Economics Commons^™

Census Tracts, Racial Separation, And The Landscape Of Higher Education, Aaron Scholl

College of Business: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This dissertation centers on research at the intersection of labor, public, and urban economics. Chapter 1 details the role, process, and history of census tract delineation prior to each Decennial Census, and investigates short- and long-run implications of neighborhoods that receive further delineation, or become “split”. Using a difference-in-differences empirical design, I exploit Decennial Censuses from 1980 to 2010 to find that “split” census tracts increase in their proportion of Black residents and these effects persist decades. Further evidence suggests that the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program may play a role in concentrating residents in areas with greater census tract …

Measuring The Significance Of Precautionary Savings: Empirical Evidence From The Psid, Sokaina El Bekri

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Many economic models assume frictionless worlds with perfect insurance markets. A notable exception is the standard incomplete markets (SIM) model which allows for incomplete insurance markets that result in precautionary savings among agents. In this paper, I test for evidence in support of precautionary savings using both macro and micro-level data. Using aggregate data, I find that the unemployment rate is negatively correlated with savings and consumption, and positively correlated with household debt. If the unemployment rate rises, savings and consumption fall the next period while household debt increases. At the micro level, panel data analysis shows strong evidence of …

(Wp 2021-04) John Tomer's Reconceptualization Of The Concept Of Human Capital, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

This chapter examines John Tomer’s contributions to our understanding of the concept of human capital. Tomer criticized the standard mainstream view of the concept as narrowly focused on education and training and as seeing investments in human capital as having “an individual, cognitive, and machine-like nature.” A broader concept included attention to the people’s noncognitive development, and employed both social capital and personal capital concepts. This produces a more expansive view of human development, allows for a humanistic psychological perspective, and supports a multi-dimensional, Maslovian understanding of the hierarchy of human needs. Tomer framed his policy thinking regarding investments in …

Technology And Sustainability: The New Business Playing Field, Havovi Joshi

Asian Management Insights

Two topics that have consistently cropped up in conversations among business leaders during the pandemic are technology, in the context of the pervasiveness and quickening pace of digital transformation, and sustainability, especially how we should be doing business without harming the environment and society. The collective belief is that both topics will continue to rise on the world’s agenda, reshaping entire industries while creating new ones. They have changed the way of doing business. So what does the new playbook look like?

The Impact Of Information Shocks And Partisanship On The Evolution Of Covid-19 In Connecticut, Joslin Valiyaveettil

Honors Scholar Theses

The COVID-19 pandemic has affected all aspects of life within the United States since early 2020. How people decided to behave during this time heavily influenced the trends that followed, triggering both health and behavioral economic concerns. Those trends seemed to vary based on the area and the beliefs of those constituents. This paper explores how partisan beliefs had an impact on the changes in case rates that occurred within the top 30 most populated towns in the state of Connecticut. In July 2020, former President Donald Trump sent out a tweet publicly endorsing face masks for the first time. …

How The Level Of Job Complexity Impacts The Gender Wage Gap Across Occupations, Zytlaly Magaña Corona

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The present study focused on unpacking the social and structural aspects of job complexity to better understand its effects on the gender wage gap. Previous research on the job complexity-compensation dynamic has primarily focused on cognitive complexity. Job complexity across occupations were examined using work activity data from O*NET and merging it with the Current Population Survey data sponsored by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (N=67,003). Results revealed that higher complexity jobs in this study yielded greater wage disparities across different occupations as predicted. Furthermore, physical activities and gaining knowledge from the Generalized Work Activities were the two most …

From Self-Sufficiency To Import Dependence In The Republic Of The Marshall Islands: Data Issues And Challenges, Debra L. Claypool

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Although it appears likely that the profoundly asymmetrical political and economic relationship between the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has contributed to the abandonment of traditional agriculture, import-dependency, and a decrease in quality of life for the citizens of the RMI, limits in existing quantitative data make it impossible to model exactly how this occurred. Therefore, rather than seek to model this causal relationship, the researcher employed three existing ethnographic studies to establish a quantitative measure of the transformation itself. Using additional government documents to supplement the existing data, a measure of relative percentage of …

Borderplex Business Barometer, Volume 5, Number 5, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Steven L. Fullerton, Ana Gutierrez Zubiate

Border Region Modeling Project

No abstract provided.

Three Essays On Nonstationary Financial Econometrics, Yajie Zhang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation consists of three essays that contribute to the theory of nonstationary time-series analysis.

The first chapter explores the inference procedures for predictive regressions with time-varying characteristics. We extend the self-generated instrumentation, called IVX, to incorporate persistent regressors of functional local-to-unity, functional mildly explosive, and functional mildly stationary roots. The asymptotic distributions of IVX estimators under time-varying parameters are novel and nonpivotal but lead to pivotal distributions of the corresponding Wald statistics that are robust across various roots. The numerical experiments justify the robustness of IVX testing procedures in finite samples. We also verify the existence of time-varying coefficients …

Two Essays On Innovation And Growth In China, Qiugu He

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation studies China’s economic growth from a perspective of industry dynamics. In chapter 1, I introduce the background and policies relating to China’s economic growth after 1978. In chapter 2, I find that the elasticity of the average R&D expenditure of firms on competition is -0.29 in weak-IPR (intellectual property right) provinces, and -0.06 in strict-IPR provinces. Next, I use the Schumpeterian growth model to explain this finding: When the market becomes more competitive, a firm prefers imitation to innovation to a larger extent, as a means of getting new technology. Due to enforcement of IPR laws, the imitation …

Byzantine Empire Economic Growth: Did Climate Change Play A Role?, Thomas E. Lambert

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Different chroniclers of the history of the Byzantine Empire have noted various economic data gleamed from historical documents and accounts of the empire at different periods of time. Research for this paper has not uncovered any estimates of long term, annual macroeconomic data (gross domestic product (GDP), national income (NI), etc.) for the empire during its existence. Such data has been estimated to one extent or another for other nations and societies that have existed during the middle ages. This paper attempts to provide conjectures on approximate real GDP per capita trends for the empire over its existence from AD …

Covid-19: A Black Swan?, Ben M. Uehlinger

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

A Black Swan, as termed by Nassim Taleb, is an unexpected, high magnitude event that is often rationalized in hindsight. 9/11 and the Financial Crisis of 2008 are two examples of these tail probability events. Though COVID-19 has been regarded as momentous and unexpected, Taleb does not credit it as a true Black Swan. This paper aims to compare COVID-19 to these recent Black Swans in terms of predictability and significance. Cointegration was tested across 11 major sectors. Further economic indicators were explored with the goal of discussing the broader context of each event. It was concluded that COVID-19 was …

Exploring Equity In Health And Poverty Impacts Of Control Measures For Sars-Cov-2 In Six Countries, Sedona Sweeney, Theo Prudencio Juhani Capeding, Rosalind Eggo, Maryam Huda, Mark Jit, Don Mudzengi, Nichola R. Naylor, Simon Procter, Matthew Quaife, Lela Serebryakova

Community Health Sciences

Background: Policy makers need to be rapidly informed about the potential equity consequences of different COVID-19 strategies, alongside their broader health and economic impacts. While there are complex models to inform both potential health and macro-economic impact, there are few tools available to rapidly assess potential equity impacts of interventions.
Methods: We created an economic model to simulate the impact of lockdown measures in Pakistan, Georgia, Chile, UK, the Philippines and South Africa. We consider impact of lockdown in terms of ability to socially distance, and income loss during lockdown, and tested the impact of assumptions on social protection coverage …

(Wp 2021-02) Attribute Substitution, Counterfactual Thinking, And Heterodox Economics, John B. Davis, Theodore Koutsobinas

Economics Working Papers

This paper examines how attribute substitution (AS), central to the psychology of choice and behavioral economic reasoning, can be understood when combined with counterfactual thinking (CFT), often called ‘what if’ or ‘if only’ thinking, and how their combination creates important opportunities for the seeing heterodox economics as a single research program alternative to mainstream economics. The first section of the paper discusses AS, CFT, and what a AS-CFT behavioral framework involves, and then emphasizes how this framework departs from fundamental assumptions mainstream rational choice theory employs. The second section reviews the foundations of behavioral thinking regarding AS, describes what it …

The Impact Of Integrating An Sbdc Program Into A College/University Career Center, Harshdeep Singh Nanda

Master's Projects

With a new approach for integrating the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) program in Alameda County, the Ohlone Community College District (Ohlone College) has introduced a new model for hosting an SBDC program on a college/university campus. While many other educational institutions across the nation have hosted an SBDC program (Cook Center for Entrepreneurship - Ivy Tech Community College of Indiana, n.d.; University of Scranton Small Business Development Center (SBDC) | Helping NEPA & Northern Tier Small Businesses Start, Grow & Prosper., n.d.; Olson, 2006), most have treated the program as a separate entity or department, often leading to the …

The Political Anatomy Of Economic Crises –The Case Of Turkey, Hurşit Güneş

Topics in Middle Eastern and North African Economies

The foundations of economic and financial crises are conventionally attributed to the technicalities of macroeconomic fragilities. Yet political instability (caused by the deficiency of democracy and/or unfunctional political institutions) can also be considered as a major determinant of economic instability by deteriorating the debt dynamics through depreciation of the national currency or the ascent of interest rates. Analogously, political instability, for instance, disruption of cabinet durability, to a large extent depends on the economic performance of governments. Hence, though most economists conceive macroeconomic fragilities as the mother of all crises, the issue is rather complex and there is an intermingled …

Bankruptcy And The Debt-Unemployment Relationship: Evidence From A Natural Experiment, Gina C.M. Jouaneh

Senior Honors Projects

This paper examines the effect of a change in bankruptcy law on the relationship between household debt and longer-run unemployment in the United States. In consumer bankruptcy cases, filers can be eligible for two different types of bankruptcies: Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. Chapter 7 frees filers from debt repayment by liquidating their assets and using those proceeds to pay creditors, while Chapter 13 allows filers to enter a debt repayment plan of three to five years rather than discharge debt altogether. In 2005, Congress passed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act (BAPCPA), which greatly increased the difficulty …

Rising Costs, Stagnant Prices: How Video Game Companies Truly Earn Profit, Lucas Mcculloch

Senior Honors Projects

Despite being one of the youngest forms of entertainment, video games have grown from a relatively niche market into an economic juggernaut, easily eclipsing both film and music in market value. In particular, the global video games industry has doubled in value in under a decade, from an estimated global revenue of approximately $80 billion in 2012 to approximately $160 billion in 2020. In order to better understand the economic principles underlying the rise of the gaming industry over the past decade, this project includes an interview of game developer and industry insider Rami Ismail and an in-depth literature review. …

The Impact Of Mindfulness On Healthy Food Choices, Kaylea Hopfer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The practice of mindfulness has a long history in research, particularly psychological studies. In this paper I examine the effects of a short mindfulness intervention on healthy food purchases. Specifically, I developed an online survey and recruited 634 participants via Prolific between July 24 - July 27, 2020. I randomly assigned participants to either a mindfulness manipulation or a control condition. Following treatment (or control) participants completed a food choice task and various other control. Following the survey, I analyzed data using R version 4.0.2 (2020-06-22) and R-Studio. I estimated three different regression models, ordinary least squares (OLS), Poisson, and …

Sovereignty, Statehood, And Subjugation: Native Hawaiian And Japanese American Discourse Over Hawaiian Statehood, Nicole Saito

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Although discourse over Hawaiian statehood has increasingly been described by scholars as a racial conflict between Japanese Americans and Native Hawaiians, there existed a broad spectrum of interactions between the two groups. Both communities were forced to confront the prejudices they had against each other while recognizing their shared experiences with discrimination, creating a paradoxical political culture of competition and solidarity up until the conclusion of World War Two. From 1946 to 1950, however, the country’s collective understanding of Japanese American citizenship began to shift with recognition of the community’s military service record and an increased proportion of veterans elected …

The Effect Of High Elevation Weather Stations On The Usda's Pasture, Rangeland, And Forage Insurance Program, Wyatt Matthew Feuz

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This paper examines the effect of high elevation weather stations on the rainfall index used by the Pasture, Rangeland, and Forage insurance program. Weather station data for the state of Utah is used to identify high elevation weather stations and their location. Utilizing the corresponding rainfall index data, the effect of the high elevation weather stations is determined. This paper finds when high elevation weather stations begin reporting there is a jump up of 19.01–27.88 percentage points on average in the rainfall index for the corresponding grid locations. This indicates the rainfall index may not accurately represent actual precipitation amounts …

Applied Microeconomics And Business Intelligence In The Digital Age, Thomas J. Weinandy

Dissertations

The Digital Age is defined by advances in big data, low-cost computing, and modern analytical methods. In three chapters, I apply microeconomic thought to the influence these digital technologies have on business and consumer decision-making.

Chapter One considers how Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) like Uber and Lyft impact the relationship between the quantity of car service trips and fuel prices. I find that a single day 1% increase in fuel prices is associated with a 0.367 to 0.486% decrease in the number of TNC trips and a 0.033 to 0.088% increase in the number of taxi trips, even though the …

Behavioral Economic Modeling Of The Effects Of Symptom, Severity, And Cost On Seeking Medical Care, Mark J. Rzeszutek

Dissertations

While the United States has some of the highest healthcare spending in the world, it has some of the worst health outcomes. For example, maternal mortality in the United States is almost five times as high as in other similarly wealthy countries. It also has the highest rates of avoidable deaths. One of the reasons for this may be the cost of accessing healthcare due to privatized insurance. For example, Americans may avoid important preventive medical visits and other health screeners due to cost. While lack of health insurance has been correlated with decreased health utilization, a precise understanding of …

Investing In Our Future: A State-Level Analysis Of The Relationship Between Education Funding And Economic Growth, Corinna Campbell-Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research paper aims to investigate associations between education investments and economic growth on the state level. These relationships are measured in terms of two dependent variables: state gross domestic product output and cumulative personal incomes by state. These dependent variables, or indicators of economic growth were selected from previous supportive literature. The present study analyzes publicly available aggregate school finance data reports and aggregate GDP output reports for the year of 2018. Two hypotheses were tested to assess these associations. The results of the present study showed significant, positive associations for both tested hypotheses. This study further supports existing …

Trustors’ Disregard For Trustees Deciding Intuitively Or Reflectively: Three Experiments On Time Constraints, Antonio Cabrales, Antonio M. Espín, Praveen Kujal, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Working Papers

Human decisions in the social domain are modulated by the interaction between intuitive and reflective processes. Requiring individuals to decide quickly or slowly triggers these processes and is thus likely to elicit different social behaviors. Meanwhile, time pressure has been associated with inefficiency in market settings and market regulation often requires individuals to delay their decisions via cooling-off periods. Yet, recent research suggests that people who make reflective decisions are met with distrust. If this extends to external time constraints, then forcing individuals to delay their decisions may be counterproductive in scenarios where trust considerations are important. In three Trust …

Standard Vs Random Dictator Games: On The Effects Of Role Uncertainty And Framing On Generosity, Ernesto Mesa-Vázquez, Ismael Rodriguez-Lara, Amparo Urbano

ESI Working Papers

We show that generosity is affected when we vary the level of role uncertainty, i.e., the probability that the dictator’s decision will be implemented. We also show that framing matters for generosity in that subjects are less generous when they are told that their choices will be implemented with a certain probability, compared with a setting in which they are told that their choices will not be implemented with certain probability.

The Response Of The Chinese Economy To The U.S.-China Trade War: 2018-2019, Pao-Li Chang, Kefang Yao, Fan Zheng

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper, we follow the micro-to-macro approach of Fajgelbaum et al. (2020) and analyze the impacts of the 2018–2019 U.S.-China trade war on the Chinese economy. We use highly disaggregated trade and tariff data with monthly frequency to identify the demand/supply elasticities of Chinese imports/exports, combined with a general equilibrium model for the Chinese economy (that takes into account input-output linkages, and regional heterogeneity in employment and sector specialization) to quantify the partial and general equilibrium effects of the tariff war at the product/sector/region/aggregate levels. This complements the studies that focus on the ex post response of the U.S. …

Business Cycles, Trend Elimination, And The Hp Filter, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

Trend elimination and business cycle estimation are analyzed by finite sample and asymptotic methods. An overview history is provided, operator theory is developed, limit theory as the sample size n → ∞ is derived, and filtered series properties are studied relative to smoothing parameter (λ) behavior. Simulations reveal that limit theory with λ =O(n4) delivers excellent approximations to the HP filter for common sample sizes but fails to remove stochastic trends, contrary to standard thinking in macroeconomics and thereby explaining ‘spurious cycle’ effects of the HP filter. The findings are related to the long run effects of the GFC.

Boosting: Why You Can Use The Hp Filter, Peter C. B. Phillips, Zhentao Shi

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose a procedure of iterating the HP filter to produce a smarter smoothing device, called the boosted HP (bHP) filter, based on L2-boosting in machine learning. Limit theory shows that the bHP filter asymptotically recovers trend mechanisms that involve integrated processes, deterministic drifts, and structural breaks, covering the most common trends that appear in current modeling methodology. A stopping criterion automates the algorithm, giving a data-determined method for data-rich environments. The methodology is illustrated in simulations and with three real data examples that highlight the differences between simple HP filtering, the bHP filter, and an alternative autoregressive approach.

In-Fill Asymptotic Theory For Structural Break Point In Autoregression, Liang Jiang, Xiaohu Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article obtains the exact distribution of the maximum likelihood estimator of structural break point in the Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process when a continuous record is available. The exact distribution is asymmetric, trimodal, dependent on the initial condition. These three properties are also found in the finite sample distribution of the least squares (LS) estimator of structural break point in autoregressive (AR) models. Motivated by these observations, the article then develops an in-fill asymptotic theory for the LS estimator of structural break point in the AR(1) coefficient. The in-fill asymptotic distribution is also asymmetric, tri-modal, dependent on the initial condition, and delivers …