Economics Commons^™

Multidimensional Sorting: Comparative Statics, Joe Boerma, Andrea Ottolini, Aleh Tsyvinski

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

In sorting literature, comparative statics for multidimensional assignment models with general output functions and input distributions is an important open question. We provide a complete theory of comparative statics for technological change in general multidimensional assignment models. Our main result is that any technological change is uniquely decomposed into two distinct components. The first component (gradient) gives a characterization of changes in marginal earnings through a Poisson equation. The second component (divergence-free) gives a characterization of labor reallocation. For U.S. data, we quantify equilibrium responses in sorting and earnings with respect to cognitive skill-biased technological change.

Drivers Of Racial Differences In C-Sections, Adriana Corredor-Waldron, Janet Currie, Molly Schnell

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Black mothers with a trial of labor are 25 percent more likely to deliver by C-section than non-Hispanic White mothers. The gap is largest among mothers with the lowest risk and is reduced by only one-fifth when controlling for observed medical risk factors, sociodemographic characteristics, hospital, and physician or medical practice group. Remarkably, the gap disappears when performing a C-section is more costly due to a concurrent pre-labor C-section limiting surgical resources. This finding is consistent with provider discretion—rather than differences in unobserved medical risk—accounting for persistent racial disparities in delivery method. The additional intrapartum C-sections that occur among low-risk …

The "Gray Tsunami": Aging Trends In East Texas, Manuel Reyes-Loya, Cecilia Cuellar, Pedro Gallardo-Toledo

Hibbs Outlook of East Texas

This report examines the “gray tsunami,” the rapid aging of the Baby Boomer generation, and its impact on East Texas. As more workers retire, the region faces a shrinking labor force and a growing elderly population, reflected in a higher old-age dependency ratio than state and national averages. These demographic changes may create challenges for businesses and public services but also open opportunities through workforce flexibility, delayed retirement, and improved planning for healthcare, housing, and transportation. The report emphasizes the importance of proactive strategies to help East Texas adapt to and benefit from this

Cooperative Agreement Between Countries Of The North Atlantic Ocean Reduces Marine Plastic Pollution But With Unequal Economic Benefits, Nicola J. Beaumont, Tobias Börger, James R. Clark, Nick Hanley, Robert Johnston, Keila Meginnis, Christopher Stapenhurst, Frans P. De Vries

Economics

Plastic pollution in the world’s oceans threatens ecosystems and biodiversity. The connected nature of the marine environment suggests that coordinated actions by countries sharing an ocean border may provide more effective pollution control than unilateral actions by any one country. However, countries often fail to cooperate, even when joint economic benefits would be higher under cooperation. Here we present a modelling framework to determine the potential economic benefits of cooperative marine plastic pollution management. The framework integrates an estimated plastic transfer matrix from a particle tracking model with game theory to derive the economic benefits of international cooperation for 16 …

University Athletic Subsidies Connections To Various Campus-Wide Outcomes, Daniel Vainner

Dissertations

This study examines the relationship between university athletic subsidies and outcomes for the broader undergraduate student population. The athletic subsidy, referred to as an athletic tax, is defined as institutional and student fees used to support athletics. Although athletics are often viewed as enhancing institutional prestige and recruitment, most universities depend heavily on subsidies to sustain their programs. In 2019, National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) institutions spent over $18.8 billion on athletics, with $8.3 billion, or 44 percent, coming from institutional and student sources rather than athletic revenue (NCAA, 2019a). This research explores whether such subsidization predicts measurable differences in …

An Empirical Investigation Of The Effects Of Gunshot Detection Technology In Detroit, Joe Davis

All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present

This paper evaluates the impact of acoustic gunshot detection technology (GDT) on crime and policing outcomes in Detroit, Michigan. Leveraging the implementation of ShotSpotter across high-crime neighborhoods, I analyze outcomes including crime rates, emergency calls, police response times, and case clearance. My findings indicate that ShotSpotter installation is associated with a 6% reduction in violent crime but a modest increase in nonviolent crime. The technology also produces a large increase in the reporting of gunfire incidents—over 300% more gunshot-related calls for service—yet police respond 7% slower to ShotSpotter alerts than to citizen-reported gunshots. Consistent with prior research, I find no …

Female Politicians And Corruption In Rural India, Somdeep Chatterjee, Shiv Hastawala, Elisa Taveras

Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

This paper leverages random assignment of female quotas for leadership positions on Indian village councils to assess its causal effect on corruption. Since the mid-1990s, India has mandated that at least one third of village council chief positions be randomly reserved for women. Using data from the Rural Economic and Demographic Survey (REDS) 2006, we find that an additional term reserved for a female head as opposed to just a single one reduces both the occurrence and bribe amounts paid to the local government by households. This reduction is also observed in bribes paid to other local officials suggesting downstream …

Too Far, Too Costly, Too Complex: How Structural Factors Impact Women’S Mobile-Money Adoption And Business Investment In Sub-Sahara Africa, Iyabo A. Olanrele Dr

Bullion

This study investigates how structural factors shape women’s adoption of mobile-money services and access to credit for entrepreneurship across Sub-Sahara Africa. Using cross-country data from the 2025 Global Findex Database, the analysis demonstrates that women face disproportionately higher barriers than men. Long distances to mobile-money agents significantly reduce women’s likelihood of borrowing, while men’s borrowing is less affected. High service and transaction fees further constrain women, reflecting their lower and more irregular incomes, and liquidity limitations prevent many from maintaining active accounts. Documentation requirements, though partially mitigated by improved national ID systems and tiered Know-Your-Customer (KYC) rules, remain a secondary …

A Thesis On Incentive Structures, Shirking Dynamics, And Market Valuation In Major League Baseball: A Statcast Analysis Of Worker Effort Levels, Charles Jordan

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how guaranteed contract length influences player effort and market valuation in Major League Baseball using high resolution Statcast data across over 1,200 player season observations. Fixed effects regressions on the 2015 to 2024 seasons show directionally consistent but statistically imprecise shirking and final year effort spikes in hard hit rate and sprint speed. Machine learning models (OLS and Random Forest) predict next year Dollars Over League Average (DOL) with out of sample MAE approximately $11.4–11.8 million and approximately 0.23–0.27, with plate appearances, hard hit rate, sprint speed, and contract timing as top predictors. Embedding these findings in …

The Moderating Effect Of Income Inequality On The Income–Emissions Relationship In G20 Countries, Zahra Rizky Fadilah, Budiasih Budiasih

Economics and Finance in Indonesia

This study analyzes the moderating effect of income inequality on the income–emissions relationship in the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) framework. Findings indicate that the relationship is inverted U-shaped in middle-income G20 countries, but monotonically increasing in high-income G20 countries. Interestingly, income inequality moderates this relationship only in the latter group. These findings suggest that middle-income G20 countries should focus on raising income per capita to mitigate environmental degradation, while their high-income counterparts need to prioritize reducing income inequality to effectively decouple income from emissions.

The Relationship Between The Development Of Tourism Special Economic Zones (Sezs) And Local Tax Revenue, Ibnati Misbha Hussudurri, Riatu Mariatul Qibthiyyah

Economics and Finance in Indonesia

This study employs dynamic two-way fixed effect (TWFE) event regressions to analyze the direct impact of SEZ policies, specifically focusing on tourism SEZs in 6 districts across Indonesia and neighbouring districts within the same province. By examining data from 2010 to 2022, the research aims to evaluate how tourism SEZ development influences local tax revenue. Our estimation results show no evidence that Tourism SEZs affect aggregate local tax revenues. However, by type of local taxes, we found that Tourism SEZs have increased hotel tax and entertainment tax but not restaurant tax revenues.

Does Investing In Schools Reduce Violent Crime?, Jamein Cunningham, Monique E. Davis, Kenneth Whaley

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Voting Under Contradictory News, Arnab Mitra, Quazi Shahriar

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

How much do opposing news sources distort private information and how do voters use distorted contradictory information regarding candidate quality? In a two candidate voting game, we derive and experimentally test an “average-opinion” hypothesis, where two opposingly biased sources, capable of forming an unbiased estimate of candidate quality as well as a distorted estimate within a bound, symmetrically distort their reported estimates in opposite directions, and voters split the estimate difference to decipher the unbiased estimate. Data support the hypothesis and show that voters benefit from sources’ competition, compared to a control treatment without competition. When sources are allowed to …

Gender Differences In Dishonesty When Leaders Make Decisions On Behalf Of Their Team, Kerstin Grosch, Stephan Muller, Holger A. Rau, Lilia Wasserka-Zhurakhovska

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

This study examines the ethical dilemma faced by leaders, balancing financial gains and ethical considerations, with a focus on gender differences. We experimentally study such a dilemma in which leaders can benefit their teams at the expense of moral costs from dishonest reporting. We measure, first, individual dishonesty preferences and, second, reporting decisions for teams in a leadership role using outcome-reporting games in a laboratory setting. Individual dishonesty preferences predict men’s propensity to apply for leadership. We further find that women have lower initial dishonesty preferences compared to men but increase dishonesty when assuming leadership roles. A follow-up study indicates …

Information Without Rents: Mechanism Design Without Expected Utility, Ernesto Rivera Mora, Philipp Strack

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We study mechanism design for a sophisticated agent with non-expected utility (EU) preferences. We show that the revelation principle holds if and only if all types are EU maximizers: if at least one type is a non-EU maximizer, randomizing over dynamic mechanisms generates a strictly larger set of implementable allocations than using static mechanisms. Moreover, dynamic stochastic mechanisms can fully extract the private information of any type who doesn’t have uniformly quasi-concave preferences without providing that type any rent. Full-surplus extraction is possible in a broad variety of non-EU environments, but impossible for types with concave preferences.

Borderplex Business Barometer, Volume 9, Number 12, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Steven L. Fullerton

Border Region Modeling Project

No abstract provided.

Hkc03 - Leading A Horse To Water: Understanding The Potential Consequences Of Ordeals In Subsidized Tariff Pricing, Evan Plous Kresch, Carlota Loran Lopez

Oberlin College Kasper Economics and Business Working Paper Series

Water utilities attempting to balance widespread network access with financial stability in providing services often employ Increasing Block Tariffs (IBTs), where volumetric rates increase nonlinearly with water consumed. The widespread adoption of IBTs by utilities across the world is partly attributed to their ability to cross-subsidize smaller monthly users; however, this often leads to the undesirable outcome that large poor households are shifted into higher tariff blocks. To address this, water utilities often adopt a“social tariff”, with significantly lower rates specifically targeted at poor households. However, most of these social tariff policies require households to opt-in or apply to the …

The Bandwagon Model, Dean A. Williams

All Dissertations

Professional sports teams are in the entertainment market where owners of teams invest in players with the hopes of converting their talents into wins, and in turn, added revenues for their team. To gain an understanding of the incentives that shape these team talent investment decisions, prior economists have created theoretical models of professional sports leagues that give predictions regarding the cost to acquire talent, and the winning percentage of teams from different market sizes. These models are then used to show how team talent investment decisions change once professional sports leagues implement policies such as first-year player drafts, salary …

Mountain Communities During A Time Of War: A Case Study Of The Hutsul Region In The Carpathian Mountains Of Ukraine, Pavlo Rybaruk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the ethno-ecological technologies employed by the Hutsul people within the highland agrarian economy of the Carpathian Mountains. Over centuries, the Hutsuls have developed ethno-ecological technologies that maintain ecological integrity while supporting community livelihoods.

The study addresses three primary research questions: What are the most important ethno-ecological technologies of the Hutsul highland economy? How might these traditional ethno-ecological practices be applied to economic, agricultural, and tourism development in the Hutsul region? How might these traditional ethno-ecological practices be combined with contemporary approaches to encourage sustainable development in the region?

The research explores the devastating impact of the Russian …

Hkc01 - What We Do In The Shadows: How Urban Density Facilitates Information Diffusion And Civic Engagement, Qing Zhang, Evan Plous Kresch

Oberlin College Kasper Economics and Business Working Paper Series

Does urban density facilitate the diffusion of information and civic engagement? This paper exploits plausibly exogenous variation generated by a unique national policy in China that requires all residential buildings to receive sufficient hours of sunshine. The policy creates higher degrees of restriction on density at higher latitudes, where longer shadows require buildings to be further apart. Using differential topic dynamics on a national petition platform to measure information diffusion, this paper shows that people respond to shifts in government attention with varying speeds across latitudes. Increases in local government reply rate to a topic raises the volume of subsequent …

Presumption Of Creditworthiness, Nakita Q. Cuttino

Michigan Law Review

Creditworthiness, or the likelihood that one will repay one’s debts, is typically signaled through a three-digit number known as a credit score. Yet, over thirty-two million adult-aged consumers lack adequate consumer credit reports and therefore do not have a traditional credit score. As a result of being unscored, these consumers are generally presumed uncreditworthy and foreclosed from mainstream credit markets. Unscored consumers are often relegated to extractive, fringe credit markets that neither require nor build credit scores. More insidiously, however, a growing number of non-credit contexts, including rental housing, utility services, and employment markets, look to creditworthiness to determine eligibility …

(Wp 2025-06) Ramsey And Keynes...And Sraffa And Wittgenstein: Change In Interwar Cambridge Economics And Policy, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

The Ramsey-Keynes exchange regarding the nature of probability is investigated in connection with the development of interwar Cambridge economics and Ramsey and Sraffa’s influences on Keynes and Wittgenstein. First discussed are Ramsey’s criticisms of Keynes and Wittgenstein; then Sraffa’s criticisms of Marshall and Wittgenstein. Ramsey was influenced by Peirce and pragmatism and Sraffa by Gramsci and the theory of cultural hegemony. Ramsey died in 1930 but Sraffa continued to interact with both Keynes and Wittgenstein. After his critique of Marshall he participated in the ‘Cambridge circus’ and turned to recovering the Classical economics of Ricardo. Keynes’s General Theory statement of …

Strategic Interactions And Gender Cues: Evidence From Social Preference Games, Hernán Bejarano, Matias Busso, Juan Francisco Santos

ESI Working Papers

This paper studies trust, reciprocity, and bargaining using a large-scale online experiment conducted in six Latin American countries. Participants played trust and ultimatum games under randomly assigned conditions in which the gender of their counterpart was either disclosed or withheld. On average, disclosing counterpart gender does not yield statistically detectable effects in either game. However, statistically significant differences emerge by participants' own gender: on average men exhibit higher levels of trust, reciprocity, and generosity in bargaining than women. When disaggregating by participant-counterpart gender pairings, point estimates differ in sign across groups but are generally imprecisely estimated, and differences between interacting …

The Economic Impact Of Drought On Alfalfa Price Formation And Irrigation Modernization Feasibility In The Western U.S., Saba Ardakani

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Fall 2023 to Present

This research examines how drought severity affects alfalfa hay prices across nine Western states from 2021 to 2024, using detailed economic analysis and market data. The findings show that droughts significantly raise alfalfa prices, especially when combined with other market and product factors such as forage quality and package, while other factors like corn prices also influence the market. Additionally, the research examines the economic potential of upgrading wheel-line irrigation systems with technologies such as low-pressure sprinklers and automated controls. Modernization substantially reduces water, labor, and energy costs while boosting crop yields, offering a practical solution for farmers. In Utah, …

What Do Americans Think About Federal Tax Options To Support Transportation? Results From Year Sixteen Of A National Survey, Asha Weinstein Agrawal, Hilary Nixon

Mineta Transportation Institute

This report summarizes the results from the sixteenth year of a national public opinion survey asking U.S. adults questions related to their views on federal transportation taxes. A nationally representative sample of 2,539 respondents completed the online survey from February 3 to February 27, 2025. The questions test public opinions about raising the federal gas tax rate, replacing the federal gas tax with a new mileage fee, and imposing a mileage fee just on commercial travel. In addition to asking directly about support for these tax options, the survey collected data on respondents’ views on the quality of their local …

Privately Owned Companies Dominate Renewable Energy Generation Ownership Around The World, Dyaran Bansraj, Theodor Florian Cojoianu, Xi Hu, Khaladdin Rzayev, Francisco Urzua

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Global sustainable finance policies are premised on publicly listed companies driving decarbonization through transparency, investor pressure, and capital market access. Analysing c. 20,000 corporate owners of renewable and fossil-fuel assets worldwide, we show the opposite: private firms own approximately 75% of global renewable generation capacity. This private dominance holds across all major technologies and regions, with listed ownership of renewable assets being the majority only in the oil & gas and technology sectors. The Paris Agreement did not alter this balance. Instead, ownership of the energy transition reflects countries' financial structures, with similar patterns observed across manufacturing, construction, and financial …

Is Complexity Virtuous?, Ryan Elmore, Jack Strauss

Business Information and Analytics: Faculty Scholarship

(Kelly et al., 2024) show that increasing complexity in linear models, with potentially thousands of predictors, is "virtuous". Their work contradicts the dogma of model selection, including the Principles of Parsimony and Occam's Razor. They find that when the number of predictors far exceeds the number of observations, the bias-variance trade-off breaks down, the variance declines, and the Sharpe ratio increases. In the context of ridge regression, we find that very high complexity coupled with large penalty terms (excessive shrinkage) generate forecasts that converge to a rolling window of past returns. For example, we show the past twelve-month moving average …

Trade Dependency And Resilience: An Analysis Of Egypt’S Wheat Import Dynamics During The Russia-Ukraine War, Maha Elhini, Jomana M. Eiisa, Rasha Hammam

Economics

Purpose

Provided that Egypt is the world’s largest wheat importer, the conflict between its primary suppliers presents significant challenges to its trade stability and food security. This paper aims to investigate the impacts of the Russia–Ukraine (RU) war on Egypt’s trade dynamics, with a particular focus on wheat imports over the period 1995–2023.

Design/methodology/approach

The study uses the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Squares (FMOLS) model to estimate the relationship between macroeconomic variables and Egypt’s trade performance, as well as agricultural determinants and wheat import dynamics.

Findings

The empirical results show that Egypt’s GDP growth rate and its exchange rate have …

Financial Safety Nets, Bank Risk And Depositor Behaviour In Central And Eastern Europe, Dorota Skała

Journal of Banking and Financial Economics

We studied expansions in financial safety nets and their relation to bank risk and depositor behaviour in Central and Eastern Europe, using time-varying regulatory data. In general, we find that stronger deposit insurance and state aid granted to banks are linked with both bank risk and depositor behaviour. However, these relations critically depend on whether safety net instruments are used separately or simultaneously. When deposit insurance is strengthened or state aid is granted, we confirm the standard moral hazard behaviour of banks visible in higher bank risk. In parallel, we observe more elevated deposit growth, implying lower market discipline. Conversely, …

Connectedness Of Uncertainty, Volatility, And Stock Market Performance, Szczepan Urjasz

Journal of Banking and Financial Economics

This study examines the dynamic connectedness and spillover effects among various financial and economic indicators, including uncertainty indices, market volatility, and stock market indices, from 3 June 2008, to 30 December 2024. This interconnectedness implies that shocks originating in one market or asset class can rapidly transmit to others, underscoring the potential for systemic risk and financial contagion. The US emerges as a significant net transmitter of influence within the global financial system, with the VIX playing a crucial role in influencing global financial conditions. Major European equity markets also transmit influence, while the Geopolitical Risk Index (GRI) and the …