Economics Commons^™

Longer Classes Versus More Frequent Classes: Which Wins? Evidence From A Liberal Arts College, Timothy M. Diette, Manu Raghav

School of Business and Leadership Working Papers

Colleges and universities have to stagger their classes across different times and days to make the best use of their existing buildings. Some of these class meetings are for different lengths of time and meet a different number of days per week. In addition, students and faculty have increased demand for courses that meet fewer days per week. There is some concern that classes that meet more often are better suited for student learning than others. However, this paper finds that, after controlling for the class time and course fixed effects as well as faculty and student fixed effects, there …

Feats And Failures Of Corporate Credit Risk, Stock Returns, And The Interdependencies Of Sovereign Credit Risk, Uche C. Isiugo

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation comprises two essays; the first of which investigates sovereign credit risk interdependencies, while the second examines the reaction of corporate credit risk to sovereign credit risk events. The first essay titled, Characterizing Sovereign Credit Risk Interdependencies: Evidence from the Credit Default Swap Market, investigates the relationships that exist among disparate sovereign credit default swaps (CDS) and the implications on sovereign creditworthiness. We exploit emerging market sovereign CDS spreads to examine the reaction of sovereign credit risk to changes in country-specific and global financial factors. Utilizing aVAR model fitted with DCC GARCH, we find that comovements of spreads …

B.E.I.B. And Financial Inclusion In Northwest Cameroon, Kareen Ngendape Atchala

Capstone Collection

The Bee Effect Initiative Bank uses an integrated approach to foster financial inclusion in the North West region of Cameroon. This paper has several services under three main themes; economic wellbeing, capacity building, and insurance. Its theory of change and objectives while seeking to make profit centers on creating social change. The mechanics in the paper seek to evoke sustainable economic change in cross sectors- savings, credit, capacity building, and insurance with ROSCAs as target clientele.

No, Broadband And Garbage Collection Aren’T Public Goods. Here’S Why They Might Require Regulation Anyway, Louis D. Johnston

Economics Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Democratization, Political Performance, And Income Distribution In Argentina And Brazil, Nicholas Paul Stowell

Dissertations and Theses

This research examines the effects of democratization and political performance on the functional distribution of income in Argentina and Brazil from the end of their authoritarian periods to the present. The existing literature tends to focus on the impacts of democratization and political performance on the economic growth of the country as a whole or on changes to per capita income. This analysis focuses on the equality of economic development in less developed countries because growth is not necessarily distributed equally and poverty and inequality are both endemic to many less developed countries and also negatively impact development as a …

Measurement Of The Ocean Economy From National Income Accounts To The Sustainable Blue Economy, Charles S. Colgan

Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics

The widespread efforts to incorporate the economic values of oceans into national income accounts have reached a stage where coordination of national efforts is desirable. A symposium held in 2015 began this process by bringing together representatives from ten countries. The symposium concluded that a definition of core ocean industries was possible but beyond that core the definition of ocean industries is in flux. Better coordination of ocean income accounts will require addressing issues of aggregation, geography, partial ocean industries, confidential, and imputation is also needed. Beyond the standard national income accounts, a need to incorporate environmental resource and ecosystem …

An Evaluation Of Constitutional Constraints On Capital Taxation, Begoña Domínguez, Zhigang Feng

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper investigates the desirability of constitutional constraints on capital taxation in an environment without government debt and where benevolent governments have limited commitment. In our setup, governments can choose proportional capital and labor income taxes subject to the constitutional constraint but cannot commit to the actual path of taxes. First, we explore a form of constitutional constraint: a constant cap on capital tax rates. In our quantitative exercise, we show that a three per cent cap on capital taxes provides the highest welfare at the worst sustainable equilibrium. However, such cap decreases welfare at the best sustainable equilibrium (both …

Out Of Big Brother's Shadow: Ranking Economics Faculties At Regional Universities In The Us South, Franklin Mixon, Jr., Kamal Upadhyaya

Economics & Business Analytics Faculty Publications

This study applies the methodology of a recent study that ranks economics departments at national universities in the U.S. South to economics faculties at regional universities in the same geographic location. Ranking results from a “core” (i.e., the top five faculty researchers) of each institution's economics faculty reveals that Appalachian State University, James Madison University, Southeastern Louisiana University, Trinity University and Loyola University – New Orleans currently maintain the top five economics faculties, respectively, among the approximately 200 regional universities in the U.S. South.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- August 2016, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Globalization And The Environmental Impact Of Fdi, Nadia Doytch, Merih Uctum

Economics Working Papers

We analyze the environmental impact of capital inflows and investigate the halo effect (FDI improves the environment). We control for the type of FDI inflows, the EKC (Environmental Kuznets Curve) effect and country income level, and find (i) a differential industry effect: while total foreign investment in aggregate has a negative effect on all countries, this can be traced in particular to capital flows to manufacturing and nonfinancial services sectors.; (ii) an income inequality effect: foreign investment flowing into poorer countries has harmful effects on environment consistent with the race-to-the bottom argument, while capital flowing to richer countries has a …

Lowering Regional Inflation? Improve Budget Absorption, Vid Adrison

Economics and Finance in Indonesia

The subnational government spending in Indonesia exhibit a highly skewed distribution, i.e., it is very low in the first two-quarters and then increases significantly in the last two-quarters. Such explosive pattern poses two disadvantages. First, the regional output will fall below its optimal level as the low government capital expenditure leads to a fewer provision of public goods. Second, a significant increase in government spending in the later quarter pushes the short run aggregate demand to the northeast and creates an inflationary pressure in the following quarters. In this study, we analyze the effect of quarterly regional government expenditure growth …

Portfolio Flows Into Indonesia: Push Or Pull?, Chaikal Nuryakin

Economics and Finance in Indonesia

This paper focuses on the dynamic of the portfolio flows into Indonesia. The result of Structural Vector Autoregression (SVAR) model reveals that push factors is more dominant than pull factors in explaining portfolio flows into Indonesia. Portfolio flows into Indonesia are positively correlated with regionals stock market performance and negatively correlated to the federal funds rate. On the pull factors, domestic risk (the Credit Default Swap spread) is more dominant than domestic return (the BI rate) in explaining the flows. Thus, it is important for authorities to have more focus on domestic risk relative to rate of return in managing …

Essays In International Migration, Marcelo J. Castillo

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation consists of three essays examining the effects of high-skilled immigration on various economic outcomes within the receiving country. In the first essay, I study how skilled immigrants affect wages and employment in US industries during 1995-2007, using novel microdata on approved H-1B visas. These data show that most H-1B employers specialize in the production of high-skilled services used as inputs by other businesses. In light of this, I consider the downstream effects of skilled immigrants on industry labor market outcomes: how wages and employment in an industry respond to immigration shocks to its suppliers. The identification strategy relies …

Tail Risk In International Markets, Yanchu Wang

Open Access Dissertations

Tail risk, defined as extreme event risk in asset markets, is an important consideration for investors when making investment decisions. This paper empirically tests the role of tail risk in international market. Using sample of 40 countries from 1980 to 2014, I show that tail risk positively predicts future market returns. Across all countries, stocks with high sensitivity to past global tail risk on average will earn higher returns than stocks with low sensitivity. In addition, I show that tail risk act as a global transmission channel of contagion during crisis.

Black Gentrification Twice Removed: A Study Of Migration And Community Involvement In Washington, Dc, Janwin A. Zeegar-Holman

Capstone Collection

This paper is about Black people and community involvement against the backdrop of gentrification in Washington, DC, and possibility of Black-led neighborhood revitalization. My practicum in Southeast Washington DC compelled me to examine the ability of a Black person in Washington DC to sustain commitment to a community that they do not live in, and if Black people moving to gentrifying areas of Washington DC can help the predominantly Black non-gentrifying areas to gentrify on their own terms.

This paper focuses specifically on Black individuals who have spent time in DC and proposed ways that Black non-gentrifying communities can revitalize …

Mergers And Acquisitions In Food And Agribusiness: Returns, Drivers, And Long Run Performance, Josiah M. Ringelberg

Open Access Theses

Food and agribusiness in the U.S is a dynamic and ever changing business. The industry has seen booms and busts, considerable consolidation, and continued globalization in the past few decades. Businesses operating within its sectors have had to demonstrate flexibility and adaptability as the industry’s landscape consolidates at the consumer, supplier, and producer level. One strategy companies have used to grow and position themselves throughout years of industry consolidation has been merger and acquisition (M&A) transactions.

During the eleven years from 1985 and 1995, the food industry was listed in the top 10 M&A most active industries ten times. It …

Demand Uncertainty And Investment In The Restaurant Industry, Jayoung Sohn

Open Access Dissertations

Since the collapse of the housing market, the prolonged economic uncertainty lingering in the U.S. economy has dampened restaurant performance. Economic uncertainty affects consumer sentiment and spending, turning into demand uncertainty. Nevertheless, the highly competitive nature of the restaurant industry does not allow much room for restaurants to actively control prices, leaving most food service firms exposed to demand uncertainty. To investigate the impact of demand uncertainty in the restaurant industry, this study focused on the implications of demand uncertainty for investment.

The first essay in chapter 3 examined the impact of demand uncertainty on investment and how the impact …

Firm Demography And Location Decisions In The United States After 1990, Francisco Albert Scott

Open Access Theses

This thesis deals with firm formation and location choice of firms in the manufacturing (and commercial service) sector in the United States after 1990. The topics of firm formation and location choice are part of a wider field that is usually referred to as "firm demography.'' We start off with a description of the size structure of firms by looking at the evolution of the average size of manufacturing firms in counties in the USA between 1990 and 2011. We hypothesize that the size of manufacturing firms depends on the firm sizes in proximate regions as well as on the …

The Labor Market Consequences Of Endogenous Low-Skill Migration With A Market-Based Immigration Policy, German A. Marquez Alcala

Open Access Theses

The undocumented migration of Mexican nationals to the U.S. is largely influenced by labor demand in low-skill sectors. The legal migration channels available to Mexican nationals with little education are based on family petitions and subject to visa quotas which are dwarfed by the demand for entry to the United States; visa approval can take upwards of 20 years for a Mexican national with little education and few resources. Thus, undocumented immigration is a more responsive unskilled labor distribution mechanism than the existing quota-based immigration policy. However, the restrictive legal migration channels and increased costs of undocumented migration are stifling …

Essays In Experimental Economics On Contract Design, Jacob A. Brindley

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation contains three related essays which examine contracting environments with moral hazard. I use laboratory experiments to study how across treatment variations affect contractual outcomes including the types of contracts that principals design, the overall efficiency of the contractual relationship, and the surplus distribution between the principal and agent(s).

In the first chapter, which is joint work with Steve Wu, I investigate relational contracting within a bilateral relationship. Specifically, I explore how contracting is impacted by a reduction in the agent's market power as proxied by an exogenous decrease in the agent's expected outside option. Surprisingly, principals did not …

Three Essays In Economics, James R. Bland

Open Access Dissertations

How Many Games Are We Playing: An Experimental Analysis of Choice Bracketing in Games

A subject brackets two decisions if she "choose[s] an option in each case without full regard to the other" Rabin (2009). Although in most situations such behavior is unlikely to be optimal, it is well documented in experiments where subjects make decisions in the absence of strategic considerations. This paper uses an economic experiment to investigate whether subjects also bracket their decisions in games. Subjects played two Volunteer's Dilemmas at the same time, with the payoffs from both games added to their earnings. In a lottery …

Essays On Health Insurance, Amanda C. Cook

Open Access Dissertations

Uninsured individuals receive fewer health care services for at least three reasons: higher prices, responsibility for the entire bill, and potential provider reductions for concern of non-payment. This study isolates differences in service levels between insured and uninsured individuals that are attributed to different effective prices; the uninsured pay the bill without a contribution from an insurance company. I capitalize on Maryland's highly regulated health care system, where prices are set by the state, are uniform across all patients, and hospitals are compensated for free care and bad debt, to isolate the difference in quantity demanded by the uninsured. While …

State Based Financial Liberalization, Robert J. Kulzick

Open Access Dissertations

In the last 40 years, states around the globe have increased the role of markets in their financial systems. Using newly collected information on the educational backgrounds of Central Bankers, I demonstrate that the beliefs of state officials about the proper role of markets in the financial system influence the extent to which state's liberalize their financial systems. By tracing the liberalization experiences in both France and China through secondary sources, I show that bureaucrats within the state suggest reforms that conform to their neoliberal training when political leaders turn to them for solutions to what are perceived as technical …

Essays In Labor Economics And Panel Data Analysis, Evan S. Totty

Open Access Dissertations

This dissertation is composed of three independent chapters. The first chapter studies the impact of minimum wage hikes on employment of low-skill workers in the United States. The second chapter studies the lasting impact of attending a higher value-added high school on college performance. The third chapter studies the impact of stuttering on labor market outcomes.

The first chapter resolves issues in the minimum wage-employment debate by using factor model econometric methods to address concerns related to unobserved heterogeneity. Recent work has shown that the negative effects of minimum wages on employment found using traditional methods are sensitive to the …

(Wp 2016-05) Hodgson, Cumulative Causation, And Reflexive Economic Agents, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

This paper examines Geoff Hodgson’s interpretation of Veblen in agency-structure terms, and argues it produces a conception of reflexive economic agents. It then sets out an account of cumulative causation processes using this reflexive agent conception, modeling them as a two-part causal process, one part involving a linear causal relation and one part involving a circular causal relation. The paper compares the reflexive agent conception to the standard expected utility conception of economic agents, and argues that on a cumulative causation view of the world the completeness assumption essential to the standard view of rationality cannot be applied. The final …

The Hub Of Human Innovation: Economic Impacts Of The Utep Paso Del Norte Clean Energy Incubator Program In El Paso, Texas Over January 2016 - June 2016, Manuel L. Reyes Loya, Jesus E. Mendoza, David A. Schauer

Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Uniqueness And Stability Of Equilibrium In Economies With Two Goods, John Geanakoplos, Kieran James Walsh

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We offer new sufficient conditions ensuring demand is downward sloping local to equilibrium. It follows that equilibrium is unique and stable in the sense that rising supply implies falling prices. In our setting, there are two goods, which we interpret as consumption in different time periods, and many impatience types. Agents have the same Bernoulli utility function, but the types differ arbitrarily in time preference. Our main result is that if endowments are identical and utility displays nonincreasing absolute risk aversion, then market demand is strictly downward sloping local to equilibrium. We discuss implications for the Diamond-Dybvig literature.

Longitudinal Student Data And State Education Aid Formulas, 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.

Economic Growth, Natural Mineral Resources And Education In Developing Countries, Kasimu J. Mayundo

Applied Economics Theses

The contributions of education in achieving the modernization of developed countries has attracted much attention. Perhaps, underdeveloped countries have provided a limited contribution toward economic development and growth because educational funding was not a priority. Therefore, some underdeveloped countries, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, rely heavily on their natural resources for economic development and growth, minimizing the importance of high quality education in economic growth.

The question is: Why has the Democratic Republic of Congo not been able to transform its abundant resources into a blessing for a prosperous nation? And how does education contribute to economic growth and …

Three Essays On Informal Payments In The Health Care Sector In Russia, Alexandra Polovinka

Dissertations

Health care is one of the most corrupt sectors in Russia. In 2015 twenty percent of patients paid a bribe for the health care services once or twice, and thirteen percent more than twice (Russian Public Opinion Research Center, 2015). Using data on adults from over 5,000 households in Russia, this three-essay study analyzes out-of-pocket formal (official) and informal (unofficial, bribes) payments for the health care.

In the first essay, I study whether there is a difference in the amount of unofficial pay-ments across five types of health care services (ambulance, inpatient, outpatient, dental, and medical checkups) and two types …