Economics Commons^™

The Interplay Between Economic Growth And The Environment: The Case Of China, Christian D. Carpio-Thomas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Historically, economic development has come at the cost of environmental degradation. Since the 1980s, neoliberalism rooted in neoclassical theory has dominated mainstream economic thought. The result has been a dramatic increase in environmental degradation in favor of economic growth. The neoliberal recommendations toward development are encapsulated in the Washington and post-Washington Consensuses which promote the liberalization of trade and foreign investment as well as a reliance on market mechanisms. Ultimately, the goal of neoliberalism is to generate growth regardless of the impact that it places on the environment. The case of China presents an example of an economy which pursued …

Poverty In The United States: An Analysis Of Its Measurement And The Long-Term Social And Economic Costs, Abby Magnus

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the role of poverty in the United States and how it has impacted social and economic systems. It explores how U.S. poverty measurements developed in the 1960s may not be accurately measuring poverty now, and the ways in which these measures could be improved upon. This work also reviews literature on health and educational inequities stemming from socioeconomic class, and the role these play in long-term economic mobility. Finally, it analyzes how larger social institutions like mass incarceration and capitalism have developed around poverty, and the role they play in maintaining its prevalence today. This thesis finds …

China’S One Belt One Road Initiative—A Debt Trap?, Qi Liu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Infrastructure has been a bottleneck for industrialization of developing countries. After decades of economic growth led by investment in infrastructure, China released its first global strategy in 2013, One Belt One Road (BRI), to improve infrastructure in less developed countries along the belt and road. Although economic development has been witnessed in some BRI members, large amount of investments from China raised concern over debt crisis from the Western world and host countries. Countries receiving loans from China are struggling to effectively manage the BRI projects. Some are renegotiating the investments with China and some BRI members even canceled them. …

Antitrust In Times Of Information Technology: An Analysis Of Big Tech Monopoly Cases, Shamayeta Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The information technology industry is one of the most rapidly growing yet concentrated markets existing today. Big Tech monopolies and their increasingly anticompetitive behavior posits risks for competition, technological innovation and consumer welfare. This ranges from price discrimination, limiting consumer choices to the unethical use of data. The particular nature of information technology, with its network effects and negligible marginal costs, incentivizes and facilitates predatory market practices making antitrust analysis in this industry extremely complex. Certain schools of antitrust thought are more sensitive (namely the post-Chicago school) to these implications than others, though antitrust application is still lacking in both …

Worker Cooperatives And Social Transformation: An Anti-Essentialist Marxist Perspective, Zachariah D. Thanasilangkul

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Against Monetary Functionalism: A Social Ontology Of Money, James Payne

Honors Program Theses

This paper explores the concepts of individualism and holism in social ontology through an analysis of the ontology of money by integrating insights from the Critical Realist tradition as well as the distinction between metaphysical grounds and anchors. In doing so it examines alternative explanations of money's ontology like the paradigmatic approach of John Searle. The results of the inquiry are then connected in relation to the models of social explanation in mainstream economics.

Integrative And Contextual Learning In College Algebra: An Interdisciplinary Collaboration With Economics, Choon Shan Lai, Glenn Henshaw, Tao Chen, Soloman Kone

Publications and Research

Many students consider mathematics too abstract and useless for their academic and career goals. Meanwhile, instructors in quantitative disciplines such as economics find many students mathematically underprepared for their courses. The disconnect between students’ perceptions of the utility of mathematics and their life and career may have contributed to some of the under-performance in learning mathematics. Addressing this problem requires collaboration across disciplines to develop an understanding of each other’s needs, more specifically to develop an integrative platform that allows students to apply mathematical skills in interdisciplinary contexts (Ganter & Barker, 2004). We collaboratively designed and implemented an integrative platform …

Hedonic Games And Monte Carlo Simulation, Sheida Etemadidavan, Andrew J. Collins

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Hedonic games have applications in economics and multi-agent systems where the grouping preferences of an individual is important. Hedonic games look at coalition formation, amongst the players, where players have a preference relation over all the coalition. Hedonic games are also known as coalition formation games, and they are a form of a cooperative game with a non-transferrable utility game. Some examples of hedonic games are stable marriage, stable roommate, and hospital/residence problem. The study of hedonic games is driven by understanding what coalition structures will be stable, i.e., given a coalition structure, no players have an incentive to deviate …

Naloxone Access And Opioid Use: A Theoretical Analysis, Caroline Dunsby

Honors Theses

Naloxone, commonly known by the brand name Narcan, is a medication that reverses the potentially fatal effects of an opioid overdose. Amidst the opioid epidemic that has taken tens of thousands of lives each year, many policies have been enacted to increase the public's access to naloxone, allowing non-medical personnel to save lives. There have been two distinct reactions to these policies. Those that support the policies state that harm reduction measures are necessary to save lives. Those that oppose the policies claim that by providing naloxone, states may be increasing risky opioid use - suggesting that naloxone leads to …

An Analysis Of Excise Taxes On Wine In The United States, William A. Saunders

Honors Theses and Capstones

Excise taxes are a form of tax that are applied specifically to certain goods, and are charged by the wholesaler to the retailer; they are then usually passed onto the consumer through price increases. Throughout the history of the United States, this form of taxation has transformed and taken on a variety of different roles before arriving at its modern role; a tool to implement certain tax systems, such as the Pigovian system, as well as to influence consumer behavior. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the purpose of excise taxes on wine within the United States by …

Social Agglomeration Forces And The City, Peter A. Luff

Library Map Prize

The presence of “agglomeration forces” in production markets is widely accepted and has been recently quantified in the economics literature. Social scientists have done little theoretical work, however, and even less quantitative work, on how the logic of agglomeration might also apply to social groups and the gains that people derive from their social interactions. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by modeling and measuring the benefits in terms of social prestige that arose from the spatial concentration of socialites in Manhattan in the 1920s. I formulate a model of location-based social status determination that illustrates why these benefits …

The Economic Impact Of Forest Harvest Practices On Washington State Park Visitation, Tyler Humphries

All Master's Theses

Washington State receives timber contributions from 34 out of its 39 counties, making it a top producer of timber in the United States. Because of the widespread and abundant number of harvests, many forests that society values are affected via diminished aesthetic appeal. Of these affected areas are Washington State Parks and the areas around them. This study seeks to estimate the economic impact that forest harvest practices have on the visitation of Washington State Parks. Through the use of GIS and fixed effect regression analysis, I estimate the impact that over 100,000 permitted forest cuts have on the visitation …

Integrative And Contextual Learning In College Algebra -An Interdisciplinary Collaboration With Economics, Choon Shan Lai, Glenn Henshaw, Tao Chen, Soloman Kone

Journal of Mathematics and Science: Collaborative Explorations

Many students consider mathematics too abstract and useless for their academic and career goals. Meanwhile, instructors in quantitative disciplines such as economics find many students mathematically underprepared for their courses. The disconnect between students’ perceptions of the utility of mathematics and their life and career may have contributed to some of the under-performance in learning mathematics. Addressing this problem requires collaboration across disciplines to develop an understanding of each other’s needs, more specifically to develop an integrative platform that allows students to apply mathematical skills in interdisciplinary contexts (Ganter & Barker, 2004). We collaboratively designed and implemented an integrative platform …

An Empirical Analysis Of Company Culture: Using Glassdoor Data To Measure The Impact Of Culture And Employee Satisfaction On Performance, Linnea Uyeno

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines the impact of culture and employee satisfaction on company performance; it considers which elements of culture are most important in specific industries: manufacturing, technology, and finance. Additionally, it explores whether these elements of productive cultures are also associated with employee satisfaction. It uses data from the MIT Sloan Management Review/Glassdoor Culture 500 database, which applied machine learning to analyze 1.2 million Glassdoor reviews. This data quantitatively measures nine dimensions of culture: agility, collaboration, customer focus, diversity, execution, innovation, integrity performance, and respect—assigning each company a score for every cultural dimension. Two depende­­­nt variables are used to measure …

Optimal Execution In Cryptocurrency Markets, Ethan Kurz

CMC Senior Theses

The purpose of this paper is to study the Almgren and Chriss model on the optimal execution of large block orders both on the NYSE and in cryptocurrency exchanges. Their model minimizes execution costs, which include linear temporary and permanent price impacts. We focus on how the stock market microstructure differs from a cryptocurrency exchange microstructure and what that means for how the model functions. Once the model and microstructures are explained, we examine how the Almgren-Chriss model functions with stocks from the NYSE, looking at specifically selling a large number of shares. We then investigate how a large "wholesale" …

Inheritance And Financial Health: The Correlation Between Intergenerational Wealth Transfers And Income Levels Of Personal Bankruptcies, Benjamin D. Kahn

CMC Senior Theses

This paper describes the correlations between intergenerational wealth transfers, or IWTs, and income of households in bankruptcy as existing research does not address any linkage between the two events. The effect that inheritances, trust payments, and lump sum gifts have on personal finances will impact the millions of Americans who will receive such transfers during the “Great Wealth Transfer” of the coming decades. I use bankruptcy data from the Federal Judicial Center’s Integrated Database, or IDB, and income data from the University of Michigan’s Panel Survey of Income Dynamics, or PSID, to produce a dataset that contains average IWT values …

A Theory Of Fire Service Provision: With An Empirical Analysis Of Response Time, Suppression Time, And Service Output, Hyong-Gu Hwang

Senior Independent Study Theses

We introduce a two-stage theoretical framework of fire services that justifies the status of response time as a factor input. In the first stage, the provincial government distributes a budget to its cities, resulting in varied numbers of firefighters and fire engines in each city. In the second stage, each city fire department places its fire stations at spatially optimal locations that minimize expected response times. When a fire occurs, the outputs from these two stages are actualized into dispatch level, response time, and suppression time. These intermediate outputs are then transformed into inputs for producing service output, which is …

Predicting Market Trends: Effects Of Gdp And Pmi On Changes In Stock Closing Prices, Charley Renna

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

In an effort to learn more about the impact of certain economic variables on the stock market, I chose to analyze the impact that the Purchasing Managers’ Index and U.S. Gross Domestic Product have on three major stock indices: S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq 100. The PMI is an index of the direction of economic trends in the manufacturing and services sector. Released on the first business day of every month, it consists of a diffusion index that summarizes whether market conditions are expanding, staying the same, or contracting. An index level greater than 50 percent suggests …

Three Essays On Incentive Mechanisms, Kuangli Xie

Economics Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, I use both theoretical and experimental methods to investigate incentive mechanisms of the sort commonly used by firms and governments. I have finished three chapters, two of which focus on how firms choose the appropriate incentive mechanisms to motivate their employees and the other one investigates how governments design mechanisms to improve social welfare. Chapter two provides a novel explanations why stock options are widely used in executive incentive contracts. Chapter three titled ``Ask Your Workers to Report Frequently, But Not Too Often'' studies how having employees reporting their progress to supervisors affects the employees' work effort. …

Bilingualism: Visualizing The Outcomes For Latinx Students In The United States, Paul Polanco

Teaching and Learning Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I analyzed the outcomes of bilingualism for the growing Latinx community living in the United States. Outcomes were quantitatively analyzed from four different perspectives: educational outcomes, job market participation, income, and social capital engagement. Chapters 1 and 2 cover previous studies about bilingualism, the importance of including outcomes that are not purely related to income, and general characteristics of the Latinx community. To perform the analyses, I used the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002/2012 (ELS:2002) dataset, a nationally representative dataset administered by the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) of the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department …

Practice Questions For Openstax Economics 2nd Edition, Levent Bulut, Ellis Heath

Business Administration, Management, and Economics Ancillary Materials

This set of practice questions for OpenStax Economics Second Edition was created under a Round Twelve Mini-Grant for Ancillary Materials Creation and Revision.

The PDF contains questions for:

• Chapter 3 Part 1: Demand and Supply Model;
• Chapter 3 Part 2: Price Floors and Efficiency;
• Chapter 4: Labor and Financial Markets;
• Chapter 12: Environmental Protection and Negative Externalities;
• Chapter 13: Positive Externalities and Public Goods;
• Chapter 17: Financial Markets;
• Chapter 19: The Macroeconomic Perspective: GDP;
• Chapter 20: Economic Growth;
• Chapter 21: Unemployment;
• Chapter 22: Inflation;
• Chapter 27: Money and Banking;
• Chapter 28: Monetary Policy and Banks Regulation.

Revisions To Pce Inflation Measures: Implications For Monetary Policy, Dean Croushore

Economics Faculty Publications

This paper examines the characteristics of the revisions to the inflation rate as measured by the personal consumption expenditures price index both including and excluding food and energy prices. These data series play a major role in the Federal Reserve's analysis of inflation. We examine the magnitude and patterns of revisions to both PCE inflation rates. We can forecast data revisions in real time from the initial release to the annual revision released in the following year. Policymakers should account for this predictability in setting monetary policy.

Payday Lenders And Credit Cards: A Hidden Driver Of Income Inequality, Aaron Klein

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

As part of the Brookings Scholar Lecture Series, Brookings Mountain West presents a lecture titled "Payday Lenders and Credit Cards: A Hidden Driver of Income Inequality" by Brookings Fellow in Economic Studies, Aaron Klein. This lecture examines how, for millions of working families, America’s slow payment system costs billions of dollars. The system needs technological innovation, but incumbency, economies of scale, and government may counter technological advancement. This lecture explores if the U.S. remains the dominant global standards setter for payment instruments.

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

Theses and Dissertations

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

The Natality Effect Of State Administered Earned Income Tax Credits, Jerome Sader

Capstone Projects – Economics

This paper utilizes a nine-period panel dataset and a first-difference equation to analyze to what extent state administered Earned Income Tax Credits to tax-filers impact the fertility rate among a state’s population. Utilizing data from the American Community Survey, the IRS, and the Center for Disease Control, changes in fertility rates are regressed upon a first-difference model, which includes year fixed effects, that controls for changes in state-level variables such as household income, female education, female labor supply, changes in the amount of a state’s population receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit, and the average amount that each household receives …

The Effect Of Economic Downturns On Mortality Rates, Bethany Koch

Celebration of Learning

My research attempts to show the effect that economic downturns have on overall mortality rates in the United States. I compare mortality rates for several states from 2000 to 2010, attempting to find a pattern in the individual states of lower mortality rates subsequent to the 2008 recession. I do so by running a regression equation to find any sign of correlations.

A Statistical Analysis Of Economic Perceptions In The 2015 United Kingdom General Election, Amarvir Singh-Bal Mr.

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper characterises the vote which took place in the United Kingdom's (U.K.) 2015 General Election as an ‘accountability instrument.’ In doing so, the research interrogates which sections of the electorate hold the incumbent government more accountable for economic outcomes between the 2010 and 2015 U.K. General Elections. The Rational Choice Theory and the Michigan Model are used in this study to present two interlinked, and yet distinct, hypotheses – that less politically informed and non-partisan voters are more likely to hold the government accountable for economic performances; compared to the politically informed and partisan voters within the electorate. Implementing …

Economic Development And Peace: To Be Pursued In Tandem, Allison Fisher

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

Peace and economic development are often regarded as separate fields with little overlap. The association with the field of economics makes the latter seem more measurable, more tangible, and therefore more academic. However, a shift is taking place as peace practitioners and researchers discover ways to compare the level of peace within and between countries. Current research in peace studies shows a salient link between the level of economic development and the level of peace within societies. Researchers that work in these two fields must pursue them simultaneously and jointly. The purpose of this paper is to highlight evidence of …

An Evaluation Of The Impact Of Leading Pedestrian Interval Signals In Nyc, Jeremy J. Sze

Theses and Dissertations

I evaluated the impact of the phased introduction of Leading Pedestrian Interval Signals (LPIs) on collision and injury outcomes at 12,987 signalized traffic intersections in New York City over the course of 25 quarters from 2012 to 2018. An intersection is treated when a LPIs is installed to give pedestrians lead time to cross the street before vehicles are allowed to move. Outcomes from NYPD’s Motor Vehicle Collisions data were matched to signalized intersections. I hypothesize that LPIs would reduce collisions and reduce injuries for pedestrians at intersections. A difference in difference fixed effects panel regression was used to identify …

The Quality Of Xbrl Structured Financial Statements: An Empirical Examination Of Custom Tags, Aidana Razhap Kyzy

Theses and Dissertations

In 2009 the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) system to improve the process by which financial statements can be used. Interactive financial data filed with the SEC using XBRL provides easily readable and comparable financial data, thereby improving transparency and efficiency in the corporate market. SEC rules permit companies to use custom tags in their financial reports in cases when an appropriate element cannot be found in the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) standard XBRL taxonomy. The inordinate use of custom tags may result in a reduction of financial report quality by …