Economics Commons^™

Essays On The Impact Of Exchange Rate Movements On Stock Return And Country Output, Junnan Zhao

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Exchange rate movements are widely believed to be a major source of uncertainty at both micro- and macro-economic levels. At the microeconomic level, corporate managers controlling risk and investors seeking to hedge their portfolios are both obviously interested in estimates of a firm’s exchange rate exposure ̶ i.e., how much of the value of a firm will be affected by exchange rate movements. At the macroeconomic level, a currency appreciation may have a contractionary effect on a country's output.

Chapter 1 tests whether the launch of the euro around 1999 significantly reduced stock market volatility and exchange rate risk exposure …

Essays In Financial Development And Income Inequality, Samuel M. Jung

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three essays of original research. Chapter 1 is a survey of the literature on the theoretical and empirical interactions among financial development, economic growth, and income inequality.

Chapter 2 describes empirical research on the relationship between financial development and income inequality based on Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) method using a Chinese provincial dataset between 1998 and 2014. The empirical findings support the notion that well-developed financial markets increase income inequality in China. After adding a year dummy for 2001 to examine the impact of China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, which caused the financial …

Phragmites Removal Increases Property Values In Michigan’S Lower Grand River Watershed, Paul Isely, Erik E. Nordman, Shaun Howard, Richard Bowman

Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics

The presence of Phragmites australis, an invasive wetland plant, negatively affects coastal property values and home prices rise with distance from Phragmites. Home prices increased as distance to Phragmites increased at a rate of $3.90/meter. Removing Phragmites from a property so that the next closest Phragmites was 400 m away results in a property value increase of over $1,500. Removing all Phragmites within 400 m of any property results in a total property value impact of $837,000. This generates about $13,457-$15,121 in additional property taxes each year once the prices and taxes adjust to the plant’s removal. We …

The Paradigm Sways: Macroeconomics Turns To History (Reviewing Three Titles), David A. Westbrook

Book Reviews

Reviewing Markus K. Brunnermeier, Harold James & Jean-Pierre landau, The Euro and the Battle of ideas (2016); Martin Wolf, The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned—And Still Have to Learn—From the Financial Crisis (2014); and Mervyn King, The End of Alchemy: Money, Banking, and the Future of the Global Economy (2016).

Charles Ballard Interview, Justin Carinci

External Papers and Reports

Professor Charles Ballard of Michigan State University delivered the lecture “The Fall and Rise of Income Equality in the United States” Sept. 27, 2017 as part of the Werner Sichel Lecture Series at Western Michigan University. Ballard detailed the “Great Convergence” of income equality in the United States that grew out of policies of the 1930s and 1940s and a “Great Divergence” of inequality starting about 1980. Ballard called this income gap, which is now greater than during the Gilded Age, “the largest economic phenomenon of our lifetimes.”

Georgetown’S First Six Moocs: Completion, Intention, And Gender Achievement Gaps, Paul A. Healy

Undergraduate Economic Review

This analysis of Georgetown’s first six MOOCs (massive open online courses) comprises three parts, moving from general to specific in scope. I begin with a discussion of demographic factors across all six courses, seeking to answer the following question: “Who takes, and succeeds in these courses?” Next, I discuss the relationship between stated intention and course performance with survey data from a pre-course survey for Georgetown’s very first MOOC, an economics course. I end by examining the gender achievement gap in the same economics course.

Nebraska Monthly Economic Indicators: September 20, 2017, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

The Leading Economic Indicator – Nebraska (LEI-N) 1 fell by 0.38% during August of 2017. The decline in the LEI-N, which is designed to predict economic activity six months into the future, suggests that the Nebraska economy will grow slowly during the first few months of 2018. The drop in the indicator was primarily due to a decline in manufacturing hours-worked during August. Building permits for single-family homes and airline passenger enplanements also dropped slightly. There were two positive components of the LEI-N. Businesses responding to the August Survey of Nebraska Business reported plans to increase sales and employment over …

Risk And Abnormal Returns In Markets For Congestion Revenue Rights, Rimvydas Baltaduonis, Samuel Bonar, John Carnes, Erin Mastrangelo

Economics Faculty Publications

In organized energy markets that use locational pricing, power generators and energy suppliers procure financial transmission rights (FTRs) to hedge against grid con- gestion charges, while third-party speculators attempt to capture a return with these extremely volatile contracts. This paper develops a novel methodology for estimating the systematic risk of individual FTRs and detecting the presence of abnormal returns among these financial instruments. The prevalence of congestion paths with abnormal returns could be used by policy experts as an efficiency measure when assessing the performance of FTR markets. Being the only organized energy market in the Western Interconnection, California has …

Ceo Traits And Loan Contract, Yiu Chung Ma

Lingnan Theses

The first part of the thesis investigates the relationship between managerial overconfidence and loan covenant usage. Empirical findings show that creditors use significantly more covenants, increase covenant intensity, and rely on different types of covenants, such as debt-to-cash flow and coverage ratio to lower the default risk emanating from managerial overconfidence. Besides, creditors tighten individual covenants, such as debt-to-cash flow covenants and current ratio covenants in order to alleviate their risk exposure. Covenant usage is reported to be quantitatively larger in the loan contracts of firms with higher market-to-book ratios, reflecting that high-growth firms provide opportunities for overconfident CEOs to …

Climate, Wildfire, And Erosion Ensemble Foretells More Sediment In Western Usa Watersheds, Scott E. Lowe

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

The area burned annually by wildfires is expected to increase worldwide due to climate change. Burned areas increase soil erosion rates within watersheds, which can increase sedimentation in downstream rivers and reservoirs. However, which watersheds will be impacted by future wildfires is largely unknown. Using an ensemble of climate, fire, and erosion models, we show that postfire sedimentation is projected to increase for nearly nine tenths of watersheds by >10% and for more than one third of watersheds by >100% by the 2041 to 2050 decade in the western USA. The projected increases are statistically significant for more than eight …

The Welfare Effects Of Civil Forfeiture, Michael Preciado, Bart J. Wilson

ESI Publications

Using a laboratory experiment we explore competing claims on the welfare effects of civil forfeiture. Experiment participants are tasked with making trade-offs in allocating resources “to fight crime” with and without the ability to seize and forfeit assets. It is an open question whether the societal impact of reducing crime is greater in a world with or without civil forfeiture. Proponents of civil forfeiture argue that the ill-gotten gains of criminals can be used by law enforcement to further fight crime. Opponents claim that the confiscation of assets by law enforcement distorts the prioritization of cases by focusing attention, not …

Trade Union Trade-Offs: Unions, Voters, And The Rise Of Right-Wing Populism, Kim Gabbitas

Claremont-UC Undergraduate Research Conference on the European Union

Trade union membership in European Union member states has been in decline for decades, which has many concerned about the future of workers’ rights. While existing work examines the reasons for this decline, my research shifts the focus from union density to the functions unions serve and how these functions affect and are affected by changing electoral behavior. I examine the rise of right-wing populist movements in Europe and how these movements and the challenges today’s labor unions face can be traced to the same underlying forces. I argue that, as the relevance of trade unions declines for blue-collar workers, …

Chinese Perceptions Of Cpec, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

Most discussions and analyses with regard to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor(CPEC) have a Pakistan-driven perspective, and rightly so. After all, we have to safeguard our national interests and ensure maximum benefits for the country. These discussions and writings have evoked a lot of interest in China. This article attempts to present a limited cross section of the views articulated by Chinese scholars, academics, companies engaged in CPEC, retired officials and other friends of Pakistan. My past association with China as the region’s chief economist for the World Bank as well as visits to China practically every year since then has …

The Children's Community Center, Noelle Howard (Economics), Silvia Martin Aldana (Graphic Design Certificate), Cristina Pareja (Disaster And Medicine And Management), Albaraa Jebreel (Disaster And Medicine And Management)

Nexus Maximus

We are the Children’s Community Center, a NGO thats wants to provide an emergency response to the new surge of Rohingya refugee children. We want to relieve the daily mental traumas of the refugee camps through the collaborative interaction of the different children within the camps. This center will also give parents the space to focus on their own healing without the preoccupation of childcare.

Nexus Maximus IV

The Challenge: Innovation for Refugees and Displaced Populations

One of the great challenges of our time is how to help refugees and displaced populations, and how to prevent the causes in the …

Emerging Dynamics Of Management: Book Launch Ceremony Remarks, Ishrat Hussain Dr.

Faculty Research - Talks, Speeches, & Discourse

Several years ago, there was book called, What they Don't Teach you at Harvard Business School. The tile of Mr. Sirajuddin's book could simply be: What they don't teach you in Business School and Management Schools. Period. There are some lessons that you learn from a very personal and professional experience, which is accumulated overtime. It is reflected, digested, accumulated and then it is shared. The beauty of this book is that you will find these anecdotes to be a subset of the generalized obser vations about of management. I will not go into strateaies, structures, processes of human resource …

No Mere Tautology: The Division Of Labor Is Limited By The Division Of Labor, Andrew Smyth, Bart J. Wilson

ESI Working Papers

We explore the intersection of growth theory and the theory of the firm with an experiment. Economic growth is possible in our experiment when agents specialize to exploit increasing returns. We find that low opportunity costs are sufficient for Marshallian internal economies, but that Marshallian external economies are slow to emerge in four probing treatment conditions. Transaction costs do not hamper external economies as we anticipated prior to collecting data. When external economies falter, it is because new ideas about the cost and value of more extensive specialization fail to emerge. Ideas are what make further divisions of the …

Nebraska Business And Consumer Confidence Indexes: September 1, 2017, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

Nebraska’s consumer and business confidence fell during August. The Consumer Confidence Index – Nebraska (CCI-N) stood at 100.9 in August, below the reading of 102.5 from July. Notably, the CCI-N remained above the neutral value of 100.0 during August. The outlook of Nebraska businesses remained strong. The Business Confidence Index – Nebraska (BCI-N) stood at 104.2 in August, close to the value of 105.1 during July, and well above the neutral value of 100.0. When asked about the most important issue facing their business, customer demand was mentioned by 35 percent of business respondents. Businesses also faced growing competition in …

The Business Of Business…Is Creating Shared Value, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Corporations, governments and NGOs need to work together for mankind to exist sustainably, says the former Prime Minister of the Netherlands

China’S Growth Story: Plenty To Come, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

The Middle Kingdom has lots of room to grow if it could sort out economic distortions and optimise capital allocation. The tweaking of the one-child policy might also help

Evaluating The Empirical Performance Of Dsge Models: What Is The Role Of Search And Matching Frictions In The Labor And Capital Markets?, Weng Sam Mok

Dissertations and Theses Collection

A major perspective in explaining involuntary unemployment is to recognize the existence of job market frictions, in particular, job market matching frictions. The workhorse model employed is the Diamond- Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) model. Similar to the labor market, the market for physical capital markets exhibits the same characteristics with a pool of unsold inventory as well as used capital that is sold and reallocated to other terms. Nevertheless, past research has highlighted several issues of the DMP model in matching the characteristics of the labor market. In a model enriched with labor participation flows and job separation, I evaluate the model …

An Ancient Bankruptcy Solution Makes Economic Sense, Anh H. Ly, Michael Zakharevich, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

While econometrics is a reasonable recent discipline, quantitative solutions to economic problem have been proposed since the ancient times. In particular, solutions have been proposed for the bankruptcy problem: how to divide the assets between the claimants? One of the challenges of analyzing ancient solutions to economics problems is that these solutions are often presented not as a general algorithm, but as a sequence of examples. When there are only a few such example, it is often difficult to convincingly extract a general algorithm from them. This was the case, for example, for the supposedly fairness-motivated Talmudic solution to the …

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- September 2017, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Latent Variable Nonparametric Cointegrating Regression, Qiying Wang, Peter C.B. Phillips, Ioannis Kasparis

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper studies the asymptotic properties of empirical nonparametric regressions that partially misspecify the relationships between nonstationary variables. In particular, we analyze nonparametric kernel regressions in which a potential nonlinear cointegrating regression is misspecified through the use of a proxy regressor in place of the true regressor. Such regressions arise naturally in linear and nonlinear regressions where the regressor suffers from measurement error or where the true regressor is a latent variable. The model considered allows for endogenous regressors as the latent variable and proxy variables that cointegrate asymptotically with the true latent variable. Such a framework includes correctly specified …

Point Optimal Testing With Roots That Are Functionally Local To Unity, Anna Bykhovskaya, Peter C.B. Phillips

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Limit theory for regressions involving local to unit roots (LURs) is now used extensively in time series econometric work, establishing power properties for unit root and cointegration tests, assisting the construction of uniform confidence intervals for autoregressive coefficients, and enabling the development of methods robust to departures from unit roots. The present paper shows how to generalize LUR asymptotics to cases where the localized departure from unity is a time varying function rather than a constant. Such a functional local unit root (FLUR) model has much greater generality and encompasses many cases of additional interest, including structural break formulations that …

Impact Of Socioeconomic Factors On Florida Consumers' Perceptions On Use Of Chemical In Locally Or Regionally Produced Livestock Products, David Nii O. Tackie, Akua Adu-Gyamfi, Janette R. Bartlett, Bridget J. Perry

Professional Agricultural Workers Journal

Abstract

The use of chemicals in livestock production has been an issue for consumers for several decades. This study, therefore, assessed the impact of socioeconomic factors on Florida consumers’ perceptions on the use of chemicals in locally or regionally produced livestock products. Data were collected from a sample of 404 participants from several Florida counties and were analyzed using descriptive statistics and ordinal logistic analysis. Most of the respondents were of the opinion that using chemicals in locally or regionally produced and sold beef or goat meat was a serious or somewhat serious hazard. The ordinal logistic regression results showed …

Boundary Limit Theory For Functional Local To Unity Regression, Anna Bykhovskaya, Peter C.B. Phillips

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper studies functional local unit root models (FLURs) in which the autoregressive coefficient may vary with time in the vicinity of unity. We extend conventional local to unity (LUR) models by allowing the localizing coefficient to be a function which characterizes departures from unity that may occur within the sample in both stationary and explosive directions. Such models enhance the flexibility of the LUR framework by including break point, trending, and multi-directional departures from unit autoregressive coefficients. We study the behavior of this model as the localizing function diverges, thereby determining the impact on the time series and on …

Politics, Hospital Behavior, And Health Care Spending, Zack Cooper, Amanda E. Kowalski, Eleanor Neff Powell, Jennifer Wu

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper examines the link between legislative politics, hospital behavior, and health care spending. When trying to pass sweeping legislation, congressional leaders can attract votes by adding targeted provisions that steer money toward the districts of reluctant legislators. This targeted spending provides tangible local benefits that legislators can highlight when fundraising or running for reelection. We study a provision - Section 508 – that was added to the 2003 Medicare Modernization Act (MMA). Section 508 created a pathway for hospitals to apply to get their Medicare payment rates increased. We find that hospitals represented by members of the House of …

Detecting Financial Collapse And Ballooning Sovereign Risk, Peter C.B. Phillips

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper proposes a new model for capturing discontinuities in the underlying financial environment that can lead to abrupt falls, but not necessarily sustained monotonic falls, in asset prices. This notion of price dynamics is consistent with existing understanding of market crashes, which allows for a mix of market responses that are not universally negative. The model may be interpreted as a martingale composed with a randomized drift process that is designed to capture various asymmetric drivers of market sentiment. In particular, the model is capable of generating realistic patterns of price meltdowns and bond yield inflations that constitute major …

Kernel-Based Inference In Time-Varying Coefficient Cointegrating Regression, Degui Li, Peter C.B. Phillips, Jiti Gao

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper studies nonlinear cointegrating models with time-varying coefficients and multiple nonstationary regressors using classic kernel smoothing methods to estimate the coefficient functions. Extending earlier work on nonstationary kernel regression to take account of practical features of the data, we allow the regressors to be cointegrated and to embody a mixture of stochastic and deterministic trends, complications which result in asymptotic degeneracy of the kernel-weighted signal matrix. To address these complications new \textsl{local} and \textsl{global rotation} techniques are introduced to transform the covariate space to accommodate multiple scenarios of induced degeneracy. Under certain regularity conditions we derive asymptotic results that …

Identification-Robust Subvector Inference, Donald W.K. Andrews

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper introduces identification-robust subvector tests and confidence sets (CS’s) that have asymptotic size equal to their nominal size and are asymptotically efficient under strong identification. Hence, inference is as good asymptotically as standard methods under standard regularity conditions, but also is identification robust. The results do not require special structure on the models under consideration, or strong identification of the nuisance parameters, as many existing methods do. We provide general results under high-level conditions that can be applied to moment condition, likelihood, and minimum distance models, among others. We verify these conditions under primitive conditions for moment condition models. …