Economics Commons^™

The Samuels-Buchanan Correspondence And The Lost Opportunity For A Positive Public Choice Scholarship, Luke Petach

Funded Scholarship

This article revisits the debate between James Buchanan and Warren Samuels over Miller v. Schoene (1928). The initial court case—concerning the rights of government in the face of conflicting private interests—and subsequent debate between Buchanan and Samuels have important implications for the interrelations between legal and economic processes, the difference between a normative and positive theory of public choice, and the nature of public choice more generally. In published papers and private correspondence, the writings of Samuels reveal an alternative conception of public choice theory as a positive endeavor divorced from the free market normative implications of Buchanan’s work. Application …

Better Solutions To Increasing Covid-19 Vaccine Access: Giving Away Vaccines Rather Than Vaccine Formulas, Tristen Prouse

Honors Program Theses

The debate over giving away the COVID-19 vaccine formulas is a political hot topic. Mention of a Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) waiver proposed in early 2021 suggested violating patent law to give away the vaccine formulas. While a tempting option, many problems exist with this solution. Violating patent law to give away the vaccine formulas disincentivizes innovation, undermines confidence in vaccine safety, and harms America’s geopolitical objectives. Patent law can be inefficient and is not the only way to incentivize innovation, but it is here to stay. Instead, the United States should give away vaccines rather than vaccine formulas …

Section 5 In Action: Reinvigorating The Ftc Act And The Rule Of Law, Lina M. Khan

Faculty Scholarship

The Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914 didn’t just create a new agency. It created new law for that agency to enforce. The heart of that law is Section 5, which provides that ‘unfair methods of competition in or affecting commerce’ are ‘hereby declared unlawful’. In passing this law, Congress also tasked the FTC with identifying the range of methods of competition that qualify as unfair, since lawmakers recognized they could not specify them all prospectively.

This is a straightforward reading of the statute, and yet it is somewhat controversial. There is a school of thought that considers Section 5’s …

Unraveling The Hispanic Health Paradox, Jose Fernandez, Monica Garcia-Perez, Sandra Orozco-Aleman

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

In 2019, Hispanics in the US had a life expectancy advantage of 3.0 years and 7.1 years over non-Hispanic Whites and non-Hispanic Blacks, respectively, despite having real-household income values 26 percentage points lower than Non-Hispanic White households. Hispanics appear to have equal or even better health outcomes relative to non-Hispanic Whites across various health measures. This is known as the Hispanic health paradox. This paper underscores the importance of disaggregating Hispanics by ancestry and age profile when discussing the paradox across key health outcomes. It also provides an overview of the leading explanations, such as the salmon bias and the …

Sovereign Wealth Funds, Corporate Governance, And Corporate Performance, Feiyu Liu

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation comprises three chapters regarding the impact of sovereign wealth fund (SWF) investments on target firms’ corporate governance, cost of debt, and corporate social responsibility performance.

The first chapter is entitled “The Corporate Governance Consequences of Small Shareholdings: Evidence from Sovereign Wealth Fund Cross-Border Investments.” This chapter shows that firms’ corporate governance decrease following SWF cross-border investments. This impact holds for small SWF cross-border equity investments only, and is stronger for firms that are weakly governed and for those located in jurisdictions with weak shareholder protection. The negative relation is more pronounced when SWFs’ home countries have lower-quality investor …

Three Essays On Political Economy, Colin Michael Steitz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The first chapter studies the impact of conventions and multi-day events on
hotel demand in the Indianapolis metro area. Using hand-collected data on
sporting events and conventions, we study the impact on hotel metrics: ADR,
Occupancy, Daily Rate, and Revenue. We show that traditional sporting
events generate little impact when compared to multi-day conventions. We
show that mega-events such as major championship games generate significant
increases in hotel demand. We find large and statistically significant effects for
multi-day conventions on hotel demand with very little evidence of crowding
out. A single day of a multi-day convention brings in approximately $928,000 …

Essays In Applied Microeconomics, Joshua C. Martin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The first chapter examines the role that same-sex marriage legalization had on the number of adoptions of children from foster care in the United States. We do so by employing a synthetic difference-in-differences estimator which leverages both the differential timing of these laws across states and the subsequent wave of state-level legal protections which give foster-care agencies the right to deny service to same-sex couples based on religiously-held beliefs. Using highly detailed, county-level data of nearly 20 million children in the foster care system from 1995-2020, our findings reveal that same-sex marriage legalization led to a 3.8%-5.9% increase in the …

Economic Thought: A Biblical Perspective, Williams Kwasi Peprah, Lucile Sabas, Quentin Sahly, Delynne Shepard

Faculty Publications

This study joins the debate about whether capitalism or socialism best shows how the Bible sees economic interactions between people and, by extension, provides insights into how a Christian should live. Capitalism is based on the private ownership and control of resources and profit, which spread with the migration process of the Protestants. Socialism is based on the idea that the group or community should own the means of production and distribution to benefit everyone equally. This paper argues that biblical principles point neither to socialism nor capitalism as the appropriate economic framework for economic interactions and the organization of …

The Price Of Fairness, Christopher Buccafusco, Daniel Hemel, Eric Talley

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic led to acute supply shortages across the country as well as concerns over price increases amid surging demand. In the process, it reawakened a debate about whether and how to regulate “price gouging”—a controversy that continues as inflation has accelerated even as the pandemic abates. Animating this debate is a longstanding conflict between laissez-faire economics, which champions price fluctuations as a means to allocate scarce goods, and perceived norms of consumer fairness, which are thought to cut strongly against sharp price hikes amid shortages.

This Article provides a new, empirically grounded perspective on the price gouging debate …

Essays On The Economics Of Law And Crime, Zachary J. Porreca

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The first chapter examines the connection between gentrification and urban violence. I demonstrate a positive and plausibly causal relationship between urban redevelopment and gun violence in Philadelphia. As the underlying mechanism, I focus on gentrification's displacement effect on local drug markets. Treating the city as a spatial network of city blocks and using two-way fixed effects differences-in-differences estimators, I show the gentrification of one block increases violence across the surrounding neighborhood. I find that some 2,400 (8%) of Philadelphia's shootings between the years 2011 and 2020 can be attributed to spillover effects from the gentrification of drug blocks. This effect …

Two Essays On Esg, Natalya Bikmetova

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

My dissertation studies the potential for the increased importance of Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) information for corporations and investors in the U.S. market. In my first essay, I examine the effect of coverage by ESG rating agencies on firm ESG performance and disclosure policy. To control for the selection in coverage, I construct a sample of firms with existing ESG ratings from some agencies and study the marginal effect of an additional coverage on a firm relative to firms that did not receive the additional coverage. I find that when firm ESG coverage intensifies, its ESG ratings improve, its …

Two Essays On The Airbnb Market, Debanjana Dey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

This dissertation analyses the Airbnb market in Orange County, FL to provide insight on the performances of short-term vacation rentals listed on the platform. In the first essay we examine the factors affecting the demand and supply of this real estate sector before and after the Covid-19 pandemic, using occupancy, pricing and revenue models. The results identify the aspects of the Airbnb peer-to-peer sharing model that do and those that do not recover quickly after local covid restrictions are lifted. In particular, host experience, professional management, and proximity to major tourist attractions are some of the key factors that generate …

Decentralizability Of Efficient Allocations With Heterogenous Forecasts, Shurojit Chatterji, Atsushi Kajii

Research Collection School Of Economics

Do price forecasts of rational economic agents need to coincide in perfectly competitive complete markets? To address this question, we define an efficient temporary equilibrium (ETE) within the framework of a two period economy. Although an ETE allocation is intertemporally efficient and is obtained by perfect competition, it can arise without the agents forecasts being completely coordinated on a perfect foresight price. Nevertheless, it entails price forecasts delicately related with each other: we show that regardless of the number of agents, there is a one dimensional set of such Pareto efficient allocations for generic endowments.

Economic Rights And Human Dignity, Lucile Sabas, Syoum Negassi

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Is Democracy Good For Growth? Development At Political Transition Time Matters, Di Sima, Fali Huang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Is democracy a better political regime for economic prosperity than autocracy? This paper shows that the answer depends on the initial economic development level during the democratic transition when the foundation of institutions was laid. Democracy facilitates growth only in countries that already have adequate development at transition time. These countries are more likely to create and sustain growth-enhancing institutions than others. Without appropriate development, democracy does not improve growth; this applies to about 40% of the third-wave democratized countries. These results are based on a sample of 153 countries in 1960–2010 and robust to various specifications and endogeneity issues.

Can Digital Finance Promote Low-Carbon Transition? Evidence From China, Xing Ge, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

Using panel data of Chinese cities from 2011 to 2019, this paper analyzes the impact of digital finance on low-carbon transition derived from a super-efficiency slacks-based measure data envelopment analysis. We find that digital finance promotes low-carbon transition, and this finding is robust with respect to the choice of sample, potential presence of measurement issue, choice of study period, presence of other policies, and potential endogeneity, among others. This impact is at least in part goes through increased green innovations. We also find evidence for impact heterogeneity across locations and by the level of low-carbon transition.

School Attendance Information Or Conditional Cash Transfer? Evidence From A Randomized Field Experiment In Rural Bangladesh, Tomoki Fujii, Christine Ho, Rohan Ray, Abu S. Shonchoy

Research Collection School Of Economics

Low school attendance remains an important challenge in resource-poor settings with cash and information constraints. We compare conditional cash transfer (CCT) treatments with framing variations (gain and loss) against attendance information treatment as interventions to address these constraints in a unified framework. Our randomized evaluation shows CCT treatments increase attendance by 11 percentage points, about half of which is attributable to attendance information. These treatments improve girls’ academic aspirations and reduce early marriage. Daily CCT set at a quarter of local child wage maximizes attendance impact. We highlight the importance of low-cost information technology to boost attendance sustainably and cost-effectively.

Growth And Risk: A View From International Trade, Pravin Krishna, Andrei A. Levcheko, Lin Ma, William F. Maloney

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies the cross-country patterns of risky innovation and growth through the lens of international trade. We use a simple theoretical framework of risky quality upgrading by firms under varying levels of financial development to derive two predictions. First, the mean rate of quality growth and the corresponding cross-sectional variance of quality growth in a country are positively correlated. Second, both the mean and variance of quality changes are positively correlated with the country’s level of financial development. We then test these two hypotheses using data on disaggregated (HS10) bilateral exports to the United States. The patterns in the …

Retail Pharmacies And Drug Diversion During The Opioid Epidemic, Aljoscha Janssen, Xuan Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This study investigates the role of retail pharmacy ownership in the opioid epidemic. Using data of prescription opioid orders, we show that compared with chain pharmacies, independent pharmacies dispense 39.1% more opioids and 60.5% more OxyContin. After an independent pharmacy becomes a chain pharmacy, opioid dispensing decreases. Using the OxyContin reformulation, which reduced non-medical demand but not the legitimate medical demand, we show that at least a third of the difference in the amount of OxyContin dispensed can be attributed to non-medical demand. We show that differences in competitive pressure and whether pharmacists own the pharmacy drive our estimates.

Predictive Taxonomy Analytics (Lasso): Predicting Outcome Types Of Cyber Breach, Jing Rong Goh, Shaun S. Wang, Yaniv Harel, Gabriel Toh

Research Collection School Of Economics

Cyber breaches are costly for the global economy and extensive efforts have gone into improving the cybersecurity infrastructure. There are numerous types of cyber breaches that vary greatly in terms of cause and impact, resulting in an extensive literature for individual cyber breach type. Our paper seeks to provide a general framework that can be easily applied to analyze different types of cyber breaches. Our framework is inspired by the taxonomy approach in the cybersecurity literature, where it was proposed that an effective set of taxonomy can provide a direction on supporting improved decision-making in cyber risk management and selecting …

Conditional Evaluation Of Predictive Models: The Cspa Command, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao, Rogier Quaedvlieg, Wenyu Zhou

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this article, we introduce a new command, cspa, that implements the conditional superior predictive ability test developed in Li, Liao, and Quaedvlieg (2022, Review of Economic Studies 89: 843–875). With the conditional performance of predictive methods measured nonparametrically by the conditional expectation functions of their predictive losses, we test the null hypothesis that a benchmark model weakly outperforms a collection of competitors uniformly across the conditioning space. The proposed command can implement this test for both independent cross-sectional data and serially dependent time-series data. Confidence sets for the most superior model can be obtained by inverting the test, for …

Presidential Economic Approval Rating And The Cross-Section Of Stock Returns, Zilin Chen, Zhi Da, Dashan Huang, Liyao Wang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We construct a monthly presidential economic approval rating (PEAR) index from 1981 to 2019, by averaging ratings on the president’s handling of the economy across various national polls. In the cross-section, stocks with high betas to changes in the PEAR index significantly under-perform those with low betas by 1.00% per month in the future, on a risk-adjusted basis. The low PEAR beta premium persists up to one year, and is present in various sub-samples and even in other G7 countries. PEAR beta dynamically reveals a firm’s perceived alignment to the incumbent president’s economic policies and investors seem to misprice such …

A Mixture Autoregressive Model Based On Student’S T–Distribution, Mika Meitz, Daniel Preve, Pentti Saikkonen

Research Collection School Of Economics

A new mixture autoregressive model based on Student’s t–distribution is proposed. A key feature of our model is that the conditional t–distributions of the component models are based on autoregressions that have multivariate t–distributions as their (low-dimensional) stationary distributions. That autoregressions with such stationary distributions exist is not immediate. Our formulation implies that the conditional mean of each component model is a linear function of past observations and the conditional variance is also time-varying. Compared to previous mixture autoregressive models our model may therefore be useful in applications where the data exhibits rather strong conditional heteroskedasticity. Our formulation also has …

R&D Subsidies In Permissive And Restrictive Environment: Evidence From Korea, Yumi Koh, Gea M. Lee

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper investigates the extent to which a regulatory environment for R&D subsidies shapes the magnitude and direction of R&D subsidies set by a government and consequent innovation paths. When the WTO adopted a permissive regulatory environment, we find that the Korean government increased R&D subsidies significantly (89.21%) and selectively so for firms and industries with higher returns. Recipient firms conducted less basic research and more development research. Improvements in innovations were mostly incremental and minor. However, such changes did not persist once the WTO switched to a restrictive regulatory environment. Our findings show that the regulatory environment imposed by …

Bubble Testing Under Polynomial Trends, Xiaohu Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops the asymptotic theory of the least squares estimator of the autoregressive (AR) coefficient in an AR(1) regression with intercept when data is generated from a polynomial trend model in different forms. It is shown that the commonly used right-tailed unit root tests tend to favor the explosive alternative. A new procedure, which implements the right-tailed unit root tests in an AR(2) regression, is proposed. It is shown that when the data generating process has a polynomial trend, the test statistics based on the new procedure cannot find evidence of explosiveness. Whereas, when the data generating process is …

Three Essays On Health And Environmental Economics: Applications Of Spatial Econometrics And Spatial Analysis, Mohammed Syedul Islam

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Spatial interaction and the locational structure between observations play key roles in the field of econometrics for both cross-sectional and panel data analysis. Compared to a non-spatial econometric model, a spatial model relaxes the assumption of independency in observations. This research applies spatial and non-spatial econometrics in three different fields of applied economics: (1) drinking water and air quality violations impacts on lung and bronchus cancer incidence in the contiguous United States (U.S.); (2) spillover effects of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) on COVID-19 cases across the contiguous U.S. counties; and (3) urbanization impacts on carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions in …

Synergies Between Residents: Evaluating Support And Concerns Of Recreation And Tourism Economic Development Within The Monongahela National Forest Region, Morgan R. Martin

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Tourism has continually been presented as a growing economic sector around the world. Having become an area of increased interest for diversifying rural economies, tourism is an attractive alternative to the declining traditional economic engines of rural communities like agriculture, forestry, and mining. Rural destinations have become increasingly attractive to outside visitors who seek to pursue activities embedded within the local culture and distinctive attractive assets available in rural regions. The USDA has recognized the increasing importance of recreation and tourism economies as an emerging or priority area of national need and an effective means for rural development. Even with …

Three Essays On Emotional Cues, Clay Collins

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The first paper investigates the relationship between intimate partner violence (IPV) and United States presidential elections. There exists a sizeable literature studying IPV that occurs during or after stressful events (such as a sports team loss), and a considerable non-economics literature examining election-related stress. However, very limited research has been done studying potential negative outcomes after a political loss (when one’s candidate loses), and these findings in other fields have not been synthesized into the economics lexicon. By interacting with the margin of victory for each state, I find large and significant decreases in IPV in states that vote for …

Biophysical Measures To Support Analysis And Communication Of Existence Values, James Boyd, Robert Johnston, Paul Ringold

Economics

A recent focus of ecosystem services research has been on the definition of biophysical outcomes and measures most closely linked to social welfare. There is a particular need to identify biophysical outcomes corresponding to existence values. (Values associated with existence apart from any current or future use.) We review economic and ecological evidence to answer two key questions: First, what are ideal characteristics of linking indicators for existence values? Linking indicators should be: understandable, subject to direct sensory perception, represented at relevant temporal and spatial scales, comprehensive, and quantifiable in a repeatable manner. Second, what types of ecosystem outcomes are …

Permutation-Based Tests For Discontinuities In Event Studies, Federico Bugni, Jia Li, Qiyuan Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

We propose using a permutation test to detect discontinuities in an underlying economic model at a cutoff point. Relative to the existing literature, we show that this test is well suited for event studies based on time-series data. The test statistic measures the distance between the empirical distribution functions of observed data in two local subsamples on the two sides of the cutoff. Critical values are computed via a standard permutation algorithm. Under a high-level condition that the observed data can be coupled by a collection of conditionally independent variables, we establish the asymptotic validity of the permutation test, allowing …