Econometrics Commons^™

National Integration And Institution Building, Haiwen Zhou

Economics Faculty Publications

The mutual dependence between national integration and institution building is established in a formal model. It is shown that a decrease in transportation costs, but not necessarily an increase in population size, reduces the equilibrium number of states and the adoption of rule-based institutions. With endogenous transportation costs or endogenous population size, the unification process can feed on itself. The model is illustrated by the state of Qin's unification of China in 221 BC. During this process of national integration, transformations from relation-based governance to rule-based governance happened.

Economic Freedom And One-Way Truck Rental Prices: An Empirical Note, Alexander Cardazzi, Robert A. Lawson

Economics Faculty Publications

This study examines the one-way truck rental prices for 378 cities. There are large price differentials in one-way rental prices between city pairs. The pull of people toward higher economic freedom locales and push away from lower economic freedom locales is found to be an important determinant of the city-pair price differentials.

Accounting For Locational, Temporal, And Physical Similarity Of Residential Sales In Mass Appraisal Modeling: The Development And Application Of Geographically, Temporally, And Characteristically Weighted Regression, Paul E. Bidanset, Michael Mccord, John R. Lombard, Peadar Davis, William J. Mccluskey

School of Public Service Faculty Publications

Geographically weighted regression (GWR) has been recognized in the assessment community as a viable automated valuation model (AVM) to help overcome, at least in part, modeling hurdles associated with location, such as spatial heterogeneity and spatial autocorrelation of error terms. Although previous researchers have adjusted the GWR weights matrix to also weight by time of sale or by structural similarity of properties in AVMs, the research described in this paper is the first that has done so by all three dimensions (i.e., location, structural similarity, and time of sale) simultaneously. Using 24 years of single-family residential sales in Fairfax, Virginia, …

Two Essays On Investor Emotions And Their Effects In Financial Markets, Jiancheng Shen

Finance Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation provides empirical evidences on media-based investor emotions in predicting stock return, conditional volatility, and stock and bond return comovements.

We first studied the interaction between US media content and the US stock market returns and volatility. We utilize propriety investor sentiment measures developed by Thompson Reuters MarketPsych. We select four measures of investor sentiment that reflect both pessimism and optimism of small investors. Our objective is two-fold. First, we examine the ability of these sentiment measures to predict market returns. For this purpose, we use dynamic Vector Auto-Regressive models. Second, we are interested in exploring the effects of …