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2014

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Articles 691 - 720 of 1582

Full-Text Articles in Economics

Typhoons And Lower Birth Weight In The Philippines, Sarah Morrow May 2014

Typhoons And Lower Birth Weight In The Philippines, Sarah Morrow

Master's Theses

Do typhoons impact birth weights of infants exposed to a typhoon while in utero? This research exploits the exogeneity and randomness of typhoons in the Philippines to estimate the impact of typhoon exposure as determined by wind speed on birth weights. Using four waves of the Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from the Philippines combined with temperature, precipitation, and rainfall data from the Philippines, I can empirically estimate the impact of a 1 m/s increase in wind speed on birth weights. I find that for certain subgroups of the population, specifically children born to mothers with primary education or …

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Heterogeneous Effects Of Commodity Price Shocks On Inflation Rates. Evidence From A Panel Study., Odbayar Batmunkh May 2014

Heterogeneous Effects Of Commodity Price Shocks On Inflation Rates. Evidence From A Panel Study., Odbayar Batmunkh

Master's Theses

Do commodity price shocks have heterogeneous effect on countries based on their export and import profiles? I address this question through a panel study of 142 countries using Export and Import Indexes aimed at differentiating the retail pass-through and fiscal balance channel of transmission of Commodity Price shocks on inflation. The results show that an increase in the Export Index leads to a decrease in contemporary inflation while an increase in the Import Index leads to an increase in inflation in the next year. Average causal mediating effect of the Export Index on Inflation through the Fiscal Balance was shown …

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How Is Sectoral Fdi Affecting Firms’ Performance In Mozambique?, Nilza A. Abdurramane May 2014

How Is Sectoral Fdi Affecting Firms’ Performance In Mozambique?, Nilza A. Abdurramane

Master's Theses

I study the effect of sectoral FDI on firms’ performance in Mozambique from 2007 to 2010 through productivity and efficiency functions, using comprehensive firm level data. Although foreign ownership has a positive effect on firms’ productivity, my results show that in general, sectoral FDI has a negative and statistically significant effect on Mozambican firms’ productivity. The findings of this study are similar to previous studies that argued that positive foreign spillovers were not automatic. Using a stochastic frontier model, to measure efficiency, I find that in general foreign firms tend to be more efficient than domestic firms. However, using this …

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More Commencement Season Silliness: This Time It’S Smith, Michael Hemesath May 2014

More Commencement Season Silliness: This Time It’S Smith, Michael Hemesath

Administration Publications

No abstract provided.

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The Ties That Bind: Candidate Appearance And Party Heuristics, Brandon D. Reilly May 2014

The Ties That Bind: Candidate Appearance And Party Heuristics, Brandon D. Reilly

Honors Theses

Studies on voting behavior have implications for academia and for real world applications. One of the main topics covered in studies of voting behavior is the use of heuristics to make voting decisions. A heuristic is a mental shortcut used to make a decision, and often times does not account for any careful consideration. According to the literature, an individual's party identification is the most commonly used heuristic in voting behavior. A voter will align with a political party based on preferences in policy (or perceived preferences) and vote for any candidate who bears the party's designation. There is also …

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Can Community Water Projects Combat Child Diarrhea? Results From The Solomon Islands, Thomas G. Sackman May 2014

Can Community Water Projects Combat Child Diarrhea? Results From The Solomon Islands, Thomas G. Sackman

Master's Theses

There is a vast amount of existing literature that has empirically scrutinized whether or not community water projects have the ability to mitigate diarrheal disease. A strong and persistent belief thinks that community water projects do have the means, however, over the decades empirical work commonly finds this to simply not be true. This study expands the research question to the Solomon Islands. The research tests the hypothesis using a differences-in-differences identification strategy by utilizing the government’s staggered timing rollout of community water subprojects with whether or not a village received a community water subproject to test for a program …

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Matrilineal Asset Inheritance, Female Bargaining Power, And Household Welfare In Malawi, Nicholas T. Garcia May 2014

Matrilineal Asset Inheritance, Female Bargaining Power, And Household Welfare In Malawi, Nicholas T. Garcia

Master's Theses

Matrilineal inheritance practices in Malawi exogenously determine female land holdings at the time of marriage, allowing for the identification of the effect of increased female bargaining power on household consumption decisions. I use the matrilineal ethnicity of the head of household as an instrument for the share of total household land inherited by the female head or male head’s wife. I find that child’s height-for-age decreases with female assets, and evidence suggesting increased consumption from households’ own production. Since the food basket from own consumption is high in carbs but not nutritious, long-term child health suffers despite receiving more resources …

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The Determinants Of Urban Land And Property Values: The Case Of Rwanda, Pierre Kolowe May 2014

The Determinants Of Urban Land And Property Values: The Case Of Rwanda, Pierre Kolowe

Master's Theses

Abstract: The paper seeks to determine the factor of urban housing values and their effects on the well-being of urban residents in terms of access to potable water, quality sanitation and other housing amenities. The study uses a total of 36 variables on structural, environmental and neighborhood attributes from the 2010-2011 survey data on income, expenditures and living conditions for the Rwandan urban households. With the use of the semi-log form of the hedonic price model and the survey data, factors of urban properties are determined and quantitative estimates of the Willingness-to-pay for environmental amenities are determined. The analysis of …

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Another Way To Assess The College Experience: A Caring Professor, Michael Hemesath May 2014

Another Way To Assess The College Experience: A Caring Professor, Michael Hemesath

Administration Publications

No abstract provided.

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Bubbles, Post-Crash Dynamics, And The Housing Market, Crocker H. Liu, Adam Nowak, Stuart Rosenthal May 2014

Bubbles, Post-Crash Dynamics, And The Housing Market, Crocker H. Liu, Adam Nowak, Stuart Rosenthal

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

This paper documents and explains previously unrecognized post-crash dynamics following the collapse of a housing bubble. A simple model predicts that speculative developers ensure stable pre-crash relative prices between small and large homes while their post-crash exit allows smallhome relative values to fall. Evidence from Phoenix supports the model. Although home prices doubled 2004-2006, relative prices of small-to-large homes remained nearly constant but then plummeted post-crash. As speculative developers return relative prices must return to pre-boom levels, consistent with patterns since 2011. Anticipated mean reversion indicates that cities can reduce post-crash volatility and mispricing by publicizing size-stratified house price indexes.

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Social Capital And Social Identity: Trust And Conflict, John B. Davis May 2014

Social Capital And Social Identity: Trust And Conflict, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

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Impact Of Typhoons On Children's Human Capital Investments In Filipino Households, Kate Zitelli May 2014

Impact Of Typhoons On Children's Human Capital Investments In Filipino Households, Kate Zitelli

Master's Theses

Typhoons are a unique type of natural disaster affecting both developing and developed countries, causing both short and long-term destruction. Typhoons are random both in intensity and frequency, making them difficult to predict their strength and when they will strike. With global climate change, typhoons are expected to increase in both frequency and magnitude, making it important to understand their impacts. This study uses DHS data from the Philippines and a unique Filipino typhoon data set covering they years 1989-2008 to explore how typhoons affect household allocation of basic human capital investments, such as breastfeeding duration. Using OLS estimation and …

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Early Life Rainfall And Later Life Human Capital Outcomes In Bangladesh, Thomas Dreesen May 2014

Early Life Rainfall And Later Life Human Capital Outcomes In Bangladesh, Thomas Dreesen

Master's Theses

How does early life rainfall impact later life human capital outcomes in Bangladesh? This paper examines the effect of exogenous rainfall shocks that occur during individuals early-life on later life health, wealth and education outcomes of Bangladeshi women born between 1952-1988. I link historical rainfall for each woman’s birth year and Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) cluster of birth with current outcomes from the 1999/2000, 2004 and 2007 survey rounds of the DHS. This study finds that rural women with 20% higher than mean rainfall in their year and cluster of birth are on average 0.24 cm taller and score …

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Does Being An Only Child Affect The Attitudes Of Chinese Students?, Yuwei Wei May 2014

Does Being An Only Child Affect The Attitudes Of Chinese Students?, Yuwei Wei

Senior Theses

Three decades has passed since China started implementing regulations and policies for population control. Today, the ever-famous “One-Child Policy” is starting to not only lose its popularity, but also its effectiveness in spurring economic growth. This paper will discuss the heavy social cost the last generation had to pay for the growth of economy and the slowing down of population growth, as well as the challenges in social adaptation young adults face today. As part of the literature review, this paper examines the issue of the “Upside down pyramid” and analyzes the family planning policy’s impact on China’s demography. The …

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Producing Population Health: Collective Action Requires Infrastructure, Incentives & Evidence, Glen P. Mays May 2014

Producing Population Health: Collective Action Requires Infrastructure, Incentives & Evidence, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Population health improvement strategies are collective action problems that require targeted infrastructure, incentives, and information to succeed. Research on collective action problems and solutions in public health and other spheres of practice offer insight for the successful scale and spread of population health innovations.

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Forecasting Corn And Soybean Yields With Crop Conditions, Nicholas Jorgensen, Matthew Diersen May 2014

Forecasting Corn And Soybean Yields With Crop Conditions, Nicholas Jorgensen, Matthew Diersen

Economics Commentator (1972- 2016)

No abstract provided.

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Crime In Game Theoretic Models: An Exploration Of The Rational Criminal In A Variety Of Frameworks, Benjamin A. Chalmers May 2014

Crime In Game Theoretic Models: An Exploration Of The Rational Criminal In A Variety Of Frameworks, Benjamin A. Chalmers

Student Scholarship

There is as much contention over the cause of crime as there is about how to solve it, and the two issues are inextricable from one another. While the idea of studying such a deeply social and humanistic issue through the ‘cold lens’ of mathematics may seem unorthodox or even unproductive to the layperson, the practice has become commonplace since Gary Becker’s introduction of the ‘rational criminal’ model in his paper Crime and Punishment: An Economic Approach in 1968. The rational criminal model is a method of explaining the actions of a criminal not by attributing them to an inherent …

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Women’S Empowerment And Community-Driven Development: Evidence From The Solomon Islands, Erin M. Steffen May 2014

Women’S Empowerment And Community-Driven Development: Evidence From The Solomon Islands, Erin M. Steffen

Master's Theses

The study evaluates the impact to-date of a community-driven development (CDD) program on women’s empowerment in the Solomon Islands. Originally launched in 2008, the CDD program is known as the Rural Development Program (RDP). The RDP aims to foster employment and income growth by focusing on participatory development, demand-responsive provisions of government services, and the creation of a supportive economic environment for small-scale rural development. The RDP process mandates female involvement, which manifests predominately in the selection of community infrastructure projects and by participation in a RDP subcommittee known as the Sub-Implementation Committee (SIC). Members of the SIC are in …

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Typhoons And Temperature Impact Crime Rates: Evidence From The Philippines, Emily Wetherley May 2014

Typhoons And Temperature Impact Crime Rates: Evidence From The Philippines, Emily Wetherley

Master's Theses

This study assesses the impact of typhoons and temperature on interpersonal, property, and non-index crime rates using a novel data set from the Philippines. Distributed lag OLS regression analysis shows that in the concurrent year of increased precipitation, theft rates decrease, but in the year following high average wind-speeds, theft rates increase again. The only significant result of impacts crimes against persons is the rate of physical injury which decreases in years of higher precipitation. These results are defended by interview and focus group information. This study also shows that higher average temperatures cause significantly higher rates of murder, index …

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Impact Of Natural Disaster Exposure On Prosocial Preferences And Public Goods Provision: Evidence From The Solomon Islands, Heather Belfor May 2014

Impact Of Natural Disaster Exposure On Prosocial Preferences And Public Goods Provision: Evidence From The Solomon Islands, Heather Belfor

Master's Theses

Natural disaster exposure can impact prosocial preferences, which indicate the level of social capital, as well as create a shift in investments from public to private goods. Both are important mechanisms to study in order to create optimal climate change adaptation policies. This study evaluates the impact of natural disaster exposure on prosocial preferences and public goods provision in the evaluated communities. The data used in this research comes from a process evaluation that was carried out in the Solomon Islands on the Rural Development Program (RDP) and a Structured Community Activity (SCA) experiment, which took place in 80 villages …

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Adam Smith: Providing Morality In A Free Market Economy, Kendra Tully May 2014

Adam Smith: Providing Morality In A Free Market Economy, Kendra Tully

Honors Program Theses and Projects

Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) and Wealth of Nations (WN) appear to suffer from an irresolvable tension: TMS extols human sympathy whereas WN extols the consequences of self-interest. This paper takes a comprehensive approach, adding to scholarship on what has become known as the “Adam Smith Problem.” There are traditionally four different approaches to the “Adam Smith Problem” in the secondary literature; economic, political, moral, and “principles” approach. Through a textual analysis of TMS and WN that focuses on prudence, the nature of happiness and Smith’s rhetorical style, this inconsistency between his two texts disappears. The emphasis Smith …

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The Ups And Downs In Women's Employment—Shifting Composition Or Behavior From 1970 To 2010?, Kristin E. Smith May 2014

The Ups And Downs In Women's Employment—Shifting Composition Or Behavior From 1970 To 2010?, Kristin E. Smith

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper tracks factors contributing to the ups and downs in women’s employment from 1970 to 2010 using regression decompositions focusing on whether changes are due to shifts in the means (composition of women) or due to shifts in coefficients (inclinations of women to work for pay). Compositional shifts in education exerted a positive effect on women’s employment across all decades, while shifts in the composition of other family income, particularly at the highest deciles, depressed married women’s employment over the 1990s contributing to the slowdown in this decade. A positive coefficient effect of education was found in all decades, …

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How Much Of The Heterogeneity In Returns To College Major Can Be Explained By Institution Type?, Olivia Warner May 2014

How Much Of The Heterogeneity In Returns To College Major Can Be Explained By Institution Type?, Olivia Warner

Economics Honors Projects

Rising post-secondary education costs have increased the importance of undergraduate students’ institution and field of study choices, two aspects of higher education that affect post-graduation earnings. This paper analyzes the impact of the interaction between college major and attending a liberal arts institution on post-graduation wages. Using data on Minnesota bachelor’s degree completers who were employed at Minnesota firms 6 to 18 months after graduation, I find robust evidence that the interaction is significant. Liberal arts students are disadvantaged when other institutional and individual characteristics are controlled for, but they may be relatively less so depending on field of study.

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What Is The Relationship Between Labor Law Compliance And Employment Growth In Cambodian Garment Exporting Factories?, Vidarith Chan May 2014

What Is The Relationship Between Labor Law Compliance And Employment Growth In Cambodian Garment Exporting Factories?, Vidarith Chan

Economics Honors Projects

In this study, I examine the short- and long-run relationship between labor law compliance and employment growth in the Cambodian garment exporting factories. My paper contributes to the literature in two ways. First, I use the original working conditions dataset (2001-2013) from the International Labor Organization's Better Factories Cambodia that has not been analyzed before. Second, I use panel data techniques to investigate the short- and long-run relationship between labor law compliance and employment growth. In the short-run, I find that labor law compliance has an inverse relationship with employment growth. However, in the long-run, the sign of the relationship …

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Trading On The Margins: To What Extent Do Developing Countries Benefit From Wto Membership?, Alison Goodrum May 2014

Trading On The Margins: To What Extent Do Developing Countries Benefit From Wto Membership?, Alison Goodrum

Economics Honors Projects

Building off of the analysis and statistical technique of Liu (2009), this paper examines the intersection between membership in the World Trade Organization and development status and their effects on the intensive and extensive margins of trade. This paper uses year by country pair panel data spanning the years 1950 to 2003 and covering 28,442 country pairs. Guided by the Helpman, Melitz and Rubinstein (2008) model of heterogeneous firms, this paper finds that the intersection between development status and WTO membership has a positive net effect on trade flows. Contrary to the previous literature, however, the net effects across the …

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Do U.S. Border Enforcement Operations Increase Human Smuggling Fees Along The U.S.-Mexico Border?, Kyle Coombs May 2014

Do U.S. Border Enforcement Operations Increase Human Smuggling Fees Along The U.S.-Mexico Border?, Kyle Coombs

Economics Honors Projects

Undocumented migrants frequently hire border crossing experts, called “coyotes” to facilitate a successful, safer crossing. U.S. border enforcement actively counters these migrants. U.S. measures of enforcement and coyote fees grew together during the 20th century, suggesting a connection between enforcement and the coyote market. This paper tests the effect of border patrol agents and operations on coyote fees using a dataset compiled from the Mexican Migration Project, U.S. Customs & Border Protection, the Department of Homeland Security, and the United States Sentencing Commission. I do not find a significant connection between coyote fees and border enforcement, but do show …

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Matlab Code For Structural Decomposition Analysis, Juan Tomas Sayago Gomez May 2014

Matlab Code For Structural Decomposition Analysis, Juan Tomas Sayago Gomez

Regional Research Institute Technical Documents

This TechDoc describes the steps necessary to apply the Structural Decomposition Analysis (SDA) using Matlab. The code has two stages. The first stage, which comprises PrepSDA.m and RAS SDA.m, prepares the data and the input required for SDA based on the accounting identities defined in Miller and Blair (2009) and Jackson and Schwarm (2011). The second stage (SDA.m) carries out the analysis and estimates the results based on the mathematical procedure in Yang and Lahr (2010) and Zhang and Lahr (2014). The end results can be exported into a csv file.

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Swedish Immigration: Why They Came To Minnesota, Emma Erickson May 2014

Swedish Immigration: Why They Came To Minnesota, Emma Erickson

Honors Capstones

Capstone submitted as a graduation requirement for the BSU Honors Program.

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Affirmative Action: A Middle Ground?, Michael Hemesath May 2014

Affirmative Action: A Middle Ground?, Michael Hemesath

Administration Publications

No abstract provided.

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Why Does Society Support Science? And How To Meet The Expectations?, Fred D. Ledley May 2014

Why Does Society Support Science? And How To Meet The Expectations?, Fred D. Ledley

Natural & Applied Sciences Faculty Publications

Public support for science is related less to the wonder of scientific discovery than the expectation that scientific and technological advances will lead to new product, jobs, and economic growth. Recent evidence suggests that these outcomes are not certain. Fred Ledley argues that the public is often promised the benefits of scientific discoveries without adequate consideration of the business challenges inherent in translating science for public benefit.

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