim expenditures between Massachusetts and other states in the periods before and after the passage of Massachusetts health reform. In the individual market for health insurance, we find that …