Economics Commons^™

The Shirt Of Nessus: International Debt As A Tool Of Hegemonic Control, Omar Hamed Ghannam

Theses and Dissertations

International debt has been a fixture of the global economy and state financing for centuries. The economic logic of accruing international debt and its management is rarely questioned in the literature, even as sovereign debt crises abound. These crises offer a point of examination, re-assessment, and negotiations concerning allocating the burdens. This paper aims to study these debt crises to interrogate the issue of international debt, the depoliticized economic mantras that govern it, their validity, sincerity, and the political and social implications on the indebted polity. This is done by looking at the origins of debt crises, and examining how …

The Nebraska Ranch Practicum, Jay Parsons, Travis Mulliniks, Troy Walz

Cornhusker Economics

The Nebraska Ranch Practicum is a multi-disciplinary, hands-on educational program designed to give participants the skills and education needed to succeed in today's ranching industry. The Practicum was established in 1999 as a “three-season” program designed to integrate information producers encounter throughout the beef production year into a framework for decision making. The Practicum seeks to improve decision-making skills, enhance stewardship of natural resources, improve skills critical for evaluation of ranching enterprises, and enhance ranch sustainability.

Patience As A Predictor For Environmental Attitudes, Carolina Missura

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper aims to show the relationship between an individual’s value of patience and the degree to which they exhibit pro-environmental attitudes. My hypothesis is that country-wide patience has a strong impact on an individual’s attitudes towards protecting the environment. I present two methods to address this relationship, each method employs a different variable used to measure environmental attitudes. Given some discrepancies in the results from the first method, the second was the one utilized to reach the conclusion. The paper concludes that there is a positive and significant correlation between patience and environmental attitudes.

Lee Isaac Chung, Minari (2020): Having An Amerikorean Life, Nagehan Uzuner

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

Minari by Lee Isaac Chung is a drama which chronicles the life of a Korean family who moves to the USA during 1980s in pursuit for a better life. The acculturation process is experienced differently by family members. Children are mostly bored with their new life in the rural area of Arkansas while their mother, Monica, is terrified of living in a mobile home which is made of a truck trailer in the middle of nowhere. Meanwhile, the grandmother joins the family from Korea to take care of the kids with a more positive approach dealing with their struggles. The …

Minari: The Concealed Asian Aspiration Wrapped In The American Dream, Anh Luan Tran-Nguyen, Arthur Nguyen

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

After the success of the Korean film Parasite, Minari – a quasi-autobiographical drama of the Korean-American film director Lee Isaac Chung – has again turned the global public’s attention to Korean culture at large. In this review, we shed light on two themes that we capture from the movie: tensions and compromises in chasing the American dream of immigrants. Although stories about pursuing the American dream are abundant, we know less about how that dream causes tensions at the individual and family levels and how the tensions are resolved. Minari is an excellent example to probe the unfolding issues relating …

Minari: The Invincible, Soonkwan Hong

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

No abstract provided.

Hyphenated Globalization: First, Wide Propagation; Then, Gradual Elimination, Nikhilesh Dholakia, Deniz Atik

Markets, Globalization & Development Review

No abstract provided.

A Guide To Creating Core Ocean Gdp Accounts, Charles S. Colgan

Publications

Start with a simple question. What does the ocean contribute to the national economy? This might seem like a trivial question. After all, the contributions of other major natural resources such as agriculture or forest products are regularly counted as the output of farming, food, and fibre industries along with lumber and other forest products. But in most countries, there is no identifiable “ocean economy”. Industries like marine transportation or fishing are accounted for, but nothing that ties all the varied ocean-related economic activity together. Without a deliberate effort to identify and measure all relevant economic activity related to the …

Geopolitics And Ballpark Estimates, Thomas Lam, David Fernandez

Sim Kee Boon Institute for Financial Economics

Most economist commenced 2022 with 3 key assumptions on the global economy:

1) Some policy normalisation and reversal, though cautious and uneven, are likely to occur in economies with above-average growth and inflation;

2) The Covid-19 infection wave, while presumably asymmetric and recurrent across countries, appears to have less of an imprint on cyclical activity on balance;

3) The lingering supply disruptions resulting from the pandemic, albeit still intense and widespread, should be easing gradually.

Sweating The Energy Bill: Extreme Weather, Poor Households, And The Energy Spending Gap, Jacqueline M. Doremus, Irene Jacqz, Sarah Johnston

Economics

We estimate the relationship between temperature and energy spending for both low and higher-income U.S. households. We find both groups respond similarly (in percentage terms) to moderate temperatures, but low-income households’ energy spending is half as responsive to extreme temperatures. Consistent with low-income households cutting back on necessities to afford their energy bills, we find similar disparities in the food spending response to extreme temperature. These results suggest adaptation to extreme weather, such as air conditioning use, is prohibitively costly for households experiencing poverty.

College Street Journal (March 2022), College Of The Holy Cross

College Street Journal

College Street Journal serves as a student platform for business-related news, opportunities and resources at Holy Cross. Readers will discover a broad range of important topics from relevant news and economic issues, career development opportunities and advice, as well as Ciocca center and campus-wide opportunities to grow outside of the classroom.

Highlights of this issue include the Women in Business Club, economic impacts on culture, Easter, an alumni interview with Jim Nolan and a faculty editorial.

2nd Annual International Conference Proceedings - Development: Discourses And Critiques, Centre For Business And Economic Research (Cber), School Of Economics And Social Sciences (Sess)

Conference Proceedings

The Center for Business and Economic Research (CBER) at School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS) IBA has organized the 2nd Annual conference on 25th-27th March 2022. The theme for this year invites works from a wide range of disciplines to critique, question and reconsider the experiences of transnational, national and sub-national actors with the development process. What does ‘development’ mean for different actors, and how has this narrative shifted over time? How does development define and redefine power relations and what implications does this have for different groups? How have colonial experiences shaped futures and how does one deconstruct …

Post Covid-19 Exit Strategies And Emerging Markets Economic Challenges, Joshua Aizenman, Hiro Ito

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

We study emerging markets’ 1980s lost growth decade, triggered by the massive reversal of the snowball effect in the US during 1974–1984, finding that higher flow costs of servicing debt overhang explain the dramatic decline in growth rates of exposed emerging markets. We also show how lowering the US cost of servicing its public debt has been associated with higher US, Japan, and Western Europe real output growth rates during the post WWII recovery decades, 1946–1956, and validate that fiscal adjustments of large countries have strong growth and volatility spillovers effects on exposed emerging markets and developing countries.

An Exploratory Analysis Of Time Series Econometric Data For Retention Forecasting Using Deep Learning, John C. O'Donnell

Theses and Dissertations

Officer retention in the Air Force has been researched many times in an attempt to better predict the personnel needs of the Air Force for the future. There has been previous work done in regards to specific AFSCs and how their retention compares to specific yet similar private sector jobs. This study considers different econometric time series statistics as a feature space and an average Air Force officer separation rate as the response variable for the multivariate time series analysis deep learning techniques. The econometric indicators used in this study are New Business Formations, New Durable Good Orders, and the …

Distributions Of Posterior Quantiles And Economic Applications, Kai Hao Yang, Alexander K. Zentefis

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We characterize the distributions of posterior quantiles under a given prior. Unlike the distributions of posterior means, which are known to be mean-preserving contractions of the prior, the distributions of posterior quantiles coincide with a first-order stochastic dominance interval bounded by an upper and a lower truncation of the prior. We apply this characterization to several environments, ranging across political economy, Bayesian persuasion, industrial organization, econometrics, finance, and accounting.

Framing Human Action In Physics: Valid Reconstruction, Invalid Reduction, Shabnam Mousavi, Shyam Sunder

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We propose framing human action in physics before reaching to biology and social sciences, rearranging the order of their usual deployment. As an example, consider efforts to model altruism that start in a frame of psychological or social attributes such as reciprocity, empathy, and identity. Evolutionary roots might also be used by appeal to survival of the species from biology. Only then the modeler abstracts to work on notations, and to establish relationships using mathematical apparatus from physics. This top-down deployment of principles from various scientific disciplines has generated a body of coherent models, partially generalizable theories, and disagreements. In …

Consumer Bankruptcy, Mortgage Default And Labor Supply, Wenli Li, Costas Meghir, Florian Oswald

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We specify and estimate a lifecycle model of consumption, housing demand and labor supply in an environment where individuals may file for bankruptcy or default on their mortgage. Uncertainty in the model is driven by house price shocks, education specific productivity shocks, and catastrophic consumption events, while bankruptcy is governed by the basic institutional framework in the US as implied by Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. The model is estimated using micro data on credit reports and mortgages combined with data from the American Community Survey. We use the model to understand the relative importance of the two chapters (7 …

Paso Del Norte Economic Indicator Review, March, Hunt Institute For Global Competitiveness

Technical Reports

No abstract provided.

Big Data And Inflation Forecasting In Nigeria: A Text Mining Application., M. A. Adebiyi, A. O. Adenuga, T. S. Olusegun, O. O. Mbutor

Economic and Financial Review

The success of monetary policy is substantially predicated on the availability of reliable forecast of inflation. However, the shocks arising from COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine war have brought about significant economic uncertainties; thus, necessitating the fine-tuning of existing forecasting models of the Central Bank of Nigeria. This study explores the usefulness of public sentiments obtained using machine learning methods to improve the predictive power of the existing short-term inflation forecasting model (STIF) in Nigeria. Findings indicate that, for all components of inflation, models that include the computed sentiment index perform better in both in-sample and out-sample forecasts than those excluding …

Twin Deficits In Nigeria: Where Does The Exchange Rate Fit?, G. K. Sanni, B. A. Gaiya, V. O. Aliyu, S. N. Okafor

Economic and Financial Review

This study investigates the twin deficits hypothesis for Nigeria while accounting for the role of exchange rate. The study utilises annual data series spanning 1981 to 2019 and the ARDL modelling technique for the estimations. Among other findings, the study reveals the existence of a bi-directional causation between current account deficit and fiscal deficit. Similarly, a positive relationship was seen to exist between current account balance and fiscal balance in both the short-run and long-run during periods of exchange rate appreciation and depreciation, thus confirming the role of exchange rate in the twin deficit hypothesis in Nigeria. The study recommends …

Implications Of The African Continental Free Trade Area For Nigeria’S Economic Growth, O. S. Aigheyisi, M. A. Iyoha

Economic and Financial Review

The objective of this paper is to examine the effect of intra-African Trade on Nigeria’s economic growth from 1981 to 2019. To achieve this, the ARDL modeling technique is employed to investigate the short-run and long-run effects of intra-African trade on Nigeria’s economic growth. The study finds that though the short-run effect is positive but not significant; the long-run effect is significantly positive, and robust to alternative estimation techniques. This suggests that expansion of trade among African countries, which is expected to result from the full implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), would have positive growth effect …

Microfinance Sustainability In A Digitalised Economy, M. A. Adebiyi, T. S. Olusegun, J. Yakubu

Economic and Financial Review

The study examines microfinance sustainability in a digitalised economy using a panel dataset of 1,314 microfinance banks in Nigeria spanning 2012 to 2020. The results show that digitalisation poses significant threats to microfinance sustainability in Nigeria. The industry presently faces strong competition from commercial banks and Fintech companies, and is characterised by a low capital base, product innovation and market penetration, high transaction costs, and some idiosyncratic risks. The study suggests that microfinance institutions should leverage their large customer base by utilising digital innovations. Regulatory agencies should ensure that Fintech services are adequately regulated, affordable, and easily accessible to microfinance …

The Effect Of Foreign Institutional Ownership On Corporate Tax Avoidance: International Evidence, Iftekhar Hasan, Incheol Kim, Haimeng Teng, Qiang Wu

School of Economics and Finance Faculty Publications

We find that foreign institutional investors (FIIs) reduce their investee firms’ tax avoidance. We provide evidence that the effect is driven by the institutional distance between FIIs’ home countries/regions and host countries/regions. Specifically, we find that the effect is driven by the influence of FIIs from countries/regions with high-quality institutions (i.e., common law, high government effectiveness, and high regulatory quality) on investee firms located in countries/regions with low-quality institutions. Furthermore, we show that the effect is concentrated on FIIs with little experience in the investee countries/regions or FIIs with stronger monitoring incentives. Finally, we find that FIIs are more likely …

A Requiem For “Blame It On Beijing” Interpreting Rotating Global Current Account Surpluses, Menzie David Chinn, Hiro Ito

Economics Faculty Publications and Presentations

Global current account imbalances have reappeared, although the extent and distribution of these imbalances are noticeably different from those experienced in the middle of the last decade. What does that recurrence mean for our understanding of the origin and nature of such imbalances? Will imbalances persist over time? Informed by empirical estimates of the determinants of current account imbalances encompassing the period after the global recession, we find that – as before – the observable manifestations of the factors driving the global saving glut have limited explanatory power for the time series variation in imbalances. Fiscal factors determine imbalances, and …

Borderplex Business Barometer, Volume 6, Number 3, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Steven L. Fullerton

Border Region Modeling Project

No abstract provided.

Lasso For Stochastic Frontier Models With Many Efficient Firms, William C. Horrace, Hyunseok Jung, Yoonseok Lee

Center for Policy Research

We apply the adaptive LASSO (Zou, 2006) to select a set of maximally efficient firms in the panel fixed-effect stochastic frontier model. The adaptively weighted L1 penalty with sign restrictions for firm-level inefficiencies allows simultaneous estimation of the maximal efficiency and firm-level inefficiency parameters, which results in a faster rate of convergence of the corresponding estimators than the least-squares dummy variable approach. We show that the estimator possesses the oracle property and selection consistency still holds with our proposed tuning parameter selection criterion. We also propose an efficient optimization algorithm based on coordinate descent. We apply the method to estimate …

(Wp 2022-03) Managing Contagion: Covid, Public Health, And Reflexive Behavior, John B. Davis

Economics Working Papers

This paper characterizes a pandemic as one kind of contagion, and defines a contagion as a two-level, two-direction, reflexive feedback loop system. In such a system, experts’ opinions can act as self-fulfilling prophecies that significantly influence social behavior. Also, when multiple experts produce multiple, expert opinions can fragment a society’s response to a pandemic worsening rather than ameliorating it. This paper models this with two competing expert opinions, associates them with club goods and common pool goods types of circumstances, and argues that to combat fragmentation of opinion a focus on public health public good provision needs to be framed …

Financial Intermediaries And Contagion In Market Efficiency: The Case Of Etfs, Claire Yurong Hong, Frank Weikai Li, Avanidhar Subrahmanyam

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Capital constraints of financial intermediaries can affect liquidity provision. We investigate whether these constraints spillover and consequently cause contagion in the degree of market efficiency across assets managed by a common intermediary. Specifically, we provide evidence of strong comovement in pricing gaps between ETFs and their constituents for ETFs served by the same lead market maker (LMM). The effects are stronger for ETFs that are more illiquid and volatile, when the underlying constituents of the ETFs are more costly to arbitrage, and for LMMs with more constrained capital. Using extreme disruptions in debt markets during COVID-19 as an experiment, we …

How Do Firms Respond To Reduced Private Equity Buyout Activity?, Yi-Hsin Lo

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This paper presents new evidence on the economic role of private equity buyouts by exploiting the staggered adoption of the constructive fraud provision by U.S. state courts. The law unintentionally shifts the credit default risk borne by existing unsecured creditors of the buyout target to the selling shareholders and lenders in the form of ex-post litigation risk, thereby discouraging buyout activity. Using a difference-in-differences framework, I find that firms raise less capital, reduce payouts and investments, and form alliances with employees. Firms also avoid positive NPV projects that carry too much risk. These findings are consistent with managers enjoying a …

Correlation-Robust Auction Design, Wei He, Jiangtao Li

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the design of auctions when the auctioneer has limited statistical information about the joint distribution of the bidders' valuations. More specifically, we consider an auctioneer who has an estimate of the marginal distribution of a generic bidder's valuation but does not have reliable information about the correlation structure. We analyze the performance of mechanisms in terms of the revenue guarantee, that is, the greatest lower bound of revenue across all joint distributions that are consistent with the marginals. A simple auction format, the second-price auction with no reserve price, is shown to be asymptotically optimal, as the number …