Economics Commons^™

University Rankings: Evidence And A Conceptual Framework, Jonathan G.S. Koppell, Jacob Fowles, H. George Frederickson

Publications from President Jonathan G.S. Koppell

University ranking has high public visibility, the ranking business has flourished, and institutions of higher education have not been able to ignore it. This study of university ranking presents general considerations of ranking and institutional responses to it, particularly considering reactions to ranking, ranking as a self-fulfilling prophecy, and ranking as a means of transforming qualities into quantities. The authors present a conceptual framework of university ranking based on three propositions and carry out a descriptive statistical analysis of U.S. and international ranking data to evaluate those propositions. The first proposition of university ranking is that ranking systems are demarcated …

Oil And Gcc Financial Markets: The Significance Of The Oil Price Collapse, Shawkat Hammoudeh

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

No abstract provided.

How Did The Aca Affect Health Insurance Coverage In Kentucky?, Aaron Yelowitz

Institute for the Study of Free Enterprise Working Papers

The major components of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) were implemented in 2014, including the rollout of the Health Insurance Marketplace, Medicaid expansions, and the individual mandate. Kentucky stands out as one of the few southern states to expand Medicaid, and earlier work has demonstrated that Kentucky experienced some of the largest gains in health insurance coverage. The goal of the current study is to further explore the sources that individuals used to gain coverage in Kentucky using a large, publicly available dataset, the American Community Survey (ACS). Several findings emerge. First, overall health insurance coverage increased by 5.7 percentage …

The Banking System, Manufacturing Sector And Sustainable Economic Development., Risikat S. Oladoyin Dauda

Bullion

The paper is structured into five sections. Section one presents the introduction, while section two presents conceptual and theoretical issues. Section three captures issues in Nigeria's manufacturing sector, Section four presents a brief overview on the performance and financial intermediation roles of Nigeria's banking industry vis-a-vis the manufacturing sector, Section five and six contains the challenges and prospect of promoting banking system intermediary services in the manufacturing sector for sustainable development and concludes the paper respectively.

Overview Of Non-Oil Sector In Nigeria., Uwatt B. Uwatt

Bullion

This paper is to enhance the understanding of the non-oil sector in Nigeria, The underlying need is the emphasis on why the sector should be embraced as the new economic bride, not only by the government, but by oil and sundry, to fast-track economic recovery and enhance sustainable growth.

Cbn Real Sector Financing For Inclusive Growth And Economic Development., Mudashiru A. Olaitan

Bullion

lt is important to note that no economy can grow and improve the living standard of its population without a vibrant real sector. Consequently, the Central Bank of Nigeria intervenes in the real sector to stimulate flow of finance and boost productivity and employment generation.

Promoting Non-Oil Sector Financing In Nigeria: The Role Of The Media., Ugochukwu A. Okoroafor

Bullion

ln the case of Nigeria, the dominance of earnings from crude oil as a source of external revenue become pronounced in the wake of the positive oil shocks of the 1970s as the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) began to effectively exert its powers as a cartel. In the light of a few developments in the sector, it is clear that the oil sector can no longer power the economy of Nigeria. As a result the non-oil and the private sector are required to ensure that Nigeria develops well-rounded and sustainable economic outcomes.

Nonlinear Tax Incidence And Optimal Taxation In General Equilibrium, Dominik Sachs, Aleh Tsyvinski, Nicolas Werquin

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We study the incidence and the optimal design of nonlinear income taxes in a Mirrleesian economy with a continuum of endogenous wages. We characterize analytically the incidence of any tax reform by showing that one can mathematically formalize this problem as an integral equation. For a CES production function, we show theoretically and numerically that the general equilibrium forces raise the revenue gains from increasing the progressivity of the U.S. tax schedule. This result is reinforced in the case of a Translog technology where closer skill types are stronger substitutes. We then characterize the optimum tax schedule, and derive a …

Can Noncompliant Behavior Explain Racial/Ethnic Disparities In The Use Of Force By The Nypd? An Econometric Analysis Of New York's Stop-And-Frisk, Omari-Khalid Rahman

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to analyze spatiotemporal variations in NYPD policing patterns in an attempt to identify the causal mechanism(s) driving the observed racial/ethnic disparities; specifically, it addresses questions of how changing neighborhood demographics influence the decision-making of NYPD officers/precincts as it relates to their controversial Stop-and-Frisk policy.

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: A Closer Look At Cliff Effects In Massachusetts, Randy Albelda, Michael Carr

Center for Social Policy Publications

This report shows that universal free education and child care would substantially increase family net resources and alleviate cliff effects.

All New Yorkers Would Benefit From A Fairer School Aid Formula, John Yinger

Center for Policy Research

It’s Elementary is a series of essays on topics in education and education policy. The main focus is on education finance in New York State, but general research findings in education and education policy issues in several other states are also discussed. John Yinger, Professor of Economics and Public Administration at the Maxwell School, Syracuse University is the author of most of these essays, although a few are written by or co-authored with other scholars.

Technology Innovations And The Financial Services Industry., Olubukola Akinniyi Akinwunmi

Bullion

This article explores the future of the financial services industry in the context of new technologies. Technological innovations were reviewed and likely implications for the industry were highlighted. The article suggests that a symbiotic relationship among new and incumbent financial services providers will benefit the industry. Since technology is re-defining the financial services industry and the global financial system as undergone transformation in the last couple of decades.

Entrepreneurial Orientation: A Global Asset For National Development., Sunday Alewo Omale, Kate Obianuju Chima

Bullion

This paper appraised the outcome of Entrepreneurial Orientation on national development . Entrepreneurial orientation (EO) deals with the level in which nations or firms strategically educate its citizens or members to promote entrepreneurial culture to gain economic benefits. EO entails dimensions of innovation, proactiveness and risk taking. It is held that entrepreneurial orientation is required for a successful national development. innovativeness ls the predisposition to engage in creativity and experimentation through the introduction of new products/ services as well as technological leadership and advancement. To drive home the aims of this investigation, relevant data were sourced from management journals, bulletin …

Financing Agriculture For Sustainable Economic Development, Grace Ofure Evbuomwan

Bullion

Nigeria's agriculture is diverse. presenting various opportunities. lt includes four sub-sectors, namely; crop, livestock, fishery and forestry. The crop sub-sector accounts for about 90.0 per cent of agricultural production in Nigeria, followed by the livestock sub-sector which contributes about 7.0 per cent. Fishing activities contribute about 2.0 per cent and forestry activities account for about 1.0 per cent. However, Nigeria remains a food-deficit country blessed as it is with abundant agro-ecological resources and diversity. As reported by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the number of people undernourished has been on the increase, from 8.7 per …

A Targeted Approach? A Study Of Ngo Roles And Practices In Promoting Economic Development, Emma Shoaf

Mahurin Honors College Capstone Experience/Thesis Projects

In recent years, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have become key actors promoting economic development. Despite their rapid rise, there are still significant gaps in the development sphere regarding what NGOs do in specific contexts. This research evaluates how NGOs promote economic development among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to give context to general trends within development literature. Through an in-depth case study of the NGO Cives Mundi and their recent development project Tatreez–focused on promoting economic empowerment among Palestinian refugee women through the formation of a weaving co-op–this study seeks to evaluate key advantages and disadvantages to NGO work in specific …

How To Fly A Horse: The Secret History Of Creation, Invention, And Discovery (Book Review), Kevin Timmer

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

Reviewed Title: How to Fly a Horse: The Secret History of Creation, Invention, and Discovery by Kevin Ashton. New York: Doubleday, 2015. 336 pages. ISBN: 9780385538596.

Are Us-Dollar-Hedged-Etf Investors Aggressive On Exchange Rates? A Panel Var Approach, Corey A. Shank, Andre C. Vianna

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

Exchange traded funds (ETFs) are a multi-trillion dollar market that epitomizes financialization due to its recent growth. This study examines the behavior of U.S. listed currency hedged ETF investors towards changes in the underlying benchmark and foreign exchange rate from July 2011 to November 2015 using a panel VAR approach. We find that investors are able to anticipate changes in future exchange rates and invest in currency hedged ETFs prior to changes. Granger-causality tests confirm that these investors proactively trade before large real exchange rate movements. These results suggest that the use of financial instruments such as ETFs to hedge …

The Transatlantic Oarsmen Cooperative: Doubling Down On A Transatlantic Financial Regulatory Regime, Joselyn Muhleisen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project argues that, in the wake of the 2007-09 financial crisis, the United States (US) and European Union (EU) are doubling down on finance-led domestic growth strategies and that this is their goal in constructing a transatlantic financial regulatory regime. The regime’s goal privileges the input of industry actors over other civil society actors. The construction of this regime is in response to pressure from emerging markets and to service domestic industry actors after the financial crisis. The regime is intended to allow the US and EU to maintain their dominance within the international financial regulatory regime and continue …

Does Globalization Affect Top Income Inequality?, Rene Cabral, Rocio Garcia-Diaz, Andre V. Mollick

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

We reexamine in this paper the role of globalization on top income shares (five classes from top 0.1% to top 10% of the income distribution) for a sample of 15 economies over the period 1970–2004. We investigate financial globalization measures that complement trade openness. Our system GMM (SGMM) estimations allow for a robust treatment of the endogeneity between income concentration and GDP per capita (as well as with taxation or government size). We find two interesting new results. First, the financial integration measure based on portfolio equity and FDI stocks (GEQ) turns out to have a large impact on top …

Trade Invoicing In Major Currencies In The 1970s-1990s: Lessons For Renminbi Internationalization, Hiro Ito, Kawai Masahiro

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this paper, we investigate how much a major currency is used for trade invoicing by focusing primarily on the experiences of the U.S. dollar, the Japanese yen, and the Deutsche mark (DM) in the 1970s through the 1990s. We then attempt to draw lessons for China’s renminbi (RMB) internationalization. Our data on the shares of the three major currencies in export invoicing show that the dollar was unequivocally a global invoicing currency, and that the DM was the most important regional currency in Europe while the yen was never a global or a regional currency. DM invoicing was driven …

The Economic Value Of Forest Park Ecosystem Services: Results Of Five Focus Groups Conducted In Spring 2016, Randall A. Bluffstone, Pablo Barreyro, Jenny Dempsey Stein, Cody Kent, Antonia Machado

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Objective: This initial phase of research lays the foundation for a survey using contingent valuation (CV) and choice experiment (CE) methods. We asked select Portland residents what they care about most in Forest Park, their willingness to pay (WTP) for improving ecosystem services and how they generally think about the value of those goods and services. These results will help us narrow the experimental design of the forthcoming CV/CE study.

Approach: We conducted a focus group in each of Portland’s 5 “quadrants.” We chose each location - Skyline, St. John’s, Cully, Foster-Powell and Hillsdale - based on either its proximity …

Precedent And The Content Of The Law: Lessons From The Evolution Of Groundwater Law In Early 20th Century California, Mark Kanazawa

Department of Economics Working Paper Series

No abstract provided.

Losing Values: Illiquidity, Personhood, And The Return Of Authoritarianism In Skopje, Macedonia, Fabio Mattioli

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

On May 17, 2015, over 50,000 people took to the streets of Skopje, the capital of the Republic of Macedonia, protesting against Prime Minister Gruevski and his party, the conservative neoliberal Internal Revolutionary Organization of Macedonia (VMRO). After nine years of authoritarian government, it was the first significant demonstration in which the population demanded accountability for Gruevski's despotic system of rule. This dissertation is the story of how Gruevski's system of power was built and why it lasted for so long. I argue that a series of failing financial processes, which included the use of illiquidity, created the material and …

The Increasing Happiness Of Us Parents, Chris M. Herbst, John Ifcher

Economics

Previous research suggests that parents may be less happy than non-parents. We critically assess the literature and examine parents’ and non-parents’ happiness-trends using the General Social Survey (N = 42,298) and DDB Lifestyle Survey (N = 75,237). We find that parents are becoming happier over time relative to non-parents, that non-parents’ happiness is declining absolutely, and that estimates of the parental happiness gap are sensitive to the time-period analyzed. These results are consistent across two datasets, most subgroups, and various specifications. Finally, we present evidence that suggests children appear to protect parents against social and economic forces that may be …

Residential Electricity Demand In El Paso: 1977-2014, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., David R. Macias, Adam G. Walke

Border Region Modeling Project

This study analyzes the demand for residential electricity in El Paso, Texas, USA. Annual data are provided by El Paso Electric Company covering the period from 1977 to 2014. This study reports a negative long-run income elasticity for residential electricity demand. Per customer residential electricity usage declines by 0.68 percent for every 1-percent increase in real per capita income over the long run, indicating that electricity is treated as an inferior good by households in this metropolitan economy. That result runs counter to many earlier studies, but corroborates recent empirical evidence for Seattle, Washington and other regions of the United …

Human-Scale Economics: Economic Growth And Poverty Reduction In Northeastern Thailand, Joel D. Moore, John A. Donaldson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Under what conditions does economic growth benefit the poor? One way to answer this question is to identify and compare positive and negative outlier areas, those that experience greater and lesser poverty reduction, respectively, compared to what was anticipated given their levels of economic growth. The more similar these areas, the more leverage there is to unearth the factors that allow the poor to benefit from growth. In this paper, we employ an inductive approach to glean possible pathways out of poverty from two highly similar underdeveloped neighboring provinces in northeastern Thailand. Using extensive fieldwork and interviews, we explore factors …

Shock, But No Shift: Hospitals' Responses To Changes In Patient Insurance Mix, Kathryn L. Wagner

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

Medicaid reimburses healthcare providers for services at a lower rate than any other type of insurance coverage. To account for the burden of treating Medicaid patients, providers claim that they must cost-shift by raising the rates of individuals covered by private insurance. Previous investigations of cost-shifting has produced mixed results. In this paper, I exploit a disabled Medicaid expansion where crowd-out was complete to investigate cost-shifting. I find that hospitals reduce the charge rates of the privately insured. Given that Medicaid is expanding in several states under the Affordable Care Act, these results may alleviate cost-shifting concerns of the reform.

Effects Of Foreign Direct Investment On Firm-Level Technical Efficiency: Stochastic Frontier Model Evidence From Chinese Manufacturing Firms, Miao Grace Wang, Sunny Wong

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

It has been recognized that multinational corporations can spill over to non-affiliated firms in host economies. Existing studies of foreign direct investment (FDI) and productivity growth often assume firms are perfectly efficient. Our paper relaxes this assumption and explores how FDI affects a firm’s technical efficiency improvement as well as its technical progress in a stochastic frontier model. The stochastic frontier model estimates a firm’s production frontier given a set of production inputs. The deviation of a firm’s actual output level from its maximum level of output is defined as technical inefficiency. Using data from more than 12,000 Chinese manufacturing …

Asset Pricing With Financial Bubble Risk, Ji Hyung Lee, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper characterizes systematic risk stemming from the possible occurrence of price bubbles and measures the impact of this additional risk factor on asset prices. Historical stock market behavior and recent empirical experience have led economists and policy makers to acknowledge that price bubbles in financial markets do occur and need to be accounted for in risk analysis. New econometric tools for analyzing mildly explosive behavior (Phillips and Magdalinos, 2007; Phillips et al., 2011) have made it possible to detect the presence of bubbles in data and to date stamp their origination and collapse, providing empirical confirmation of such episodes …

Associationistic Luce Rule, Jiangtao Li, Rui Tang

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop an extension of Luce’s random choice model that incorporates a role forthe association of alternatives. Each alternative is characterized by a salience value, aLuce value, and its associated alternatives. The salience value captures the alternative’sability to attract the decision maker’s attention, and the Luce value measures thealternative’s desirability. The decision maker is first attracted by some alternativeaccording to a salience-based Luce-type formula, and then chooses among its associatedalternatives according to another desirability-based Luce-type formula. While retainingthe simplicity of the Luce rule, the theory accommodates some well-known behavioralphenomena in individual choice, such as the attraction effect (violations of regularity),and …