Economics Commons^™

Speculative Bubbles In The Recent Ai Boom: Nasdaq And The Magnificent Seven, Rerotlhe B. Basele, Peter C. B. Phillips, Shuping Shi

Research Collection School Of Economics

The recent artificial intelligence (AI) boom covers a period of rapid innovation and wide adoption of AI intelligence technologies across diverse industries. These developments have fueled an unprecedented frenzy in the Nasdaq, with AI-focused companies experiencing soaring stock prices that raise concerns about speculative bubbles and real-economy consequences. Against this background, this study investigates the formation of speculative bubbles in the Nasdaq stock market with a specific focus on the so-called Magnificent Seven (Mag-7) individual stocks during the AI boom, spanning the period from January 2017 to January 2025. We apply the real-time PSY bubble detection methodology of Phillips et …

A General Test For Functional Inequalities, Jia Li, Zhipeng Liao, Wenyu Zhou

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper develops a nonparametric test for general functional inequalities that include conditional moment inequalities as a special case. It is shown that the test controls size uniformly over a large class of distributions for observed data, importantly allowing for general forms of time series dependence. New results on uniform growing dimensional Gaussian coupling for general mixingale processes are developed for this purpose, which readily accommodate most applications in economics and finance. The proposed method is applied in a portfolio evaluation context to test for “all-weather” portfolios with uniformly superior conditional Sharpe ratio functions.

Robust Ai Solutions For Financial Markets Through Generative Modeling, Dynamic Graph Learning, And Reinforcement-Based Portfolio Optimization, Jingyi Gu

Dissertations

Financial markets are inherently uncertain and dynamic, driven by complex factors such as macroeconomic signals, investor sentiment, and evolving inter-asset relationships. While machine learning has advanced financial modeling, existing approaches often fall short in addressing the real-world intricacies of finance. This dissertation confronts two critical challenges, human-driven stochasticity and risk-intensive decision-making under real-world trading constraints, while seizing a pivotal opportunity, the structural dynamics of evolving financial systems. These elements are foundational to advancing robust and practical financial intelligence.

To this end, this dissertation develops a unified framework for robust financial modeling and decision-making. The framework is architected as a progressive, …

The Concept Of Maqāṣid Al-Sharī‘Ah And Maṣlaḥah In The Classical And Contemporary Tafsîr, Yusuf Wibisono, Femmy Roeslan

International Journal of Islamic Economics and Business Sustainability

A contemporary mufassir (Qur’anic exegete) employs the principle of al-‘ibrah bi maqāṣid al-sharī‘ah—that interpretation must refer to the objectives of Islamic law—in an effort to uncover the true meaning of the Qur’anic text. A purely literal reading of the Qur’an, without an understanding of its maqāṣid (objectives), faces many limitations. The maqāṣid approach emphasizes not only the wording of the text but also its underlying purposes and goals. The greatest strength of maqāṣid-based tafsīr (interpretation) lies in its ability to render the Qur’an always relevant, adaptable, and universally applicable. As an interpretive approach not strictly tied to …

Pipeline Vs. Choice: The Global Gender Gap In Stem Applications, Isaac Ahimbisibwe, Adam Altjmed, Georgy Artemov, Andres Barrios-Fernandez, Aspasia Bizopoulou, Martti Kaila, Jin-Tan Liu, Rigissa Megalokonomou, José Montalban, Christopher Neilson, Jintao Sun, Sebastian Otero, Xiaoyang Ye

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Women account for only 35% of global STEM graduates, a share unchanged for a decade. We use administrative microdata from centralized university admissions in ten systems to deliver the first crossnational decomposition of the STEM gender gap into a pipeline gap (academic preparedness) and a choice gap (first-choice field conditional on eligibility). In deferred-acceptance platforms where eligibility is score-based, we isolate preferences from access. The pipeline gap varies widely, from -19 to +31 percentage points across education systems. By contrast, the choice gap is remarkably stable: high-scoring women are 25 percentage points less likely than men to rank STEM first.

Cooling Protocols Impact On Nickel-Titanium Rotary Instruments Cyclic Fatigue Resistance Under Extreme Curvatures And Sodium Hypochlorite, Palak Ravjibhai Ranparia, Chintan Joshi, Mona Somani, Aashray Patel, Urooj Desai, Janki Prajapati

Journal of Dentistry Indonesia

Objective: In this work, Hyflex CM, TruNatomy, and Plex V heat-treated nickel titanium rotary instruments were evaluated at body temperature (36 °C ± 1 °C) with and without a cooling protocol to assess the cyclic fatigue resistance. Methods: A 90° curved stainless-steel block was used for cyclic fatigue tests on 60 randomly selected rotary instruments, divided into two groups of 30: body temperature (n = 10) and body temperature with cooling (n = 10). Instruments were further subdivided into 6 groups of 3 different instruments. Cooling protocol group instruments received 5-second spray cooling every 30 seconds, along with continuous 5% …

Neutral Zone Vs. Conventional Denture Fabrication: A Randomized Crossover Study On Denture Performance, Karthik Kannaiyan, Arunima Chauhan, Vijayendranath Nayak, Riyshmaa Devendaran, Dashmita Peterson, Pavittra Kanesan, Vityaa Lakshmi

Journal of Dentistry Indonesia

Objectives: It is challenging to achieve satisfactory outcomes in a complete denture for patients with resorbed residual ridges. Utilization of neutral zone techniques to guide posterior denture tooth arrangement and denture base contouring has been considered for many decades. However, the evidence is still not enough to revise protocols. This study aimed to compare patient satisfaction and stability of neutral zone denture with conventional denture. Methods: A crossover clinical trial was conducted among patients with resorbed mandibular ridges. Each participant received two sets of dentures: one fabricated using the neutral zone technique and one using the conventional method, in a …

Revisiting Kin And Ethnic Favoritism In The Bribery Experiment, Mahsa Akbari, Duman Bahrami-Rad, Erik O. Kimbrough

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We report a conceptual replication of Akbari et al. (2020), who study the impact of co-ethnicity and kinship on behavior in an experimental “bribery game”. In the game, player A can offer a bribe to B, who can help A by inefficiently transferring resources from passive third-party C. We replicate the finding that by varying the relatedness of A, B and C, we can substantially modulate the willingness of A to offer the bribe and the willingness of B to reciprocate the bribe by harming C. The findings are consistent with theories of kin altruism and ethnic favoritism.

The Cost Of Capital Calculation In The Project Finance Settings, Paweł Mielcarz, Dmytro Osiichuk, Adrian Struciński

Journal of Banking and Financial Economics

The paper aims at elucidating and solving the methodological problems around the estimation of the cost of capital in the project finance settings. By convention, capital budgeting analysts evaluate project finance ventures using the free cash flow for equity (FCFE) method, whereby cash flows, including cash, whose distribution is limited by debt covenants, are discounted with the project’s cost of equity. We argue that this approach is erroneous. From the standpoint of the sponsor company, only distributable cash flows should be taken into consideration when evaluating project finance ventures. In turn, the discount rate should be equal to the weighted …

The Discouraging Effect Of Overconfidence, Cary Deck, Klajdi Bregu

ESI Publications

Overconfidence is often viewed as encouraging entrepreneurs and CEOs to follow risky strategies such as entering new markets, engaging in innovation, or pursuing mergers and acquisitions. While such undertakings can generate excess returns and profits, overconfidence is frequently offered as an explanation for why so many business ventures fail. However, we show that in a setting where the decision maker does not know whether success is possible, theoretically, overconfidence can also have a discouraging effect, causing one to give up too soon. This counterintuitive result is driven by effectively misattributing one's own failure to an elevated assessment of the chance …

Sociohydrodynamics: Data-Driven Modeling Of Social Behavior, Daniel S. Seara, Jonathan Colen, Michel Fruchart, Yael Avni, David G. Martin, Vincenzo Vitelli

Data Science Faculty Publications

Living systems display complex behaviors driven by physical forces as well as decision-making. Hydrodynamic theories hold promise for simplified universal descriptions of socially generated collective behaviors. However, the construction of such theories is often divorced from the data they should describe. Here, we develop and apply a data-driven pipeline that links micromotives to macrobehavior by augmenting hydrodynamics with individual preferences that guide motion. We illustrate this pipeline on a case study of residential dynamics in the United States, for which census and sociological data are available. Guided by Census data, sociological surveys, and neural network analysis, we systematically assess standard …

Volatility Of The Usd/Chf Exchange Rate At The Beginning Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Anna Gaweł, Janusz Kudła

Journal of Banking and Financial Economics

Purpose

We address the problem of forecasting USD/CHF volatility at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. We chose popular currencies (Swiss franc and American dollar) in the period 1.07.2020 to 31.12.2020.

Design/methodology/approach

We employed several volatility models, including APARCH, EGARCH, GJR-GARCH, TGARCH, and GARCH-MIDAS, on high-frequency USD/CHF data. Particular emphasis was placed on asymmetric models to capture volatility asymmetry.

Findings

The highest volatility occurred during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Volatility forecasts are most accurate with EGARCH and GARCH-MIDAS models that incorporate long-term asymmetry, particularly when predicting volatility over a longer planning horizon. GARCH-MIDAS models with short-term asymmetry …

Multidimensional Monotonicity And Economic Applications, Frank Yang, Kai Hao Yang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We characterize the extreme points of multidimensional monotone functions from [0,1]ⁿ to [0,1], as well as the extreme points of the set of one-dimensional marginals of these functions. These characterizations lead to new results in various mechanism design and information design problems, including public good provision with interdependent values; interim efficient bilateral trade mechanisms; asymmetric reduced form auctions; and optimal private private information structure. As another application, we also present a mechanism anti-equivalence theorem for two-agent, two-alternative social choice problems: A mechanism is payoff-equivalent to a deterministic DIC mechanism if and only if they are ex-post equivalent.

How Air Travel Became Safer Through Cashless Service, Alan Saquella

Publications

In an age where convenience, efficiency, and security reign supreme, air travel has adapted accordingly. One notable change: the elimination of cash payments on board for food, drinks, and other purchases. This shift away from bills and coins did not happen by accident, it reflected a deliberate focus on safety, security, and smoother operations.

Employment Status And Evaluation Of Government Performance In Covid-19 Containment : Evidence From China, Jinye Chen

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

Evaluation of government performance of citizens is crucial for regime stability as it could help authoritarian regimes to identify and address brewing problems before they fuel public discontent. It can also act as a potential mechanism for improving government performance and public services and establishing a good image of government. Following the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Chinese government has adopted the zero-COVID policy to keep cases as close to zero as possible until December 2022. China’s job market also faced big pressure from the economic downturn caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. The pandemic is a shock that impact the …

Nba Player Types And Salaries: Assessing The Disparities In Pay, Nick Riccardi, Rodney J. Paul

Sport Management - All Scholarship

The purpose of this study was to identify player types that exist in the modern National Basketball Association (NBA), test whether player types are paid differently controlling for performance and other factors and construct successful rosters with cheaper payrolls.
We collected performance statistics and salary data for players and teams across five seasons (2018-19 to 2022-23). Cluster analysis is leveraged to group together player-seasons to identify the player types that exist in the NBA. Linear regression models are run to test for differences in pay by cluster membership while controlling for performance, age, and contractual details. Linear programming simulation models …

Impact Of Accounting Information Systems And Islamic Organizational Culture On Information Quality, Oelma Arfannur Azizi, Busra Busra, Marjulin Marjulin

Arab Economic and Business Journal

Amid growing demands for transparency and accuracy in financial management, an effective Accounting Information System plays a crucial role in ensuring that financial data is accurately. However, the implementation of such technology must be supported by a strong organizational culture,. The method employed in this research is a quantitative approach, utilizing inferential statistics to explain the impact of various research variables. The statistical tool used is Structural Equation Modeling -. The results of this study indicate that both the Accounting Information System and Islamic Organizational Culture have a positive and significant impact on the quality of accounting information

The Gift Of Giving: Recognizing Donors And Revealing Donation Amounts, K. Pun Winichakul

Economics: Faculty Publications

Publicly announcing how much individuals donate on behalf of themselves is a common fundraising strategy. For tribute gifts made on behalf of others, however, charities only reveal donor identities to the honoree with few revealing the size of their contributions. This paper examines the fundraising consequences of recognizing donors with and without information about donation amounts when notifying honorees of gifts made on their behalf. I find that revealing contribution amounts in addition to recognizing donors benefits fundraisers. I find that both the likelihood of giving on behalf of others and contribution amounts increase when honorees learn how much donors …

Family Ties: Nba Draft Position And Player Performance, Nick Riccardi, Rodney J. Paul

Sport Management - All Scholarship

This study aims to investigate the role, if any, that nepotism plays in the careers of players in the National Basketball Association (NBA). Career performance is compared between the 780 players drafted from 2007-2019 with familial relationships considered. Ordinary Least Squares and logistic regression models are specified to estimate the effect of having a relative on the success of an NBA player’s career. We find that siblings of NBA players earn more and reach minimum games played thresholds more often, while sons of NBA players earn more, but generally do not reach games played thresholds more often than similarly-drafted peers.

Tariffs And Trade Deficits, Lorenzo Caliendo, Samuel Kortum, Fernando Parro

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop a dynamic multi-country Ricardian trade model with aggregate uncertainty, where trade imbalances emerge as countries exchange goods and assets. We introduce a method for computing counterfactuals in this setting, which doesn't require specifying the stochastic process of shocks or solving for asset prices. Applying the model to tariff shocks, we quantify their effects on prices, income, spending, and trade imbalances. We find that higher U.S. tariffs reduce the U.S. trade deficit through general equilibrium adjustments, but raise domestic prices and lower real consumption. Our findings highlight that movements in trade imbalances are shaped by the structure of global …

Housing Crisis Outlook In Mountain West Metros, 2023, Kian Parikh, Yiselle Olivas Ruiz, Ivan Sun, Olivia K. Cheche, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Housing & Real Estate

This fact sheet presents 2023 data on housing market conditions in seven large metros across the five Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The Lending Tree report, “Portland, Ore., Has Worst Housing Crisis Outlook – Here’s Why,” includes data on the 100 largest metros in the U.S. This fact sheet focuses on housing crisis outlook data for Mountain West metros appearing among the largest 100 metros in the nation: Phoenix, AZ; Tucson, AZ; Colorado Springs, CO; Denver, CO; Las Vegas, NV; Albuquerque, NM; and Salt Lake City, UT.

The State Of The Unions 2025: A Profile Of Organized Labor In New York City, New York State, And The United States, Ruth Milkman, Joseph Van Der Naald

Publications and Research

Organized labor has taken center stage in the 2020s, with workers leading successful organizing drives at Amazon, Starbucks, Apple, and across a range of industries from health care to higher education. Public approval of unions has reached its highest level in decades, and a new generation of workers is stepping forward as leaders in the movement. The State of the Unions 2025 provides the most comprehensive profile of organized labor in New York City, New York State, and the United States, highlighting where unions are growing, who is leading the charge, and how labor is shaping the future of work …

Can Correction Messages Reduce The Spread Of Fake News On Social Media? The Impact Of Information Updates On The Effectiveness Of Corrections, Kelvin K. King, Diego Escobari

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

Although government agencies and fact-checking organizations issue correction messages to mitigate misinformation dissemination on social media, their efforts have been largely ineffective. Drawing on Information Manipulation Theory (IMT) and information extracted from over 84 million tweets, we examine the impact of correction messages and explore how different information updates affect their effectiveness. Our empirical approach differentiates between subpopulations of correction messages. The results support the existence of two distinct types: correction messages that significantly mitigate the spread of fake news—a 1 percent increase in “effective” messages decreases the spread of fake news by 0.89 percent; and those that amplify the …

The Effect Of Education Policy On Crime: An Intergenerational Perspective, Ulrika Ahrsjö, Costas Meghir, Mårten Palme, Marieke Schnabel

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We examine the intergenerational effect of education policy on crime. Using administrative data that links outcomes across generations with crime records, we show that the Swedish comprehensive school reform, gradually implemented between 1949 and 1962, reduced conviction rates for both the generation directly affected by the reform and their sons. The reduction in conviction rates occurred in several types of crime. Mediation analysis suggests that key channels include increased parental educational attainment and household income, as well as reduced criminal behavior among fathers.

Essays On Economic Behaviour, Yiting Guo

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

My PhD thesis comprises three studies. The first study examines prosocial behavior; the second analyzes vaccination behavior; and the third investigates communicative behavior in the context of trade. Specifically, the first study investigates the impact of donation visibility on individual prosocial behavior. It develops a sequential-move model based on the prosocial behavior framework proposed by Benabou and Tirole (2006). In Stage 1, individuals decide whether to attend a charity event, and if so, in Stage 2, decide on the amount to donate. In this model, an individual’s decision to engage in prosocial behavior is influenced by three main factors: intrinsic …

Essays On The Health And Labor Market Effects Of Menopause And Menopause Hormone Therapy, Lucia Elvira Torres Frasele

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation explores how menopause and its medical management affect women’s health and labor market outcomes. Despite the centrality of reproductive transitions in the life course of women, economic research has largely ignored menopause, a biologically and socially significant milestone marking the end of fertility. This omission is surprising, given well-established medical evidence that links menopause to increased risks of health conditions that may impair the ability to work. The dissertation addresses this gap through two chapters that examine the causal impact of menopause and Menopause Hormone Therapy (MHT) on health and labor supply using two distinct empirical strategies. The …

Ectopic Adipose Tissue In Subsistence Populations With Minimal Coronary Disease, Large Left Atria, And Very Low Rates Of Atrial Fibrillation, Randall C. Thompson, Benjamin C. Trumble, Daniel K. Cummings, Angela D. Neunuebel, Paul L. Hooper, Samuel Wann, Adel H. Allam, Frances Neunuebel, Benjamin D. Gans, Samantha I. King, Edmond Seabright, Caleb E. Finch, Margaret Gatz, Kenneth Buetow, Michael I. Miyamoto, Guido P. Lombardi, M. Linda Sutherland, James D. Sutherland, Christopher J. Ward, Madeleine J. Lee, Ashna Mahadev, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, David E. Michalik, Chris J. Rowan, Tianyu Cao, Jonathan Stieglitz, Cameron M. Quick, Gregory S. Thomas, Jagat Narula, Damini Dey, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Background

Methods

Decomposing Trends In The Gender Gap For Highly Educated Workers, Joseph G. Altonji, John Eric Humphries, Yagmur Yuksel, Ling Zhong

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper examines the gender gap in log earnings among full-time, college-educated workers born between 1931 and 1984. Using data from the National Survey of College Graduates and other sources, we decompose the gender earnings gap across birth cohorts into three components: (i) gender differences in the relative returns to undergraduate and graduate fields, (ii) gender-specific trends in undergraduate field, graduate degree attainment, and graduate field, and (iii) a cohortspecific “residual component” that shifts the gender gap uniformly across all college graduates. We have three main findings. First, when holding the relative returns to fields constant, changes in fields of …

Public School Funding In The Mountain West, 2020-2021, Sean Curry, Mohit Pande, Olivia K. Cheche, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

K-12 Education

This fact sheet examines the state of public school funding across the five Mountain West states of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The data are sourced from the Education Law Center’s 2023 Making the Grade report, which provides data for all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The original report provides grades for school funding, enrollment data, and funding data based on the 2020-2021 school year.

Offline Contextual Bandits In The Presence Of New Actions, Ren Kishimoto, Tatsuhiro Shimizu, Kazuki Kawamura, Takanori Muroi, Yusuke Narita, Yuki Sasamoto, Kei Tateno, Takuma Udagawa, Yuta Saito

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Automated decision-making algorithms drive applications in domains such as recommendation systems and search engines. These algorithms often rely on off-policy contextual bandits or off-policy learning (OPL). Conventionally, OPL selects actions that maximize the expected reward within an existing action set. However, in many real-world scenarios, actions—such as news articles or video content—change continuously, and the action space evolves over time compared to when the logged data was collected. We define actions introduced after deploying the logging policy as new actions and focus on the problem of OPL with new actions. Existing OPL methods cannot learn and select new actions because …