Economics Commons^™

Give Me A Challenge Or Give Me A Raise, Aleksandr Alekseev

ESI Working Papers

I study the effect of task difficulty on workers' effort and compare it to the effect of monetary rewards in an incentivized lab experiment. I find that task difficulty has an inverse-U effect on effort, and that this effect is quantitatively large when compared to the effect of conditional monetary rewards. Difficulty acts as a mediator of monetary rewards: conditional rewards are most effective at the intermediate or high levels of difficulty. I show that the inverse-U pattern of effort response to difficulty is not consistent with the Expected Utility model but is consistent with the Rank-Dependent Utility model that …

The Effect Of Inflation Targeting Policies On Dollarization-A Cross-Country Analysis, Dweepobotee Brahma

The Hilltop Review

This paper attempts to review the experiences of various dollarized economies from the adoption of an explicit inflation-targeting framework for domestic monetary policy. Dollarization is the phenomenon where agents in a country choose to use a foreign currency instead of their domestic currency. This often occurs in response to episodes of high inflation rate in the domestic economy. Central Banks of these countries often respond by adopting an inflation-targeting regime. This paper attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of such a policy by conducting a cross-country comparison. A panel dataset from 14 dollarized economies from 2001-2015, is used to compare between …

Empowerment, Resistance And The Birth Control Pill: A Feminist Analysis Of Contraception In The Developing World, Abigail S. Trombley

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics and World Affairs

The vast majority of literature on the use of contraception focuses on its frequently documented connection to socioeconomic development. Thus, contraception has become a favored programmatic element of western organizations that deliver it to women in the developing world. I analyze discourse from transnational organizations that advocate for women’s use of birth control in the developing world, as well as deliver contraceptive services themselves, in order to uncover the dominance of liberal, capitalist assumptions therein. A primary consequence of this discourse is the reconstruction of colonial relations between the global north and global south. My alternative analysis, informed by a …

Token Representation?: Impact Of Female Reservations In Panchayati Raj Institutions In Elections To State And National Legislatures, Surbhi Bharadwaj

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics and World Affairs

Reservations have long formed a fundamental tenet of affirmative action in India. Quotas for representation of various disadvantaged groups proliferate across public educational institutions and government jobs. However, elections to public office have largely escaped such quotas, except those that are caste-based. A shift in this status quo occurred in 1992 with the establishment of the Panchayati Raj system of grassroots governance. 34% of all seats under Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) were to be reserved for women under the 73rd amendment. Another constitutional amendment passed in September 2009 increased PRI quotas for women to 50%. This paper seeks to examine …

The Cost Of The Culturati: Studying The Neighborhood Stability Impact Of Cultural District Designations, Prakash Mishra

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics and World Affairs

The decision to declare a district for a specific cause is a critical policy decision; making an area an official office park or designated cultural site means it will attract specific types of residents and businesses and require specific amenities. This paper reviews the impact of designating a cultural district as a place-based policy, specifically by developing a measure of neighborhood stability and applying a stress test of neighborhood stability in cultural districts during the Great Recession. The model underpining the neighborhood stability measure is an optimal stopping time model which frames neighborhood rents as a Brownian motion with drift. …

The ‘Security Pacific Letter’: Estimating The Causal Effect Of Securitization On Banks’ Systemic Exposure, Paul-Angelo Dell'isola

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics and World Affairs

This paper aims to test the hypothesis of the ‘Safe Asset narrative’

which states that banks became manufacturers of pseudo safe assets to meet

a global shortage of safe assets in the pre-crisis period. In this narrative,

securitization is the mechanism which enables banks to become underwriters

of safe assets. This paper takes this hypothesis to the data and attempts to

estimate the causal effect of securitization on banks’ systemic exposure. In

particular, this paper exploits a regulatory change that occurred in 1987 when

the OCC expanded the scope of assets US national banks could securitize. By

using state-chartered banks …

Volume I | Issue Ii | 2019.Pdf, Dujpew Editorial Board

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics and World Affairs

No abstract provided.

Masthead 2019, Dujpew Editorial Board

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics and World Affairs

No abstract provided.

Letter From The Editor 2019, Dujpew Editorial Board

Dartmouth Undergraduate Journal of Politics, Economics and World Affairs

No abstract provided.

Potential Economic Impact Of The Goshen/Gering-Ft. Laramie Tunnel Collapse, Jessica J. Groskopf

Cornhusker Economics

Goshen and Scotts Bluff Counties reside in the High Plains and receive less than 16 inches of average annual precipitation. This low precipitation makes surface-water irrigation a critical component of modern agriculture in this area. Farmers in these counties produce irrigated alfalfa hay, corn, sugar beets, and dry edible beans, as well as other hay and crops.

Surface-water refers to water derived from melted snow that is delivered through a series of dams and canals from the mountains of Colorado and Wyoming along the North Platte River. This infrastructure, often referred to as “The North Platte Project,” was built by …

An Addiction To Capitalism: A Rhetorical Criticism Of Mainstream Environmentalism, Jake Engel

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

Show Me The (Value Of) Money!, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Plenty of adults are not financially literate. Teaching children early can make a big difference

Economic Impact Study: Kent County Parks, Grand Valley State University, Christian Glupker

Other Faculty Publications

This study will focus on the economic impact of Kent County Parks from three perspectives:

• Spending resulting from park visitors
• Revenue generated by Kaufman Golf Course and Millennium Park beach
• Spending by Kent County Parks

Review Of The Promise And Peril Of Credit: What A Forgotten Legend About Jews And Finance Tells Us About The Making Of European Commercial Society, Jared Rubin

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

A review of The Promise and Peril of Credit: What a Forgotten Legend about Jews and Finance Tells Us about the Making of European Commercial Society, by Francesca Trivellato, published by Princeton University Press.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- September 2019, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Unintended Impacts From Forest Certification: Evidence From Indigenous Aka Households In Congo, Jacqueline M. Doremus

Economics

Does Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification of “responsible” commercial forestry change nutrition, health and wealth for indigenous peoples, like the Aka of the Congo Basin? Using hand-collected data from the boundary of a certified and an uncertified forest in the Republic of Congo five years after certification, I compare nutrition, health, and wealth using questions that are locally salient and survey timing designed to reach seminomadic hunter-gatherers. Though I only observe outcomes after certification, using a spatial regression discontinuity design I find suggestive evidence that activities to satisfy forest certification may cause increased food insecurity and illness frequency for Aka …

Organic Wheat Prices And Premium Uncertainty: Can Cross Hedging And Forecasting Play A Role?, Tatiana Drugova, Veronica F. Pozo, Kynda R. Curtis, T. Randall Fortenbery

Applied Economics Faculty Publications

We compare the volatility of organic wheat prices to that of conventional wheat prices using historical measures. To reduce uncertainty, we examine the possibility of cross hedging using conventional wheat futures and the ability of futures to forecast the organic premium. Results provide evidence that conventional futures can be used to cross hedge organic wheat price risk, but results depend on the method used to impute the missing values. We also find a long-run equilibrium relationship between organic wheat prices and conventional wheat futures prices. Finally, futures prices contain some information useful in predicting organic prices in the short run.

International Trade, Fdi And Agency Problems, Yuting Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation comprises three papers that separately study product quality in international trade, the governance’ effect on FDI and the agency problems in firms’ exporting decisions.

The first chapter quantifies the contribution of differences in quality preferences to the differences in gains from trade across countries. The quantification demonstrates that variations in the strength of quality preferences across countries add to heterogeneities across countries in market competitiveness. If the quality channel is shut down, countries with stronger preferences for quality have larger degrees of underestimations in their losses from the trade barrier. Finally, gains from a universal rise in quality …

The Economics Of Social Data, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Tan Gan

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A data intermediary pays consumers for information about their preferences and sells the information so acquired to firms that use it to tailor their products and prices. The social dimension of the individual data - whereby an individual’s data are predictive of the behavior of others - generates a data externality that reduces the intermediary’s cost of acquiring information. We derive the intermediary’s optimal data policy and show that it preserves the privacy of the consumers’ identities while providing precise information about market demand to the firms. This enables the intermediary to capture the entire value of information as the …

Information, Market Power And Price Volatility, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We consider demand function competition with a finite number of agents and private information. We show that any degree of market power can arise in the unique equilibrium under an information structure that is arbitrarily close to complete information. In particular, regardless of the number of agents and the correlation of payoff shocks, market power may be arbitrarily close to zero (so we obtain the competitive outcome) or arbitrarily large (so there is no trade in equilibrium). By contrast, price volatility is always less than the variance of the aggregate shock across all information structures.

A Structural Model Of A Multitasking Salesforce: Multidimensional Incentives And Plan Design, Minkyung Kim, K. Sudhir, Kosuke Uetake

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop the first structural model of a multitasking salesforce to address questions of job design and incentive compensation design. The model incorporates three novel features: (i) multitasking effort choice given a multidimensional incentive plan; (ii) salesperson’s private information about customers and (iii) dynamic intertemporal tradeoffs in effort choice across the tasks. The empirical application uses data from a micro nance bank where loan officers are jointly responsible and incentivized for both loan acquisition repayment but has broad relevance for salesforce management in CRM settings involving customer acquisition and retention. We extend two-step estimation methods used for unidimensional compensation plans …

Jacob Marschak And The Cowles Approaches To The Theory Of Money And Assets, Robert W. Dimand, Harald Hagemann

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Jacob Marschak shaped the emergence of monetary theory and portfolio choice at the Cowles Commission (which he directed from 1943 to 1948, but with which he was involved already from 1937) at the University of Chicago, where he was the doctoral teacher of Leonid Hurwicz, Harry Markowitz and Don Patinkin, and then from 1955 at the Cowles Foundation at Yale University, where he was a senior colleague of James Tobin until moving to UCLA in 1960. Marschak’s later attempts to clarify the concept of liquidity and to emphasize the role of new information for economic behavior date back as far …

Social Exclusion, Ambiguity And (Ir)Rationality, Annette Krauss, Donald J. Brown

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This working paper extends the methodology of non-smooth affective portfolio theory (APT) for eliciting (IR)rational preferences of investors endowed with continuous quasilinear utility functions, where assets are portfolios of risky and ambiguous state-contingent claims. The elicitation is a solution of the affective Afriat inequalities;see technical appendix 1. Solving the smooth affective Afriat inequalities is Np-hard; see technical appendices 2, 3, and 4. The proposed extension is a methodology for the elicitation of (IR)rational preferences of individuals endowed with random continuous quasilinear utility functions defined over finite subsets of discrete social goods as a refutable model of social exclusion in the …

The Economics Of Social Data, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Tan Gan

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A data intermediary pays consumers for information about their preferences, and sells the information so-acquired to firms that use it to tailor their product offers and prices. The social dimension of the individual data - whereby an individual’s data is predictive of the behavior of others - generates a data externality that reduces the intermediary’s cost of acquiring information. We derive the data intermediary’s optimal information policy, and show that it preserves privacy over the identity of the consumers, but provides precise information about market demand to the firms.

On Her Own Account: How Strengthening Women’S Financial Control Impacts Labor Supply And Gender Norms, Erica Field, Rohini Pande, Natalia Rigol, Simone Schaner, Charity Troyer Moore

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Can greater control over earned income incentivize women to work and influence gender norms? In collaboration with Indian government partners, we provided rural women with individual bank accounts and randomly varied whether their wages from a public workfare program were directly deposited into these accounts or into the male household head’s account (the status quo). Women in a random subset of villages were also trained on account use. In the short run, relative to women just offered bank accounts, those who also received direct deposit and training increased their labor supply in the public and private sectors. In the long …

A Structural Model Of A Multitasking Salesforce: Multidimensional Incentives And Plan Design, Minkyung Kim, K. Sudhir, Kosuke Uetake

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

The paper broadens the focus of empirical research on salesforce management to include multitasking settings with multidimensional incentives, where salespeople have private information about customers. This allows us to ask novel substantive questions around multidimensional incentive design and job design while managing the costs and benefits of private information. To this end, the paper introduces the first structural model of a multitasking salesforce in response to multidimensional incentives. The model also accommodates (i) dynamic intertemporal tradeoffs in effort choice across the tasks and (ii) salesperson’s private information about customers. We apply our model in a rich empirical setting in microfinance …

The Economics Of Social Data, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Tan Gan

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

A data intermediary acquires signals from individual consumers regarding their preferences. The intermediary resells the information in a product market wherein firms and consumers tailor their choices to the demand data. The social dimension of the individual data -whereby a consumer’s data are predictive of others’ behavior- generates a data externality that can reduce the intermediary’s cost of acquiring the information. The intermediary optimally preserves the privacy of consumers’ identities if and only if doing so increases social surplus. This policy enables the intermediary to capture the total value of the information as the number of consumers becomes large.

The Economics Of Social Data, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti, Tan Gan

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose a model of data intermediation to analyze the incentives for sharing individual data in the presence of informational externalities. A data intermediary acquires signals from individual consumers regarding their preferences. The intermediary resells the information in a product market in which firms and consumers can tailor their choices to the demand data. The social dimension of the individual data - whereby an individual’s data are predictive of the behavior of others - generates a data externality that can reduce the intermediary’s cost of acquiring information. We derive the intermediary’s optimal data policy and establish that it preserves the …

The Effect Of Perceived Corruption On Voter Turnout In Post-Communist Countries In The European Union: Evidence From The Life In Transition Survey Iii, Ivana Pancurakova

Theses and Dissertations

This paper measures the effect of perceived corruption on voting in post-communist countries in the EU using probit models, Dong and Lewbel’s special estimator, and two stage least squares models. Corruption has a significant and negative effect on voter turnout even when controlling for the endogeneity in the corruption variable.

Assessing The Effectiveness Of California's “Replace Your Ride”, Tamara L. Sheldon, Rubal Dua

Faculty Publications

We analyze the effectiveness of California's “Replace Your Ride” policy, a pilot program that gives subsidies to lower income households in the greater Los Angeles area to retire older vehicles and replace them with newer, cleaner vehicles. Using a differences in differences strategy to compare changes in new vehicle purchase probabilities between income eligible and ineligible households before and after the implementation of the program, we find that in 2015, upwards of 44% of plug-in electric vehicle and 78% of hybrid vehicle purchases under the program were additional.