Economics Commons^™

Direct Comparison Of Apremilast And Best Supportive Care Using A Discrete Event Simulation, Zoe Clancy, Pharmd

Master of Science in Applied Health Economics and Outcomes Research Capstone Presentations

Apremilast is compared to best supportive care (BSC), and response to treatment is assessed after a trial period of 16 weeks, which corresponds to the primary efficacy endpoint in the apremilast clinical trials. DES is a technique that is event-based and models a population at the individual level in terms of utility, costs, and resource use. The DES was implemented as a series of input, calculation, and output flowcharts in Arena®. The DES reported an incremental QALY per patient of 0.16 and incremental cost per patient of $17,325. The Markov model reported an incremental QALY of 0.18 and incremental cost …

What To Do About Steel Dumping? There Are Better Responses Than Imposing Tariffs, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Exploring Economists & Society: Constructing Expert Identity, Joseph Fitzgerald, Brendan O'Rourke

Conference papers

The recent economic crisis has created a heightened interest in economics and greater demand for economics experts. The media has played an important role in meeting this demand as mediated expertise is relied upon to understand the complex relationships within society (Albaek, Christiansen and Togeby 2003; Beck 1992; Boyce 2006; Giddens 1990). Such interactions of experts with media are a key element of the knowledge flows within society (Sturdy et al. 2009) and so have attracted research attention (Ekstrom and Lundell 2011; Hutchby 2006; Montgomery 2008). This paper contributes to this literature by focusing on the under-researched area of the …

Trade, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Provides a historical overview of analysis of U.S. foreign trade policy during the early decades of the country's history. Examines bilateral U.S. trade relations with France and Great Britain, provides import and export statistics, details on commodities and products imports and exported, trade statistics, and information on the political and economic factors shaping U.S. trade during this period.

Coastal Defenses, U.S., Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Provides an overview of U.S. military coastal defenses during the period up to and including the War 1812.

Revenue, U.S. Government, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Provides a historical overview of U.S. Government revenue receipts and spending during the early years of national history. Presents revenue generation statistics, information on revenue sources, and information on domestic and international political and economic factors affecting government revenue receipts.

New York Stock Exchange, Bert Chapman

Libraries Faculty and Staff Scholarship and Research

Provides a historical overview of the origins and early development of the New York Stock Exchange.

“It’S Like Rating A Blender”, Michael Hemesath

Administration Publications

No abstract provided.

Creative Economies: Using Arts To Revitalize Post-Industrial Cities And Towns In Massachusetts, Anna Price

Honors College Theses

During my senior year in the Honors College at UMass Boston, I became involved in the yearlong Creative and Social Entrepreneurship Fellowship program. During this program, I interned alongside other UMass Boston students at a local creative non-profit organization, providing the staff with assistance as they worked towards achieving their goals. This internship was funded by the Creative Economy Fund (CE Fund) from the University of Massachusetts President’s Office. My involvement in this program sparked an interest in pursuing an Honors thesis investigating the CE Fund and how the awarded projects are benefitted by that fund.

After looking through all …

Where's My Million?, Kevin Cool

Colby Magazine

New research by Grossman Professor of Economics Jan Hogendorn hints at troubling issues surrounding the marketing of lotteries.

Repeat Sales Methods For Growing Cities And Short Horizons, Karl L. Guntermann, Crocker Liu, Adam D. Nowak

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

The accurate estimation of real estate indices is important for many purposes. A common method to estimate these indices is to use a repeat‐sales procedure. Although this does not require property attributes, this method discards a large amount of sales. This paper proposes a method that can be used to incorporate a significant percentage of these discarded observations without requiring additional data collection by the researcher. We apply our method to the metropolitan statistical areas of Phoenix and Seattle and find that standard errors are on average two‐thirds the value of standard errors from a repeat‐sales procedure in Seattle and …

College Credit For Non-College Work: Caveat Emptor, Michael Hemesath

Administration Publications

No abstract provided.

The Louis-Schmelling Paradox And The League Standing Effect, Brad R. Humphreys, Li Zhou

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

Fifty years on we examine two key propositions in Neale's (1964) "Peculiar Economics": the need for competitors in sport to have opponents of similar ability in order to earn large revenues and the effect of frequent changes sports leagues' standings on consumer demand. We develop a consumer choice model under uncertainty, and a structural econometric model, to motivate and test these ideas. Unfortunately, neither receives much empirical or theoretical support relative to alternative factors affecting consumer choice like loss aversion and home win preference.

Governance Matter: Morningstar Stewardship Grades And Mutual Fund Performance, Xiaping Jerry Cao, Aurobindo Ghosh, Choo Yong, Jeremy Goh, Wee Seng Ng

Research Collection School Of Economics

Mutual fund investors have the arduous task of disentangling luck from ability of mutual fund managers’ performance. In this paper we investigate the role of mutual fund corporate governance (measured by Morningstar Stewardship grade) in mutual fund performance. We propose an objective data-driven corporate governance score based on principal components of Morningstar Stewardship Grades. Furthermore, we establish corporate governance scores have Granger Causality on long-term risk-adjusted returns. The findings suggest that corporate governance grades of mutual funds carry information content beyond the usual star rating measures for predicting long-term mutual fund performance and provide an effective tool for selecting funds.

Delinking From Global Economy, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

Pakistanis may not be aware but the nefarious designs of extremists who wish to isolate Pakistan from the rest of the world seem to be working. Unknown to us, the creeping delinking of Pakistan from the global economy has intensified in the last few years. Evidence corroborating this finding is quite strong and is discussed below.

Pakistan is widely perceived and projected in the Western world as “the most dangerous country in the world” or as “the epicentre of global terrorism”. More recently, Karachi has been described as the “world’s most violent megacity” where the state seems to have “ceded …

State Revenue Forecasting Accuracy, Dan Williams, Joseph Ononchie

Publications and Research

This paper examines forecasting accuracy of state revenue forecasting for 50 states using data published on the National Association of State Budget Officer’s (NASBO) website (www.nasbo.org). The data shows four categories of revenue: sales tax, corporate income tax, personal income tax, and all other (as a residual from total taxes). It shows some evidence that forecast bias reflects a hedge against uncertainty; however, there is also evidence that there is a counterbalancing preference to find the money needed to provide the services demanded.

Adaptive Markov Chain Monte Carlo Sampling And Estimation In Mata, Matthew J. Baker

Economics Working Papers

I describe algorithms for drawing from distributions using adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, introduce a Mata function for performing adaptive MCMC, amcmc(), and a suite of functions amcmc *() allowing an alternative implementation of adaptive MCMC. amcmc() and amcmc *() may be used in conjunction with models set up to work with Mata's [M-5] moptimize( ) or [M-5] optimize( ), or with stand-alone functions. To show how the routines might be used in estimation problems, I give two examples of what Chernozukov and Hong (2003) refer to as Quasi-Bayesian or Laplace-Type estimators - simulation-based estimators employing MCMC sampling. …

The Pains Of Economic Reforms In China And Japan, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Asia’s two biggest economies face up to their most difficult challenges

Capital In The Twenty-First Century: A Tale Without Morality, Bruce D. Baker

SPU Works

Thomas Piketty has given economists a lot to argue about, but their arguments miss the point of the book’s success. “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” is not a bestseller based on its economic merits. It’s a bestseller because it speaks to a deep moral anxiety. Confidence in capitalism has been shaken. The crisis of 2008 exposed weaknesses in the financialization of our economy. Piketty makes a valiant contribution to economic theory and history, but his empiricism succumbs ultimately to the same flaw John Paul II diagnosed in Marxism—it leads to an incoherent statement of moral order.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- July 2014, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Hobby Lobby Ruling: The Crux Of The Problem Is Employer-Provided Health Insurance, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

From Mean And Median Income To The Most Adequate Way Of Taking Inequality Into Account, Vladik Kreinovich, Hung T. Nguyen, Rujira Ouncharoen

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

How can we compare the incomes of two different countries or regions? At first glance, it is sufficient to compare the mean incomes, but this is known to be not a very adequate comparison: according to this criterion, a very poor country with a few super-rich people may appear to be in good economic shape. A more adequate description of economy is the median income. However, the median is also not always fully adequate: e.g., raising the income of very poor people clearly improves the overall economy but does not change the median. In this paper, we use known techniques …

Editor's Note, Marites Tiongco

DLSU Business & Economics Review

No abstract provided.

Child Labor, The Wealth Paradox, And Common Forest Management In Bolivia, Randall Bluffstone

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

That wealthier developing country households may rely more heavily on child labor than poorer households has come to be known as the “wealth paradox.” This paper tests for a wealth paradox with regard to common natural resource wealth by analyzing the relationship between child labor and improved common property forest management (CPFM) in Bolivia. Data are analyzed using several econometric methods and it is found that households experiencing more effective CPFM generally use more forest-based and total child labor. The analysis also confirms others’ findings of a private wealth paradox with regard to private land and extends the analysis to …

Ceo Pay Over The Very Long Run, Kevin F. Hallock

Economics Faculty Publications

Recent work by economic historians shows people that while CEO pay has risen dramatically since the 1990s, such a trend was all but nonexistent from World War II through the mid-1970s. Imagine coming upon an article in a prestigious business publication titled "Another Decade of Deterioration in Top Executive Pay Compared to the Economy as a Whole." Its author, Arch Patton, reports data from a set of more than 400 "top managers" from 1953-1964. What is particularly startling is the size of the deterioration relative to the average. People know from piles of recent evidence that executive compensation has increased …

Defense Expenditures And Economic Growth In Pakistan And India: An Augmented Feder-Type Model, Muhammad Ramzan Sheikh

Business Review

To discover defense-growth nexus, this study has used Feder type model to capture the supply-side impacts for Pakistan and India. In Feder-type model, this study has used four sectors to find out total effects of defense spending on growth by using OLS technique. The findings of the study show that there is positive association between the total effect of defense and growth in all the sectors for both the countries. In augmented Feder type model, the total effects along with externality effects and productivity differential have been re-estimated. The sign of the total effects of defense sector remain the same …

The Role Of Individual Investors' Gambling Preference In January Effect, Nan Shao

Doctoral Dissertations

Rozeff and Kinney (1976) were the first to End that stocks in NYSE provide abnormally large returns in January. Following researchers such as Keim (1983), Branch and Chang (1990), and Bhardwaj and Brooks (1992), examine this "January effect" and find that small firms and low price stocks are more prone to this effect. The January effect is so robust that it is not a unique phenomenon in U.S., but also occurs in other countries (e.g., Gultekin and Gultekin, 1983; Kato and Schallheim, 1985; Tong, 1992); In addition, it not only occurs in the stock market, but also in the bond …

Selling Experiments: Menu Pricing Of Information, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Alex Smolin

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A monopolist sells informative experiments to heterogeneous buyers. Buyers differ in their prior information, and hence in their willingness to pay for additional signals. The monopolist can profitably offer a menu of experiments. We show that, even under costless information acquisition and free degrading of information, the optimal menu is quite coarse. The seller offers at most two experiments, and we derive conditions under which at vs. discriminatory pricing is optimal.

Dynamic Revenue Maximization: A Continuous Time Approach, Dirk Bergemann, Philipp Strack

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We characterize the revenue-maximizing mechanism for time separable allocation problems in continuous time. The willingness-to-pay of each agent is private information and changes over time. We derive the dynamic revenue-maximizing mechanism, analyze its qualitative structure and frequently derive its closed form solution. In the leading example of repeat sales of a good or service, we establish that commonly observed contract features such as at rates, free consumption units and two-part tariffs emerge as part of the optimal contract. We investigate in detail the environments in which the type of each agent follows an arithmetic or geometric Brownian motion or a …

Dynamic Revenue Maximization: A Continuous Time Approach, Dirk Bergemann, Philipp Strack

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We characterize the revenue-maximizing mechanism for time separable allocation problems in continuous time. The valuation of each agent is private information and changes over time. At the time of contracting every agent privately observes his initial type which influences the evolution of his valuation process. The leading example is the repeated sales of a good or a service. We derive the optimal dynamic mechanism, analyze its qualitative structure and frequently derive its closed form solution. This enables us to compare the distortion in various settings. In particular, we discuss the cases where the type of each agent follows an arithmetic …