Economics Commons^™

China's “Great Migration”: The Impact Of The Reduction In Trade Policy Uncertainty, Giovanni Facchini, Maggie Y. Liu, Anna Maria Mayda, Minghai Zhou

Economics: Faculty Publications

We analyze the effect of China's integration into the world economy on workers in the country and show that one important channel of impact has been internal migration. Specifically, we study the changes in internal migration rates triggered by the reduction in trade policy uncertainty faced by Chinese exporters in the U.S. This reduction is characterized by plausibly exogenous variation across products, which we use to construct a local measure of treatment, at the level of a Chinese prefecture, following Bartik (1991). This allows us to estimate a difference-in-difference empirical specification based on variation across Chinese prefectures before and after …

How The Behaviors Of Some East Texans May Affect Their Health - September 2019, Manuel Reyes-Loya, Marilyn Young, Ayush Kumar

Hibbs Newsletter

In this issue, we complement our previous edition, discussing some additional aspects of Health Status in the U.S. with a focus on East Texas.

Better Together: Improving Food Security And Nutrition By Linking Market And Food Systems, Martha Cruz Zuinga, Monty L. Lynn, Elly Kaganzi Mwesigwa, Dan Norell, Vidhya Sriram, Emmanuel Tumusiime

Management Sciences

Market-based approaches to food security often increase agricultural productivity and income yet sometimes fail to enhance nutrition. When food security programming combines market and food systems with a specific focus on women and girls, economic and nutrition outcomes benefit. We identify distinctive and shared elements from market and food systems and highlight how they enhance nutrition outcomes when they are combined. We describe food security programming by CARE and World Vision in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, demonstrating nutrition gains in food insecure households.

Estimation Of Sacrifice Ratio For The Nigerian Economy Using A Time Varying Adrl Approach, E. T. Adamgbe, M. O. Abeng, A. A. Omosola

Economic and Financial Review

Monetary policy in the last few decades had focused on creating the enabling conditions for sustainable economic growth, using the level of inflation as the pivotal tool, complemented with central banks’ independence and monetary policy transparency. However, attaining the delicate balance of achieving low inflation and optimal output, with minimal tradeoffs has been a cause for concern for policy makers. Thus, the measurement of the output loss, arising from the inflation-output tradeoff, forms the fulcrum of this study. This study estimates the sacrifice ratio using a state space methodology in an aggregate supply framework to adjust for real business cycle …

Investigating The Impact Of Exchange Rate Volatility On Naira Exchange Rate In Nigeria, A. T. Adenekan, G. K. Sanni, A. I. Itodo

Economic and Financial Review

This study investigates the impact of naira-to-dollar exchange rate volatility on naira exchange rate returns in Nigeria. Using daily percentage exchange rate returns of the naira per US-Dollar, the study estimated an AR(5)-TGARCH (1,1) to examine whether there is an existence of asymmetry in the time path of the naira exchange rate volatility. The findings indicated that exchange rate volatility leads to increase in exchange rate returns (depreciation). Also, there is the presence of asymmetry in the movement of the exchange rate volatility, such that negative shocks that cause exchange rate returns to fall lead to fall in volatility by …

California Paid Family Leave And Parental Time Use, Samantha Trajkovski

Center for Policy Research

Paid family leave policies are intended to help working parents fulfill their work and child care responsibilities by providing them with paid time off from work after the birth of a child. While other research has shown that paid leave policies increase leave-taking among parents, little is known about how parents of infants spend their time while they are on leave and shortly after returning to work. Using the American Heritage Time Use Study and taking a difference-in-differences approach, this paper shows that the California Paid Family Leave policy led to an additional six hours per week mothers spend on …

Institutional Quality, Financial Inclusion And Inclusive Growth: Causality Evidence From Nigeria, G. O. Olanrewaju, S. A. Tella, B. A. Adesoye

Economic and Financial Review

The study examines the causal interactions among the institutional, financial and inclusive growth variables by employing Toda-Yamamoto (TY) Granger non-causality test within the augmented VAR framework. Annual time series, data from 1998 to 2017, were used. The TY analysis showed that all the variables, with the exception of financial inclusion index, Granger-caused inclusive growth, but without any evidence of feedback. However, a bidirectional causal relationship was found between inclusive finance and the interaction of institutional quality and financial inclusion. Thus, the null hypothesis of block exogeneity can be refuted when real GDP per person employed (RGDPE) is taken as the …

Essays In Empirical Economics, Agustin Indaco

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters that utilize distinct econometric methods and novel datasets.

In the first chapter, “From Twitter to GDP: Estimating Economic Activity From Social Media”, I collect all geo-located image tweets shared on Twitter in 2012-2013 to study whether the volume of tweets is a valid proxy for estimating current GDP in USD at the country level. My preferred model explains 94 percent of the cross-country variation and the residuals from the model are negatively correlated to a data quality index, indicating that my estimates of GDP are more accurate for countries with more reliable GDP data. …

Essays On The Economic Consequences Of Capital Controls, Richard J. Nugent Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of three chapters. In Chapter One, we review the literature on the economic consequences of capital controls. Capital controls are advocated as second-best policy in the presence of a pecuniary externality. Restricting capital inflows as a prudential tool during economic booms may distort the efficient allocation of capital but it invokes precautionary saving behavior so that agents do not overborrow. The financial crises that are fueled by capital market distortions can be mitigated by the use of prudential capital controls, heightened during the boom and released during the bust. The empirical evidence on capital controls has revealed …

Effects Of Innovations In Health Care Provision And Financing, Hoda Nouri Khajavi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of four chapters that study the impacts of innovations in health care provision and financing. The relentless rise in US health care costs has led the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to launch various pilot programs to create financial incentives for health care providers, suppliers, and local communities to improve the efficiency of the health care system. The fist chapter of this manuscript reviews the main pilot programs implemented and/or funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services since the 111th United States Congress passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as …

Essays On Applied Machine Learning For Implied Volatility Interpolation And Artificial Counterfactuals, Pablo A. Crespo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation consists of two chapters.

Chapter 1: Volatility estimates under the risk neutral density have become a much revisited topic of interest in recent years. The density proves itself a powerful tool for sentiment analysis, since its moments provide insights about expectations in price trends. A standard procedure for its extraction utilizes artificial volatility predictions to form a dense enough grid for approximating a complete probability distribution. This paper proposes two common machine learning technique variations to produce implied volatility predictions when data is very scarce. First, a model using regularization through a variation of a generalized LASSO path …

New Factor Structure Models And Idiosyncratic Volatility, Ossama Elhadary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I propose new factor structures that are based on the Fama-French style factors but include additional locations like the industry groups and the exchanges where the stocks are traded. I show that the stock returns are clustered around the industry groups and the exchanges. Idiosyncratic volatility calculated using the new factor structure models tend to be smaller than those calculated using the traditional Fama-French model. By sorting portfolios using the idiosyncratic volatility computed using the new factor models, a trader can gain larger profits compared to sorting the portfolio using the traditionally calculated idiosyncratic volatility.

Signals In The Black Stack / Geometyr Design Manual, Jason T. Scaglione

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The following white paper provides a critical accompaniment to my capstone project: the GEOMEtyr Design Manual. GEOMEtyr is a virtual reality to be made accessible as a mobile and web platform for the visualization of certain systemic elements of a utopic world that parallels our own planet’s geographies, polities, and climates. As such, the GEOMEtyr virtualization is designed to derive utopian space from the informational structures of our own world. The operations by which this may be accomplished are broadly described within the accompanying GEOMEtyr manual. The white paper, Signals in the Black Stack, elaborates vital world-building characteristics of informational …

Market Making: Crises And The Global Production Of Shipbreaking In Chittagong, Bangladesh, Elizabeth A. Sibilia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shipbreaking is a dismantling process with a primary objective of extracting large amounts of steel from ocean-going vessels, oil tankers, bulk cargo carriers, and container ships. As mobile forms of fixed capital, these devalued vessels have experienced a gradual or sudden loss of value. The removal of devalued ships from the world fleet, through an increasingly sophisticated global demolition market and expanding domestic shipbreaking markets, have played a critical role in helping the global shipping sector solve its crises of overproduction since the mid 1970s. Since the early 1990s Bangladesh has become one of the most important domestic shipbreaking markets. …

Transaction Costs In Water Transfers: The Issue Of Local Control, Mark T. Kanazawa

Department of Economics Working Paper Series

As water becomes increasingly scarce relative to demand, it becomes increasingly important to maximize the value that we derive from it. For years, economists have been advocating increased reliance on water markets as a means of rationalizing water use, the objective being to facilitate the allocation of water to its highest-value uses.1

Yet in many parts of the arid West, water markets have been surprisingly slow to take hold. Despite some recent progress, perhaps nowhere is this truer than in California.2 The conditions of extreme drought recently experienced by the state make it even more incumbent to better understand why …

The Other America: Inequality, Taxes, And The Very Rich, Jenny Bourne

Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Effective tax rates are lower than statutory rates for wealthy people because they receive much income from capital, capital income receives preferential treatment, and recognition of capital

income is often voluntary. I calculate taxes paid as a percentage of wealth using linked estate- income data. Single itemizers with wealth of at least $2 million in 2007 paid less than 3 percent

of wealth in annual taxes, with the richest paying the smallest fraction. Changes enacted in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 favor those at the top. The estate tax remains one tool that may curb extreme wealth …

Introduction, Ezra Rosser

Contributions to Books

This is the introduction to Holes in the Safety Net: Federalism and Poverty (Ezra Rosser ed., Cambridge University Press, 2019). The table of contents for the book, with links to the other chapters, can be found below: Introduction (this document) Ezra Rosser Part I: Welfare and Federalism Ch. 1 Federalism, Entitlement, and Punishment across the US Social Welfare State Wendy Bach Ch. 2 Laboratories of Suffering: Toward Democratic Welfare Governance Monica Bell, Andrea Taverna, Dhruv Aggarwal, and Isra Syed Ch. 3 The Difference in Being Poor in Red States versus Blue States Michele Gilman Part II: States, Federalism, and Antipoverty …

Essays On New Keynesian Term Premium Model With Financial Risks, Weiguo Fu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation studies the modeling of U.S. Treasury (UST) yield curve term premia under the New Keynesian (NK) framework. Loosely speaking, term premium is the difference between a government bond’s yield for a specific tenor and the average of the expected short rates up to that tenor. The dissertation is divided into three chapters. The first chapter proposes a New Keynesianism-based macro-finance model estimated by a one-step full information maximum likelihood (FIML) method. The second chapter shows that the one-step FIML method may produce estimation biases, which result in biased expected short rates and term premia. The chapter then presents …

The Origins Of The Jones Act Of Puerto Rico, Stephanie Mercedes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

After the Spanish-American War that ended in 1898, Puerto Rico was given to the United States by Spain as a war booty, becoming a US colony. The first law ever created by the United States to control Puerto Rico was the Foraker Act (also known as the Organic Act of 1900). This established a civilian government in Puerto Rico. It also extended the federal government rulings to the island. After its creation, the Puerto Rican population began to wonder what their political status was since nothing was concretized until the Jones Act was signed. The Merchant Marine Act of 1920, …

Runaway: A History Of Postwar New York In Four Factories, Andy Battle

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

At midcentury, New York City was among the preeminent manufacturing centers in the United States. Within a generation, this manufacturing economy suffered an extraordinary collapse. Beginning in the 1950s, workers and their unions began to use the term “runaway” to describe factories that pulled up stakes in New York and set them back down in other climes. This dissertation explores the deindustrialization of New York City through case studies of “runaway” plants, or factories that left New York for the American South or abroad between the years 1945 and 1975.

In general, the manufacturers that remained in New York at …

Affective Portfolio Analysis: Risk, Ambiguity And (Ir)Rationality, Donald J. Brown

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Ambiguous assets are characterized as assets where objective and subjective probabilities of tomorrow’s asset-returns are ill-defined or may not exist, e.g., bitcoin, volatility indices or any IPO. Investors may choose to diversify their portfolios of fiat money, stocks and bonds by investing in ambiguous assets, a fourth asset class, to hedge the uncertainties of future returns that are not risks. (IR)rational probabilities are computable alternative descriptions of the distribution of returns for ambiguous assets. (IR)rational probabilities can be used to define an investor’s (IR)rational expected utility function in the class of non-expected utilities. Investment advisors use revealed preference analysis to …

Macroeconomic Dynamics At The Cowles Commission From The 1930s To The 1950s, Robert W. Dimand

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper explores the development of dynamic modelling of macroeconomic fluctuations at the Cowles Commission from Roos, Dynamic Economics (Cowles Monograph No. 1, 1934) and Davis, Analysis of Economic Time Series (Cowles Monograph No. 6, 1941) to Koopmans, ed., Statistical Inference in Dynamic Economic Models (Cowles Monograph No. 10, 1950) and Klein’s Economic Fluctuations in the United States, 1921-1941 (Cowles Monograph No. 11, 1950), emphasizing the emergence of a distinctive Cowles Commission approach to structural modelling of macroeconomic fluctuations influenced by Cowles Commission work on structural estimation of simulation equations models, as advanced by Haavelmo (“A Probability Approach to Econometrics,” …

Durables And Lemons: Private Information And The Market For Cars, Richard Blundell, Ran Gu, Soren Leth-Petersen, Hamish Low, Costas Meghir

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We specify an equilibrium model of car ownership with private information where individuals sell and purchase new and second-hand cars over their life-cycle. Private information induces a transaction cost and distorts the market reducing the value of a car as a savings instrument. We estimate the model using data on car ownership in Denmark, linked to register data. The lemons penalty is estimated to be 18% of the price in the rst year of ownership, declining with the length of ownership. It leads to large reductions in the turnover of cars and in the probability of downgrading at job loss.

Borderplex Business Barometer, Volume 3, Number 9, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Steven L. Fullerton, Ana Gutierrez Zubiate, Ignacio Santana

Border Region Modeling Project

No abstract provided.

The Interplay Between Real Estate Prices In Shenzhen, Dongguan And Huizhou, Zhituan Su

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In recent years, the Chinese government has proposed a national development strategy for the construction of Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, which has been beefing up the trend of integrated development of Shenzhen, Dongguan and Huizhou, frontiers of the reform and opening up. Among many other topics, the evolution of the real estate prices in Shenzhen, Dongguan and Huizhou has become a front-burner topic.

In this dissertation focusing on the real estate price in Shenzhen, Dongguan and Huizhou, we have conducted in-depth analysis of the interplay between the real estate price in Shenzhen, Dongguan and Huizhou from such perspectives as …

Political Connections And The Value Of Cash Holdings, Yuanto Kusnadi

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

This study examines how political connections influence the value of cash holdings in an international setting. The main finding reveals that political connections are not associated with the value of cash holdings in the overall sample. However, further analysis demonstrates that political connections are negatively associated with the value of cash holdings for firms inemerging markets and in countries with high levels of corruption. Moreover, the negative valuation of cash holdings is driven by firms that are connected through large shareholders. Overall, the findings provide new insights into the value relevance of cash holdings, especially for politically connected firms.

Holding Hospitals Accountable? Evidence On The Effectiveness Of Minimum Charity Care Provision Laws, Michah W. Rothbart, Nara Yoon

Center for Policy Research

What can governments do to encourage nonprofit hospitals to provide greater benefits to their communities? Recent efforts by the federal and state governments seek to hold hospitals accountable for community health, in part by incentivizing charity care provision. Laws that set benchmarks for charity care spending are increasingly used, but their efficacy is uncertain. In this study, we examine the extent to which Illinois’ minimum charity care provision (MCCP) law increases nonprofit hospital charity care. Importantly, we differentiate between responses for hospitals required to provide minimal charitable spending (nonprofits) and those that are not (for-profit and public). We use detailed …

Singapore As A Sustainable City: Past, Present And The Future, Tomoki Fujii, Rohan Ray

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper outlines Singapore’s major sustainability challenges and its policy response in the areas of land use, transportation, waste management, water, and energy. We review the current and past Concept Plans from the perspective of sustainable land use and provide an overview of transportation policy in Singapore. We also examine Singapore’s policies to manage increasing wastes and review the four tap water management plan. Finally, we look at various initiatives by the government for sustainable use of energy. While Singapore has been successful in many ways in transforming itself into one of the most prosperous and sustainable cities in the …

Wti Crude Oil Option Implied Var And Cvar: An Empirical Application, Giovanni Barone-Adesi, Marinela Adriana Finta, Chiara Legnazzi, Carlo Sala

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Using option market data we derive naturally forward-looking, non-parametric and model-free risk estimates, three desired characteristics hardly obtainable using historical returns. The option-implied measures are only based on the first derivative of the option price with respect to the strike price, bypassing the difficult task of estimating the tail of the return distribution. We estimate and backtest the 1%, 2.5%, and 5% WTI crude oil futures option-implied value at risk and conditional value at risk for the turbulent years 2011–2016 and for both tails of the distribution. Compared with risk estimations based on the filtered historical simulation methodology, our results …

Volatility Timing Under Low-Volatility Strategy, Poh Ling Neo, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The authors devise a volatility timing strategy based on statistical tests on the slope of the volatility decile portfolio return profile. Superior performance is obtained, with a 30% increase in Sharpe ratio and an order of magnitude improvement on cumulated wealth. The profitability of the volatility timing strategy can be attributed to holding a diversified portfolio during bear markets, while holding a concentrated growth portfolio during bull markets.