Economics Commons^™

Domestic Liquidity Conditions And Monetary Policy In Singapore, Hwee Kwan Chow-Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

Singapore has an unusual exchange rate-centered monetary policy framework that has served the economy well over the past decades. Monetary policy operations are carried out by the central bank through the management of the Singapore dollar against a currency basket. As is well recognized, such foreign exchange interventions do have an impact on domestic liquidity conditions. However, in the case of Singapore, this tends to be counteracted by the liquidity impact of public sector operations related to the fiscal position and the national pension scheme. The central bank takes into account the net liquidity impact these and other autonomous money …

In Search Of Homo Sociologicus, Yunqi Xue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The subject of this dissertation is to build an epistemic logic system that is able to show the spreading of knowledge and beliefs in a social network that contains multiple subgroups. Epistemic logic is the study of logical systems that express mathematical properties of knowledge and belief. In recent years, there have been increasing number of new epistemic logic systems that are focused on community properties such as knowledge and belief adoption among friends.

We are interested in revisable and actionable social knowledge/belief that leads to a large group action. Instead of centralized coordination, bottom-up approach is our focus. We …

Essays On The Economic Well-Being Of Women, Timothy A. Roeper

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters:

1. The Effect of College Distance on Economic Opportunity for Low-Income Youth

This chapter studies the impact of one obstacle to college completion among low-income youth: geographic distance to the nearest four-year public college. The chapter's main results show that cutting the distance to a public four-year college from its mean value of 18 miles to half of that, 9 miles, is associated with a 4 percentage point increase in the college graduation rate of low-income women. Reducing the distance to public community college also increases the probability of completing college for low-income women. …

Three Essays On The European Sovereign Debt Crisis With A Special Focus On Greece, Flora Leventi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters where I examine several aspects of the European sovereign debt crisis. The first chapter focuses on systemic risk. Following the financial crisis of 2007-08, both in academic as well as policy circles, much of the research has focused toward the systemic importance of financial institutions. Parallel to that research, but to somewhat lesser extent, there have been improvements in our understanding of how risk is transmitted from the financial system to the real economy. This chapter investigates a related yet distinct manifestation of systemic risk, namely systemic sovereign risk. Using data on sovereign credit …

The Impact Of Oil Shocks On The Housing Market: Evidence From Canada And U.S., Robert N. Killins, Peter V. Egly, Diego Escobari

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

The recent volatility in oil energy markets invites us to re-assess the impact of oil prices changes on the macroeconomic environment. The Great Recession of 2007–2009 led to closer monitoring of global housing markets by regulators and market participants. Employing a structural vector autoregressive model, we find that the reaction of housing markets to oil price shocks varies significantly depending on whether the change in oil prices is prompted by demand or supply shocks in the oil market and on country oil trading status (i.e. net importer or net exporter). Our results are robust to the inclusion of different macroeconomic …

Airport, Airline And Departure Time Choice And Substitution Patterns: An Empirical Analysis, Diego Escobari

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

This paper uses the random-coefficients logit methodology that controls for potential endogeneity of prices and allows for general substitution patterns to estimate various demand systems. The estimation takes advantage of an original ticket-level revealed preference data set on travels from the New York City area to Toronto that contains prices and characteristics of not only flight choices but also of all non-booked alternative flights. Consistent with having higher valuations, our results show that travelers buying closer to departure have a higher utility of flying. Moreover, consumers’ heterogeneity decreases as the flight date nears. At the carrier level, we identify which …

Gender And Financial Risk Aversion, Efstathia Korkou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The primary goal of this dissertation is the study and measurement of the effect of gender in the process of financial decision making and investment decision making in particular, under uncertainty. In terms of investment decisions, researchers have linked investors’ risk aversion to several individual characteristics of theirs, such as their age, their income or their financial knowledge. However, an investor’s characteristic, somehow overlooked or not properly investigated, has been the investor’s gender, and the latter’s bearing on investment decision making. Research from the 1990s suggested that once individuals are called to allocate their wealth and make investment decisions, women …

Surplus Consumption, Habit Utility And Moody Investors, Jun Lou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The thesis examines a blend of Asset Pricing topics: joint stock-bond pricing, consumption-based asset pricing puzzles, time variation in risk preference, among others. In chapter one, I first review the literature on respective topics in search of a consolidated framework of resolution. I then propose one, a consumption-based affine model that jointly prices bond and stock in closed form. The tractable feature of the price solutions remains standard as in affine termstructure of interest rates, but presents novelty for the stock prices. In chapter two, I discuss the GMM based procedures for model estimation. In chapter three, I interpret the …

Erica Groshen Interview, Justin Carinci

External Papers and Reports

Interview with former Commissioner of Labor Statistics and head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erica Groshen, from her presentation at the W.E. Upjohn Institute on August 29, 2017.

The Attack And Defense Of Weakest Link Networks, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

We experimentally test the qualitatively different equilibrium predictions of two theoretical models of attack and defense of a weakest-link network of targets. In such a network, the attacker’s objective is to successfully attack at least one target and the defender’s objective is to defend all targets. The models differ in how the conflict at each target is modeled — specifically, the lottery and auction contest success functions (CSFs). Consistent with equilibrium in the auction CSF model, attackers utilize a stochastic “guerrilla-warfare” strategy, which involves randomly attacking at most one target with a random level of force. Inconsistent with equilibrium in …

Loss Aversion And The Quantity-Quality Tradeoff, Jared Rubin, Anya Samek, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Firms face an optimization problem that requires a maximal quantity output given a quality constraint. But how do firms incentivize quantity and quality to meet these dual goals, and what role do behavioral factors, such as loss aversion, play in the tradeoffs workers face? We address these questions with a theoretical model and an experiment in which participants are paid for both quantity and quality of a real effort task. Consistent with basic economic theory, higher quality incentives encourage participants to shift their attention from quantity to quality. However, we also find that loss averse participants shift their attention from …

Port Competition And Cooperation In A Shipping Alliance Era : A Case Study On The Port Of Shanghai And Ningbo, Tianyi Jiang

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Research On Development Opportunities And Challenges For East African Ports Under China’S One Belt One Road Initiative, Gervin Maasonuo Polkuu Prince

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Do Weapons Make Warfare? An Instrumental Variables Approach Towards Investigating The Relationship Between Small Arms Abundance, Civil Conflict Onset, And Civil Conflict Intensity, Gabriel S. Barrett

Political Science Honors Projects

Scholars, journalists, and policymakers frequently attribute the intensity and onset of civil conflict to the abundance of small arms. However, the direction of causality has been difficult to assess due to a lack of data on the illicit small arms market and the plausibly endogenous relationship between the abundance of weapons and civil conflict. Using a new dataset of estimated small arms prices, I determine that a decrease in the price of small arms is significantly and negatively correlated with an increase in the intensity of conflict in the following year. I also determine that small arms prices increase in …

Nebraska Monthly Economic Indicators: August 23, 2017, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

The Leading Economic Indicator – Nebraska (LEI-N) 1 rose by 0.56% during July of 2017. The increase in the LEI-N, which is designed to predict economic activity six months into the future, suggests that the Nebraska economy will grow through the first month of 2018. Four components of the indicator improved during July. Business expectations were solid and manufacturing hours grew. The value of the U.S. dollar continued its recent decline, a positive sign for Nebraska’s export-oriented businesses. Further, in a positive sign for the labor market, there also was a drop in initial claims for unemployment insurance. In terms …

Global Scenarios Of Urban Density And Its Impacts On Building Energy Use Through 2050, Michail Fragkias

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although the scale of impending urbanization is well-acknowledged, we have a limited understanding of how urban forms will change and what their impact will be on building energy use. Using both top-down and bottom-up approaches and scenarios,we examine building energy use for heating and cooling. Globally, the energy use for heating and cooling by the middle of the century will be between 45 and 59 exajoules per year (corresponding to an increase of 7–40% since 2010). Most of this variability is due to the uncertainty in future urban densities of rapidly growing cities in Asia and particularly China. Dense urban …

Local Neighbors As Positives, Regional Neighbors As Negatives: Competing Channels In The Relationship Between Others’ Income, Health, And Happiness, John Ifcher, Homa Zarghamee, Carol Graham

Economics

That well-being is decreasing in others’ income is termed the “relative income hypothesis” (RIH) by scholars of subjective well-being (SWB) and has substantial empirical support. Some studies, however, present evidence of both positive and negative explanatory channels in the relationship between others’ income and SWB. We develop a theoretical framework integrating four distinct channels through which neighbors’ income can affect utility: public goods, cost of living, expectations of future income, and direct effects (RIH or altruism). We estimate the relationship with SWB data from the U.S. Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index and median-income data from the American Community Survey for ZIP codes …

The Efficacy Of Public Health Interventions Aimed At Curbing Gun Violence: An Integrative Review, Brian Cook

Grace Peterson Nursing Research Colloquium

Abstract

Background: Gun violence is a pressing public health issue in the United States. Homicide is the second-leading cause of death for 15 to 24 year-old Americans, and the third-leading cause of death for 25 to 34 year-old Americans, and 80% of these homicides are committed via firearm. In recent years, the field of criminology has studied the efficacy of a variety of policing, public health, and public policy interventions that aim to reduce the incidence of gun violence, but many of their findings have yet to be incorporated into the body of nursing literature.

Objective: This project’s objective was …

A Reexamination Of “The Hidden Return To Incentives”, Jing Davis, Steven Schwartz, Richard Young

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Prior literature has observed a “hidden return to incentives” where principals receive more cooperation from agents when formal incentives are available but not used than when not available. Previous experiments are replicated using a gift-exchange rather than a trust game. Hidden returns to incentives are not observed, and in fact the results show the opposite. Suggestions for future research are provided.

Endogeneity In Panel Stochastic Frontier Models: An Application To The Japanese Cotton Spinning Industry, Mustafa U. Karakaplan, Levent Kutlu

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

We present a panel stochastic frontier model that handles the endogeneity problem. This model can treat the endogeneity of both frontier and inefficiency variables. We apply our method to examine the technical efficiency of Japanese cotton spinning industry. Our results indicate that market concentration is endogenous, and when its endogeneity is properly handled, it has a larger negative impact on the technical efficiency of cotton spinning plants. We find that the exogenous model substantially overestimates efficiency in concentrated markets.

Essays On Liquidity, Informational Frictions, And Monetary Policy, Kee Youn Kang

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

The dissertation, which consists of two chapters, is devoted to exploring the role of informational friction in monetary economics and finance.Chapter Ⅰ: COUNTERFEITING, SCREENING AND GOVERNMENT POLICY.In this chapter, I construct a search theoretic model of money in which counterfeit money can be produced at a cost but agents can screen for fake money also at a cost. Counterfeiting can occur in equilibrium when both costs and the inflation rate are sufficiently low. Optimal monetary policy is the Friedman rule. However, the rationale for the Friedman rule in an economy with the circulation of counterfeit money differs from the conventional …

Micro-Data Evidence On Family Size And Chinese Household Saving Rates, Steven Lugauer, Jinlan Ni, Zichao Yin

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper examines the impact of family size on household saving. We first study a theoretical life-cycle model that includes finite lifetimes and saving for retirement and in which parents care about the consumption by their dependent children. The model implies a negative relationship between the number of dependent children in the family and the household saving rate. Then, we test the model's implications using new survey data on household finances in China. We use the differential enforcement of the one-child policy across counties to address the possible endogeneity between household saving and fertility decisions in a two-stage …

Could Reducing Compulsory Years Of Schooling In A Developing Country Be Beneficial?, Dina Al Ajmi

Theses and Dissertations

Towards the end of the 1980s Egypt introduced an educational policy aimed at reducing the years of compulsory primary schooling from six years to five years. This reduced the overall compulsory years of schooling from nine years to eight years. This paper will examine the educational and labor outcomes of this policy change differentiated by urban and rural areas using the Egypt Labor Market Panel Survey (ELMPS) 2006 and 2012 rounds. Regressions estimated in this paper differentiated between the urban and rural populations. The results suggested that the effect on the rural community was much larger than the effect on …

Credit Risk And Corporate Governance, Olivier Mugisho Mudekereza

Theses and Dissertations

Is the executive’s compensation structure influenced by the credit rating assigned to his company? I analyze a panel of U.S. public firms using the random-effects and fixed-effects estimations. Compared to firms with lower credit risk, I find that firms facing higher probability of default provide more incentives for their CEOs.

Direct Effects Of Bundled Payments For Care Improvement Initiative: A County-Level Approach, Konstantinos Panitsas Mr

Theses and Dissertations

Implementing a nonlinear, Difference-in-Differences estimation method, I quantify the positive impact bundled payment reforms have on vulnerable population groups living in U.S. counties where this cost reducing initiative was implemented. I find statistically significant effects of this health-care initiative on the elderly and the economically disadvantaged individuals.

The Effect Of Paid Sick Leave On Physician Office-Based Visits, Korvin Vicente

Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses a balanced sample of workers from cross-sections of the National Health Interview Survey to estimate the causal effects of paid sick leave on the medical care seeking behavior of individuals, as measured by physician office-based visits.

Human And Monkey Responses In A Symmetric Game Of Conflict With Asymmetric Equilibria, Sarah F. Brosnan, Sara A. Price, Kelly Leverett, Laurent Prétôt, Michael Beran, Bart J. Wilson

ESI Publications

To better understand the evolutionary history of human decision-making, we compare human behavior to that of two monkey species in a symmetric game of conflict with two asymmetric equilibria. While all of these species routinely make decisions in the context of social cooperation and competition, they have different socio-ecologies, which leads to different predictions about how they will respond. Our prediction was that anti-matching would be more difficult than matching in a symmetric coordination with simultaneous moves. To our surprise, not only do rhesus macaques frequently play one asymmetric Nash equilibrium, but so do capuchin monkeys, whose play in the …

Historical Cost And Conservatism Are Joint Adaptations That Help Identify Opportunity Cost, Sudipta Basu, Gregory B. Waymire

ESI Publications

Braun (The ecological rationality of historical costs and conservatism. Accounting, Economics and Law: A Convivium, this issue) argues that the traditional accounting principles underlying the revenue-expense approach such as Historical Cost and Conservatism are ecologically rational in that they help organizations survive better in uncertain economic environments. More importantly, Braun argues that the revenue-expense approach generates new private information, which informs markets and makes them more effective (Hayek, 1945, The use of knowledge in society. The American Economic Review, 35(4), 519–530), as opposed to merely reflecting back market data under the asset-liability approach (e.g. Sunder, 2011, IFRS monopoly: …

A Technical Note On Spatial Aggregation For Independent Cities And Counties In Virginia, Jing Chen

Regional Research Institute Technical Documents

This document provides an overview of two approaches to treat Virginia’s independent cities in county-level data sets. Then, issues of spatial aggregation and geographical division change are introduced respectively. A Python function for spatial aggregation is also provided. Although this document focuses on independent cities and counties in Virginia, it can be extended into other regions for spatial aggregation.

The Impact Of Marketization On Entrepreneurship In China: Recent Evidence, Yang Zhou, Joshua C. Hall

Economics Faculty Working Papers Series

While marketization has been linked to provincial-level economic growth in China, how marketization leads to growth has not been explored. We hypothesize that marketization creates an environment that encourages entrepreneurship, which manifests itself in economic growth. While this argument is not new, it has not been explored in the Chinese context. We fill this gap by empirically testing the relationship between marketization and measures of entrepreneurship across Chinese provinces. Our primary measures of entrepreneurship are level changes in the number of "private enterprises" and "self-employed individuals". We find that higher levels of marketization are positively related to higher levels of …