Economics Commons^™

Connecting India, Sam Pitroda

Asian Management Insights

Great inventions will not be born in the absence of the will and intent to embrace change and solve wideranging societal problems.

The New Dragon Dance, Sarita Mathur

Asian Management Insights

Is China moving to a new normal?

The Academic Effects Of Chronic Exposure To Neighborhood Violence, Amy Ellen Schwartz, Agustina Laurito, Johanna Lacoe, Patrick Sharkey, Ingrid Gould Ellen

Center for Policy Research

We estimate the causal effect of repeated exposure to violent crime on test scores in New York City. We use two distinct empirical strategies; value-added models linking student performance on standardized exams to violent crimes on a student’s residential block, and a regression discontinuity approach that identifies the acute effect of an additional crime exposure within a one-week window. Exposure to violent crime reduces academic performance. Value added models suggest the average effect is very small; approximately -0.01 standard deviations in English Language Arts (ELA) and mathematics. RD models suggest a larger effect, particularly among children previously exposed. The marginal …

Stationary Points For Parametric Stochastic Frontier Models, William C. Horrace, Ian A. Wright

Center for Policy Research

The results of Waldman (1982) on the Normal-Half Normal stochastic frontier model are generalized using the theory of the Dirac delta (Dirac, 1930), and distribution-free conditions are established to ensure a stationary point in the likelihood as the variance of the inefficiency distribution goes to zero. Stability of the stationary point and "wrong skew" results are derived or simulated for common parametric assumptions on the model. Identification is discussed.

Product Variety, Across-Market Demand Heterogeneity, And The Value Of Online Retail, Thomas W. Quan, Kevin R. Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Online retail gives consumers access to an astonishing variety of products. However, the additional value created by this variety depends on the extent to which local retailers already satisfy local demand. To quantify the gains and account for local demand, we use detailed data from an online retailer and propose methodology to address a common issue in such data-sparsity of local sales due to sampling and a significant number of local zeros. Our estimates indicate products face substantial demand heterogeneity across markets; as a result, we find gains from online variety that are 45% lower than previous studies.

2016 State Of The Commonwealth Report, James V. Koch, Vinod Agarwal, Barbara Blake-Gonzalez, Terry L. Clower, Vicky Curtis, Steve Daniel, Larry "Chip" Filer, Tim Komarek, Feng Lian, Sharon Lomax, Wolfgang Mairinger, Alice Mcadory, Robert Mcnab, Janet Molinaro, Mike Phelps, Ken Plum

Economics Faculty Books

This is the second State of the Commonwealth Report produced by the Center for Economic Analysis and Policy at Old Dominion University. It is jointly sponsored by ODU's Strome College of Business and the Virginia Chamber of Commerce. While the report represents the work of many people connected in various ways to the university, it does not constitute an official viewpoint of Old Dominion, or it's president, John R. Broderick. Similarly, it does not represent the views of the Virginia Chamber of Commerce or it's president, Barry DuVal.

The report maintains the goal of stimulating thought and discussion that ultimately …

Pegxit Pressure: Evidence From The Classical Gold Standard, Kris James Mitchener, Gonçalo Pina

Economics

We develop a simple model that highlights the costs and benefits of fixed exchange rates as they relate to trade, and show that negative export-price shocks reduce fiscal revenue and increase the likelihood of an expected currency devaluation. Using a new high-frequency data set on commodity-price movements from the classical gold standard era, we then show that the model’s main prediction holds even for the canonical example of hard pegs. We identify a negative causal relationship between export-price shocks and currency-risk premia in emerging market economies, indicating that negative export-price shocks increased the probability that countries abandoned their pegs.

Job-Destroying Effects Of $15 Minimum Wage By Metro, Industry And Occupation, Andrew R. Hanson, Zackary Hawley

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Breaking Bad In Bourbon Country: Does Alcohol Prohibition Encourage Methamphetamine Production?, Jose Fernandez, Stephan Gohmann, Joshua C. Pinkston

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

This paper examines the influence of local alcohol prohibition on the prevalence of methamphetamine labs. Using multiple sources of data for counties in Kentucky, we compare various measures of meth manufacturing in wet, moist, and dry counties. Our preferred estimates address the endogeneity of local alcohol policies by exploiting differences in counties’ religious compositions between the 1930s, when most local-option votes took place, and recent years. Even controlling for current religious affiliations, religious composition following the end of national Prohibition strongly predicts current alcohol restrictions. We carefully examine the validity of our identifying assumptions, and consider identification under alternative assumptions. …

The Pros And Cons Of Workplace Tournaments, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Tournaments are commonly used in the workplace to determine promotion, assign bonuses, and motivate personal development. Tournament-based contracts can be very effective in eliciting high effort, often outperforming other compensation contracts, but they can also have negative consequences for both managers and workers. The benefits and disadvantages of workplace tournaments have been identified in theoretical, empirical, and experimental research over the past several decades. Based on these findings, I provide suggestions and guidelines for when it might be beneficial to use tournaments in the workplace.

Who Wins In An Energy Boom? Evidence From Wage Rates And Housing, Grant D. Jacobsen

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

This paper presents evidence on the distributional effects of energy extraction by examining the recent U.S. energy boom. The boom increased local wage rates in almost every major occupational category. The increase occurred regardless of whether the occupation experienced a corresponding change in employment, suggesting a more competitive labor market that benefited local workers. Local housing values and rental prices both increased, thereby benefiting landowners. For renters, the increase in prices was completely offset by a contemporaneous increase in income. The results indicate that bans on drilling have negative monetary consequences for a large share of local residents.

Days To Cover And Stock Returns, Harrison G. Hong, Frank Weikai Li, Sophie X. Ni, Jose A. Scheinkman, Philip Yan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

A crowded trade emerges when speculators' positions are large relative to the asset's liquidity, making exit difficult. We study this problem of recent regulatory concern by focusing on short-selling. We show that days to cover (DTC), the ratio of short interest to trading volume, measures the costliness of exiting crowded trades. Crowding is an important concern as short-sellers avoid illiquid stocks, which we establish using an instrumental-variables strategy involving staggered stock market decimalization reforms. Arbitrageurs require a premium to enter into such trades as a strategy shorting high DTC stocks and buying low DTC stocks generates a 1.2% monthly return. …

Homogeneity Pursuit In Panel Data Models: Theory And Applications, Wuyi Wang, Peter C. B. Phillips, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies estimation of a panel data model with latent structures where individuals can be classified into different groups where slope parameters are homogeneous within the same group but heterogeneous across groups. To identify the unknown group structure of vector parameters, we design an algorithm called Panel-CARDS which is a systematic extension of the CARDS procedure proposed by Ke, Fan, and Wu (2015) in a cross section framework. The extension addresses the problem of comparing vector coefficients in a panel model for homogeneity and introduces a new concept of controlled classification of multidimensional quantities called the segmentation net. We …

Asymptotically Refined Score And Gof Tests For Inverse Gaussian Models, Anthony F. Desmond, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The score test and the GOF test for the inverse Gaussian distribution, in particular the latter, are known to have large size distortion and hence unreliable power when referring to the asymptotic critical values. We show in this paper that with the appropriately bootstrapped critical values, these tests become second-order accurate, with size distortion being essentially eliminated and power more reliable. Two major generalizations of the score test are made: one is to allow the data to be right-censored, and the other is to allow the existence of covariate effects. A data mapping method is introduced for the bootstrap to …

Shrinkage Estimation Of Covariance Matrix For Portfolio Choice With High Frequency Data, Cheng Liu, Ningning Xia, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper examines the usefulness of high frequency data in estimating the covariancematrix for portfolio choice when the portfolio size is large. A computationally convenientnonlinear shrinkage estimator for the integrated covariance (ICV) matrix of financial as-sets is developed in two steps. The eigenvectors of the ICV are first constructed from adesigned time variation adjusted realized covariance matrix of noise-free log-returns of rel-atively low frequency data. Then the regularized eigenvalues of the ICV are estimated byquasi-maximum likelihood based on high frequency data. The estimator is always positivedefinite and its inverse is the estimator of the inverse of ICV. It minimizes the …

Identifying Latent Structures In Panel Data, Liangjun Su, Zhentao Shi, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper provides a novel mechanism for identifying and estimating latent group structures in panel data using penalized techniques. We consider both linear and nonlinear models where the regression coefficients are heterogeneous across groups but homogeneous within a group and the group membership is unknown. Two approaches are consideredpenalized profile likelihood (PPL) estimation for the general nonlinear models without endogenous regressors, and penalized GMM (PGMM) estimation for linear models with endogeneity. In both cases, we develop a new variant of Lasso called classifier-Lasso (C-Lasso) that serves to shrink individual coefficients to the unknown group-specific coefficients. C-Lasso achieves simultaneous classification and …

Semiparametric Single Index Panel Data Models With Interactive Fixed Effects: Theory And Practice, Guohua Feng, Bin Peng, Liangjun Su, Thomas Tao Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we propose a single-index panel data model with unobserved multiple interactive fixed effects. This model has the advantages of being flexible and of being able to allow for common shocks and their heterogeneous impacts on cross sections, thus making it suitable for the investigation of many economic issues. We derive asymptotic theories for both the case where the link function is integrable and the case where the link function is non-integrable. Our Monte Carlo simulations show that our methodology works well for large N and T cases. In our empirical application, we illustrate our model by analyzing …

Invitation Strategy For Cutting Edge Industries Through Mncs And Global Talents: The Case Of Singapore, Kim Song Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

Singapore presents an interesting case of how a country achieves dynamic economic development and innovation through the "invitation" strategy of a business hub. Despite being a small city-state with limited domestic market size and no meaningful hinterland or natural resources to speak of, Singapore has managed to transform its economy dramatically over the past 50 years by leveraging the strengths of other economies. Specifically, it has been able to attract (or "invite") various types of productive resources, including foreign capital, foreign technology and foreign workers (both skilled and unskilled) to make up for what it lacks. This has helped Singapore …

Bias Correction And Refined Inferences For Fixed Effects Spatial Panel Data Models, Zhenlin Yang, Jihai Yu, Shew Fan Liu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper first presents simple methods for conducting up to third-order bias and variance corrections for the quasi maximum likelihood (QML) estimators of the spatial parameter(s) in the fixed effects spatial panel data (FE-SPD) models. Then, it shows how the bias and variance corrections lead to refined t-ratios for spatial effects and for covariate effects. The implementation of these corrections depends on the proposed bootstrap methods of which validity is established. Monte Carlo results reveal that (i) the QML estimators of the spatial parameters can be quite biased, (ii) a second-order bias correction effectively removes the bias, and (iii) the …

Ownership Structure Impact On Exchange Rate Exposure Under The Rmb Regime Reform, Luning Jia

Lingnan Theses

This thesis investigates effects of exchange rate exposure upon stock returns of a large sample of Chinese firms when they are divided into SOEs and non-SOEs. I obtain the exposure estimates first and examine their determinants. By extending the current literature, I introduce the ownership structure into the framework and I compare different ownership impacts on the exposure before and after the Reform. My study shows that a SOE or non-SOE firm makes no difference in facing the exchange rate exposure before the Reform. If a firm is a SOE, the firm faces smaller exposure after the Reform. I further …

Losing My Religion? The Impact Of Spiritual Cues On Noncognitive Skills, Daniel H. Bowen, Albert Cheng

Journal of Catholic Education

Studies consistently show that Catholic schools produce positive impacts on educational outcomes. Many charter school networks in the United States now provide, what are essentially, secularized versions of the Catholic education model. However, charter schools cannot legally replicate the overt religious curriculum and mission of Catholic schools. Although difficult to disentangle its impacts from confounding variables, research suggests that religiosity is a positive predictor of educational outcomes. This relationship might suggest that religious-based education produces effects on outcomes of public value that could be difficult to replicate in secularized contexts. To examine this question we conducted an experiment where 180 …

The Roles Of Knowledge Assets In Promoting Firm Productivity And Innovation In China, Jingsi Yang

Lingnan Theses

This paper investigates how intangible knowledge assets impact upon the firm’s products and the output of new products through a large panel data set covering all manufacturing firms from the period of 1998-2007. We hypothesize that more knowledge assets have a positive impact on total factor productivity and the ratio of new products to total products, but only up to a point, due to the importance of complementary assets. The inverse quadratic relationship found in the relationship between the ratio of knowledge assets to total assets and TFP suggests that it is necessary to balance knowledge assets with complementary assets …

The Event At Rebecca Farms - 2016, Megan Schultz

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

This study was conducted for Rebecca Farm to provide insight into the characteristics of attendees to the seventh annual The Event at Rebecca Farm. Paper surveys were completed by 479 attendees of the event. Results show that 54% of attendees were residents of Montana and of those 30% came from outside of Flathead County. Visitors spent an average of 5.29 nights in the Flathead Valley area. More people spent money on hotel/motel, restaurant/bar, and at the Rebecca Farm Trade Fair while visiting the area than other spending categories. Respondents to the survey reported total spending of $330,806 in the Flathead …

Economic Impact Of Small Scale Event To The Local Economy: Case Of Canfield Fair, Sungsoo Kim, James Dombrosky

Journal of Tourism Insights

This study examines the economic contribution of the Canfield Fair on the local community. The fair accounted for $13,419,332 in new money generated in the local economy and total expenditures of $16,874,927. Out of this total, $9,578,936 was generated from out-of-town visitors, versus $7,295,991 from local attendees. The initial amount of $9,578,936 spent by visitors created direct, indirect, and induced impacts within the local economy. The direct effect of this spending as estimated by an IMPLAN input/output model was $8,166,956, with $2,880,940 and $2,371,436 as indirect and induced impacts respectively, for a total aggregate effect on local earnings of $13,419,332.

Young African Leaders Forum (Yalf) Developmental Projects, Terea Abila

Young African Leaders Journal of Development

The Young African Leaders Forum is actively engaged in developmental projects that would see a sustainable Africa in the near future. The young leaders have committed themselves to undertaking specific projects in their countries. These projects keenly focus on playing a major role in the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals and the African Union’s Agenda 2063. YALF passionately undertakes these developmental projects because we believe that Africa has the enormous potential to empower her people and ensure her challenges are solved in an amicable manner. The youth leaders have dedicated themselves to serving voluntarily in their communities and this has …

Angels And Demons: Using Behavioral Types In A Real-Effort Moral Dilemma To Identify Expert Traits, Hernan Bejarano, Ellen P. Green, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Publications

In this article, we explore how independently reported measures of subjects' cognitive capabilities, preferences, and sociodemographic characteristics relate to their behavior in a real-effort moral dilemma experiment. To do this, we use a unique dataset, the Chapman Preferences and Characteristics Instrument Set (CPCIS), which contains over 30 standardized measures of preferences and characteristics. We find that simple correlation analysis provides an incomplete picture of how individual measures relate to behavior. In contrast, clustering subjects into groups based on observed behavior in the real-effort task reveals important systematic differences in individual characteristics across groups. However, while we find more differences, these …

Four Empirical Essays In Development Economics, Haftom Bayray Kahsay

Lingnan Theses

This dissertation contains four empirical studies on related topics in development economics. The four studies are all randomized field experiments and all of them use original data obtained from rural households in Northern Ethiopia for empirical analysis. The first study examines the medium term effects of commercial weather index insurance. I examine a randomized controlled trial in which commercial weather index insurance was offered to rural households who are highly vulnerable to drought. The results show that weather index insurance can significantly improve agricultural investments, agricultural yield and also household finance.

The second study evaluates the effects of weather index …

The State Of African Economy And A Way Forward, Florian Cyril Mshanga

Young African Leaders Journal of Development

The current emerging market downturn in economic powerhouses like China, has already negatively affected African economic growth. For resource-rich countries, it is a chance to improve their public investment management (PIM) system, which could help boost growth; although from experience drawn, Sub-Saharan oil resourced countries on average score lower in PIM, reflecting weak administrative capacity and low transparency in the use of public resources, especially at the project appraisal and evaluation stages of the PIM process. Countries that have successfully diversified their economies will suffer less than those that have not and they will enjoy less stress than countries depending …

The Impact Of Oil Price On Ghana's Inflation, Albert Mcbell Ninepence

Young African Leaders Journal of Development

World oil price is a momentous determinant of global economic performance. In most cases, when oil prices skyrockets, it leads to a transfer of income from importing countries to exporting countries through trade shifts. The link between oil and inflation is mostly seen as being correlational. The direct relationship between oil and inflation was evident in the 1970’s nevertheless this relationship started to deteriorate after the 1980’s. Quite a cornucopia of researchers have made relentless inquiry on the macroeconomics impact of world oil price shocks and hikes on economic growth and consumer price inflation on importing countries. Also, an infinitesimal …

Impact Of Conflict On Availability Of Selected Non-Timber Forest Products Around Omo Forest Reserves Of Ogun State, Nigeria, Aluko O.J.

Young African Leaders Journal of Development

This study aimed at assessing the impact of conflict on the level of availability of selected non-timber forest products around Omo forest reserve of Ogun State. Data was collected with the aid of well-structured questionnaire on one hundred and twenty marketing households using multistage sampling technique. The data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, categorization method and t-test. The data analysis targeted socio-economic characteristics, the level of availability of NTFP before/afer the conflict in the study area. It was revealed that majority (69.2%) were farmers and (75%) had experienced conflict more than 3 times. It was discovered that the selected NTFPs …