Economics Commons^™

Coverage Impacts Of Work Requirements From The Arkansas Medicaid Program, Brett D. Huettner

ETD Archive

I examine changes in Medicaid coverage and insurance status surrounding a work requirement policy implemented within the Arkansas Medicaid demonstration waiver. The policy applied to able-bodied, childless adults, aged 30 to 49, not enrolled as students, and was effective from 2018 to 2019. Eligibility was conditional on policy compliance. Taking a sample from the IPUMS American Community Survey database, I use triple-differences modeling to compare Arkansans subject to the policy with unaffected Arkansans and individuals from a set of control states. I find that the policy pilot group in Arkansas was less likely to be insured or have Medicaid coverage …

Economic Mobility Index Of Public R1 Universities In The Mountain West, Peter Grema, Saha Salahi, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Higher Education

This fact sheet presents data on public R1 higher education institutions in the Mountain West from the “Economic Mobility Index,” crafted by higher education researchers at the think tank, Third Way. We summarize the rankings of eleven Mountain West R1 institutions in Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.

Universal Basic Income And The Alaska Permanent Fund: Impact On Labor Outcomes And Skill Composition, Michele Cafasso

Theses and Dissertations

To analyze the effects of universal basic income on labor supply and human capital, I estimate the effects of Alaska’s Permanent Fund on employment, hours worked, and skills using data from the Current Population Survey and O*NET. My method combines synthetic control and difference-in-differences regressions.

How Federal Pollution Discharge Permits Affect U.S. Water Quality: A Study On Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, Cloe C. Mueller

Theses and Dissertations

This paper uses difference-in-difference regression models to examine how state-level pollution discharge permits on concentrated animal feeding operations affect U.S. water quality. I ultimately deem the permitting to be ineffective at improving water quality, calling attention to the need to re-evaluate the ``socially optimal level of pollution."

Systematic And Idiosyncratic Risks Of The U.S. Airline Industry, Rafiqul Bhuyan, André Varella Mollick, Md Ruhul Amin

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

Understanding the risky nature of the airline industry has received attention in the tourism literature from separate angles. Although the systematic risk of the airline industry has been examined before, idiosyncratic risk has largely been ignored. This study fills this gap in the tourism literature by investigating the effect of passengers’ air travel on systematic and idiosyncratic risks of the U.S. airline industry. Using historical air travel data and utilizing both OLS and fixed-effect models, this paper documents negative relationships between the occupancy of airline seats and idiosyncratic risks for 21 U.S. airline companies. This negative effect of occupancy is …

Data, Competition, And Digital Platforms, Dirk Bergemann, Alessandro Bonatti

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose a model of intermediated digital markets where data and heterogeneity in tastes and products are deÖning features. A monopolist platform uses superior data to match consumers and multiproduct advertisers. Consumers have heterogenous preferences for the advertisers' product lines and shop on- or o§-platform. The platform monetizes its data by selling targeted advertising space that allows advertisers to tailor their products to each consumer's preferences. We derive the equilibrium product lines and advertising prices. We identify search costs and informational advantages as two sources of the platform's bargaining power. We show that privacy-enhancing data-governance rules, such as those corresponding …

Skbi Big 5 Survey 2022 August, Singapore Management University

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

The latest survey results on the largest five economies (Big5) were revised markedly relative to the prior release (pre-Russia-Ukraine conflict), generally indicating weaker growth and higher inflation coupled with incremental ambiguity on the policy front.

Life In An Endemic Covid-19: Older Adults' Well-Being, Activity, And Perceptions, Rachel Ngu, Micah Tan, Jia Ying Low

ROSA Research Briefs

The current research brief provides a preliminary examination of whether older adults have been able to ‘return’ to the pre-pandemic way of life in an endemic COVID-19. To do this, we look at several key indicators, including (1) tracking older adults’ overall life satisfaction, activity levels, and trust in government over the past 3 years, (2) older adults’ confidence to resume activities, as well as subjective perceptions about their safety when leaving the home in an endemic COVID-19, and (3) older adults’ ability to adhere to the Home Recovery Program (HRP), where individuals with COVID-19 are able to recover from …

Medicaid Expansion: Changes In Individual Health Outcomes, Julie Norman

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

The Affordable Care Act is one of the biggest changes in the American healthcare system in the 21st century. One element of the ACA is medicaid expansion, which opened up federal funding for states to cover any individual earning below 138% of the federal poverty line. 21 states expanded medicaid in 2014 while 12 haven’t expanded. This paper utilizes the disparity for a natural experiment to determine the efficacy of the program. Outcome variables of interest include measurements of individual health, health access and utilization, and premature death rates. The results indicate positive, but small improvements due to the policy, …

Nebraska Monthly Economic Indicators: August 1, 2022, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

The LEI-N rose by 0.68% during June 2022. The increase in the leading indicator, which is designed to predict economic activity six months in the future, signals that the Nebraska economy will grow slowly through the end of 2022. The indicator improved for two primary reasons. First, there was an increase in manufacturing hours-worked during June. Second, respondents to the June Survey of Nebraska Business reported plans to increase sales and employment.

How Groupy Is A Group?, Rohit J. Parikh

Publications and Research

Various Cooperating Groups

Why and how do they cooperate

Bees

Chinese troops

BLM demonstrators

The reasons are different in the three cases.

1) Bees cooperate because they are all sisters who have thesame DNA. From a purely evolutionary point of view the survival of one is the survival of all.

2) Chinese troops cooperate because they are obeying a single commander.

3) Black lives people cooperate because they have a single goal, and they have communicated to be together at one time and place.

The purpose of this work is to provide a definition of the "amount" of groupiness, revealed …

Advances In Energy Hybridization For Resilient Supply: A Sustainable Approach To The Growing World Demand, Haider Al-Rubaye, Joseph D. Smith, Mohammed H.S. Zangana, Prashant Nagapurkar, Yishu Zhou, Gregory M. Gelles

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Energy poverty, defined as a lack of access to reliable electricity and reliance on traditional biomass resources for cooking, affects over a billion people daily. The World Health Organization estimates that household air pollution from inefficient stoves causes more premature deaths than malaria, tuberculosis, and HIV/AIDS. Increasing demand for energy has led to dramatic increases in emissions. The need for reliable electricity and limiting emissions drives research on Resilient Hybrid Energy Systems (RHESs), which provide cleaner energy through combining wind, solar, and biomass energy with traditional fossil energy, increasing production efficiency and reliability and reducing generating costs and emissions. Microgrids …

Three Essays In Health Economics, Mir Nahid Mahmud

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation comprises three empirical essays. The first essay estimates the long-term health and socioeconomic impact of early life nutritional deficit using the Bangladesh Famine from 1974-1975 as a natural experiment. The second essay investigates if pubic health insurance coverage of “ immigrant children¬” changed as a result of the lift of the “five-year-ban” in the Children Health Insurance Reauthorization Act-2009. The final chapter estimates the relationship between child health conditions and maternal employment using conventional econometric models. To expand the analysis and contribute to the literature, I estimate the relationship by implementing a Multiple Indicator Multiple Causes Model (MIMIC).

Essays On Education And Health Disparities, Min Jang

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis studies determinants of health and socioeconomic disparities in the US. Specifically, it focuses on the following factors: (1) public health insurance, (2) medical care, and (3) adolescent health. The first and second essays test whether access to public health insurance may be an effective tool in remedying disparities in medical access and health outcomes. The third essay examines the gap in educational attainment between students with disabilities and those without, and the evolution of the gap over time.The first essay examines the effect of Medicare Part D, a voluntary prescription drug program, on education-related disparities in mortality. It …

Three Essays In Health Economics, Savita Ramaprasad

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This dissertation includes three essays in applied econometrics. Each essay involves using econometric and statistical techniques to draw inferences from observational data on the effect of policies and quasi-experiments on various outcomes of social importance.

Obstacles To Domestic Retail Investing : Evidence From Mexico, Kenneth Bulko

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Despite efforts to improve investment behavior, equity participation worldwide remains low. Researchers have attempted to explain the reluctance to purchase risky assets by seeking to identify the barriers investors face during the investment process. However, past empirical results relied on data often collected as part of a larger investigation and not explicitly centered on barriers to investing. We seek to deepen the understanding of investor behavior with qualitative and qualitative research designed to specifically identify the obstacles typically faced by potential investors, with a particular focus on Mexico.

Three Essays In Health Economics, Sai Sindhura Gundavarapu

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

This thesis explores factors that influence various healthcare professions, and their practice behaviors. The first chapter focuses on the impacts of occupational regulation of optometrists. The second and third chapters examine the role of education and practice environment on the prescribing behavior of specialist physicians.

Three Essays In Health Economics, Jun Soo Lee

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

My dissertation includes three main studies: the first study examines the seasonality of the birth weight and the underlying mechanisms for the seasonality; the second study documents the impact of weather conditions on the gestation period by using the duration analysis and on the birth weight by using the decomposition method and quantile regression; the third study analyzes the effects of density of immigrant population around place of residence on the residents’ health outcomes.In the first study, we evaluate a range of plausible mechanisms that may underlie the seasonality of the birth weight by using U.S. birth certificate records from …

Do Rational Agents Steal, Randy Hill

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Do Rational Agents Steal?

Modern economists from Adam Smith to the present have broadly assumed that rational agents respect property rights. This respect for property rights has been a feature of nearly all economic models from the beginning. This paper examines a simple two person, production and trade model where the agents are allowed to choose to steal. Even within this simple model, there are a broad range of parameters that affect the agents' choices. In most parameter sets, the agents choose to steal as the reward for conflict outweighs the opportunity cost of not engaging in conflict. The parameter …

Academy Schools In England: Neoliberalism, Privatisation And Governance, Jeff Tan

Book Chapters / Conference Papers

This chapter examines the drivers of academisation in order to better understand the emergence, growth, and impact of academy schools in England. It traces the expansion of academy schools as part of ongoing educational reforms that were reinforced by a neoliberal narrative and facilitated by the state through subsidies and the underfunding and disinvestment of state-run schools. This was driven by the private for-profit and non-profit sectors as key agents in the implementation, and sometimes formulation, of government education policy, along with the state which was an active participant and beneficiary through the revolving door involving politicians, senior civil servants, …

The Conditional Mode In Parametric Frontier Models, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Yi Yang

Center for Policy Research

We survey formulations of the conditional mode estimator for technical inefficiency in parametric stochastic frontier models with normal errors and introduce new formulations for models with Laplace errors. We prove the conditional mode estimator converges pointwise to the true inefficiency value as the noise variance goes to zero. We also prove that the conditional mode estimator in the normal-exponential model achieves near-minimax optimality. Our minimax theorem implies that the worst-case risk occurs when many firms are nearly efficient, and the conditional mode estimator minimizes estimation risk in this case by estimating these small inefficiency firms as efficient. Unlike the conditional …

Weight Perceptions And Health Education On Obesity Among Older Adults, Seonghoon Kim, Vicky Mengqi Qin, Xuan Zhang, Kanghyock Koh, Mindy Eiko Tadai, Micah Tan

ROSA Research Briefs

The current brief presents preliminary findings from a special module that measures perceptions of weight and receptivity to health education among older adults. Singapore Life Panel® (SLP) data collected in January 2022 (n=2814) were utilized. Two policy recommendations were made: The main findings highlight that weight misperception is prevalent among older adults. More than a third of respondents (39%) incorrectly perceive their weight status, particularly among overweight and obese older adults, as well as Malay and lower educated respondents. This suggests the importance of public health education for older adults to reduce misperceptions about their own over- and under-weight status, …

The Economic Returns To Bilingualism In The U.S Labor Market, Mara Macdonald

All Theses

This paper uses pooled cross-sectional data from the General Social Survey to analyze the economic returns of bilingualism to adults in the U.S labor market. Bilingualism in the US is defined as English proficient individuals who also report speaking a foreign language “very well” or “well”. Using OLS Least Squares regression estimation where the dependent variable is the logarithm of earnings, I modify the Mincer earnings function to include foreign language skill variables and controls for observed demographic characteristics. Holding all levels of human capital constant, bilinguals earn 7.7% less than English monolinguals in the U.S labor market; however, this …

The 1-2-3 Of Market Research For Business Startups: A Case Study In Library Instruction, Daniel Le, Marie-Louise Watson

Georgia Library Quarterly

This article describes a practical way to teach student entrepreneurs to search and use market data for business startup plans. The conventional way of teaching students to find articles and business intelligence based on a class assignment can be challenging for many students without an academic business background. This library instruction approach sequentially uses three databases enriched with business data and infographics to support the development of critical thinking for student entrepreneurs. It teaches entrepreneurial personality support, analysis, visualization, and market mapping.

The Effect Of Right-To-Work Laws On Subjective Well-Being: A Case Study Of Oklahoma, Tyler Qualls

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

Using Oklahoma as a case study, this thesis applies a synthetic controls model to investigate the causal effect of right-to-work (RTW) laws on the well-being of the total population with a particular focus on the most affected subset, blue-collar workers and the less educated. The effect of RTW laws leads to a significant decrease in the happiness of blue-collar workers. To be specific, while results show a possible increase in unhappiness in the total population immediately following the adoption of the RTW law, for the more vulnerable blue-collar workers, the statistically significant negative effect of the law on happiness is …

An Empirical Study Of Rational Addiction: The Effects Of Quitting Aids On Smoking Cessation, Cade White

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores the relationship between the use of quitting aids and smoking cessation using United States (US) survey data from the 2018-2019 Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS). Becker and Murphy’s (1988) theory of rational addiction implies that strong rational addictions must terminate abruptly. In other words, strong addictions only cease by the user quitting “cold turkey”. I empirically test this hypothesis using a “double-hurdle” approach, outlined by Jones (1994). A smoker’s decision to quit and their conditional quitting success is modeled in two stages. In the first stage, a probit model is estimated for their …

(Wp 2022-06) Sheila Dow's Open Systems Methodology, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

This paper reviews Sheila Dow’s contributions to open systems thinking as a form of methodological argument and as an important foundation for pluralism in economics. It reviews the origins of her thinking in connection with her distinction between Cartesian/Euclidian and Babylonian thinking in the history of economics, discusses the further development of her views regarding open and closed systems in her 2002 Economic Methodology book and in connection with her ‘structured pluralism’ concept, discusses the 2005 paper co-authored with Victoria Chick, “The Meaning of Open Systems” examines Dow’s and Chick’s view and critique of critical realism in regard to the …

Social Security As Markov Equilibrium In Olg Models: Clarifications And New Insights, Armando R. Lopez-Velasco

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

Forni (2005) is the first author to study the politico-economic sustainability of pay-as-you-go social security in the canonical 2-period OLG model that uses Cobb-Douglas production and logarithmic utility under Markovian voting strategies. This paper (1) shows that equilibria can only exist if the economy in absence of social security is dynamically inefficient, (2) derives the exact parametric conditions that lead to existence of equilibria, (3) shows that among all the admissible arbitrary constants that produce a Markov perfect equilibrium, the maximum constant in such set produces the only equilibrium that can solve dynamic inefficiency and produces a single steady state. …

The Mangrove Walks: An Econometric Analysis Of Climate Migration Drivers From Coastal Bangladesh And Their Geopolitical Impacts, Kendall Scott Byers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Coastal Bangladesh is subject to extreme climate change forces upon poor, rural populations. The aim of this thesis is to determine the strength of environmental drivers of migration and discern whether planned or catastrophic migration predominates in the polder areas of Bangladesh. I use regression analysis on a 1,025 household, 2016 IRRI/IWMI analysis of Polder 28/1, 28/2, and 30 within Satkhira district to determine factor correlations with migration. Progressive salinization is the strongest environmental driver, while flooding decreases migration through trapping household capital investment. Religion has the greatest correlation with migration. Hindus migrate less frequently, but do so with more …

Three Essays On Consumption Smoothing, Logan James Miller

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Macroeconomic theory has established that consumption smoothing leads to higher standards of living. A stable consumption path can lead to more stability and less uncertainty between periods of high and low income. However, there is a wide body of literature that shows people do not consistently smooth their consumption when exposed to adverse income shocks. This dissertation uses experimental and empirical methods to better understand the obstacles people face when trying to smooth their consumption over time. It looks to understand the differences in pairs and individuals’ ability to smooth consumption. It also explores how the household’s level of income …