Econometrics Commons^™

Inequality, Poverty And Economic Growth In Different Income Classifications, Alexandra Zhang

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper defines the relationship between inequality and economic development, analyzes the impact of economic growth on income inequality and poverty rate. The study uses different indicators and panel data over 10 years and across 46 countries worldwide. As the Kuznets Curve suggested, a country’s inequality level and economic development share a non-linear relationship. The author applies this concept to 3 different models and found different results between low and middle-income countries and high-income countries. In result, this study confirms the Kuznets law as the author finds an unequal income distribution in low and middle-income countries.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- January 2015, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

How Do Incremental Wage Increases Affect Low-Wage Workers’ Health Levels?, Cory Stern

Award Winning Economics Papers

This paper estimates the demand for health among low-wage American workers. I incorporate theoretical assumptions and empirical findings from the fields of food and health economics to derive a utility-maximization framework, which posits health is a normal good. Using data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, I then regress an ordered probit random effects model to isolate the effect of income fluctuations on health over time. These results are statistically significant and robust to numerous specification checks, suggesting low-wage workers experience improved health levels as their wages increase. These findings deserve further inquiry to better-inform the current public debate …

Terror Attacks And Bond Yields In The European Union: An Autogressive Transfer Function Approach, Benjamin Goldman

Award Winning Economics Papers

This article seeks a connection between the rate at which governments can borrow money and terrorist activity within their country. Government borrowing habits can play a large role in economic growth, and understanding the determinants of the rate at which money can be borrowed is valuable. The traditional bond yield study includes various macroeconomic indicators and estimates the role that they play in the borrow- ing rate. A straightforward theory to connect utility theory of consumer choice to risk preferences and the decision to invest in a bond is derived. Using data from the Inter- national Monetary Fund and University …

The Role Of Fdi, Oda, Remittances, And Institutions On Economic Development In Developing Countries, William Manak

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper seeks to evaluate the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI), official development assistance (ODA), and migrant remittances to economic growth in developing countries, while also taking into account the qualities of the institutions of the countries. This study uses the linear system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) method as developed by Blundell and Bond (1998). Current research has been focused on adding institutions to growth models to understand how institutional quality can help improve outcomes in developing countries. This paper plans to further the discussion on how institutional quality affects FDI, ODA, and remittances. Institutional quality is measured …

An Analysis Of The Sales Cycle: A Case Of A Cloud-Computing Us Mnc, Matthew Walsh

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates sales techniques used during the sales cycle at a leading global provider of mobile workforce solutions for service-based business of all sizes. At the multi-national corporation, a publicly traded company, business solutions are delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS). This study focuses on “Enterprise” customers, fleets of over 100 vehicles, and examines how leads are converted to opportunities and opportunities to sales. Characteristics of the customer, such as, aforementioned fleet size, SIC code, number of employees, region, and annual revenue are examined in an effort to tailor the marketing process when targeting large customers. Additionally, the study looks at …

Financial Deepening On Economic Growth And Productivity In Sub-Saharan Africa, Yaawa Jallow

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates impact of financial deepening on economic growth and productivity in sub-Saharan Africa. The study uses variables from various studies that are said to most likely impact economic growth and productivity in a country. This study uses a Panel Data analysis to examine the impact of these variables especially financial deepening on both economic growth and productivity. The fixed effect and random effect model both suggest that overall financial deepening has a positive impact on economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. The study also suggest that financial deepening has a positive effect on productivity in sub-Saharan Africa.

Determinants Of Fdi And Economic Integration In Sub-Saharan Africa, Lachlan Davis

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper examines the effects of economic integration, FDI and increased trade liberalization in Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is a region notorious for low human development indexes, slow economic grown and high levels of corruption. Ever since the inception of western aid and corporate interests, the region has no developed at we should expect. This paper will look to find the effects of increased “globalization” in the region and attempt to suggest reasons for the developmental challenges rampant in this region of the world. I expect to find that even though development has increased in some areas (for variables such …

The Impact Of Innovation And Technology On The Economic Growth In Oecd Countries, Boqian Yin

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates the impacts of innovation and technology on the economic growth in the OECD countries. This study is based on the economic growth model from the previous research study from the innovation – economic growth nexus: Global evidence (L. Hasan, et al.). We tried to adjust the original model by substituting a fee variables and focusing only in the OECD nations. In addition, we expect the results to show a positive between the evolution of innovation and technology on economic development in the 34 OECD countries from time period of 1991 to 2012. Moreover, we want to analyze …

The Effects Of Oil Shocks On Total Government Expenditure: A Var Approach, Thomas Mullally

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper aims to examine the relationship between oil price and oil revenue shocks and government expenditures in Venezuela. In order to analyze the relationship between these variables, this study uses a VAR approach. This study aims to find a positive relationship between oil revenues and government expenditures, which will show how countries adjust their public sector spending activities in order to account for changes in demand for oil.

Monetary Policy Rules In Zero Nominal Interest Rate Environments: Exiting The Zero Bound, Sean Lambert

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

The zero bound of nominal interest is known as a liquidity trap, where expansions in the monetary base no longer are effective in lowering the nominal interest rate. This takes away the main tool of traditional monetary policy, and eliminates the ability of monetary policy to stabilize economic conditions. It has been noted that monetary policy rules, such as the Taylor Rule, fail in this situation. The Federal Reserve of the United States solved this problem by massively increasing the monetary base even after the zero bound was reached. Yet another problem loomed even as the economy began to stabilize: …

Corporate Tax Rates: Causes For Tax Rate Discrepancies At The Firm Level, Matthew G. Zanotta

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper examines the relationship between a corporation’s tax rate and a number of different variables. The variables chosen were assets, sales, property, plant, and equipment (PPE), inventory, research and development (R&D), and return on assets (ROA). The model incorporates each of these variables to find a correlation to corporate tax rates. These specific variables were chosen to represent firm size (assets at book value), financial leverage, capital structure (PPE to assets), and inventory investment (inventory to assets). The other two variables, R&D (R&D to net sales), and profitability (ROA) were chosen because of their direct value. The results from …

Educational Attainment And The Impact Of Financial Crisis On European Youth Unemployment, Matthew Mcintyre

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates some of the underlying causes of the drastic increase of youth unemployment from before the 2008 financial crisis to after the crisis. The purpose of the study is to discover what determinants had the largest impact on youth unemployment before and after the crisis. The study also attempts to differentiate between youth unemployment on a primary, secondary, and tertiary level of education, and establish the extent that each group is at risk for unemployment. It is expected that the financial crisis will have a positive and significant impact on unemployment for those with lower education levels, while …

The Impact Of Minimum Wage On Female Labor Participation Rate In The United States, Nguyen Tran-Nguyen

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This study looks at the relationship between minimum wage and female labor participation rate in the recent years from 1990 to 2014. The study incorporates results from a multivariate regression model as well as other similar studies in the field to see whether or not an increase in minimum wage would benefit female labor participation. It is expecting to see a positive correlation between those two variables, as minimum wage increase would benefit teenage female workers and adult female workers.

Economic Reforms, Governance And Fdi: The Case Of The Unasur, Pedro E. Rodriguez

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

Since the early 2000s, member countries of the Union of South America Nations (UNASUR) have moved drastically to the left of the political spectrum and have implemented protectionist economic reforms. Contrary to what many studies and scholars have concluded, the political realignment of the region and the implementation of protectionist policies has had a positive effect on foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows into the region. For the past two decades, total FDI inflows into the region has increased drastically from $8 billion to $150 billion. This study found that there is a combination of both economic reform and governance variables …

Foreign Aid And Economic Growth: A Post-Soviet Analysis Of Emerging Markets, Brett Michaelson

Student Research – Stevenson Center

This paper examines the relationship between economic growth and aid receipts per capita in a post-Soviet world. Utilizing economic growth models and assumptions developed by Burnside and Dollar (2000), I find that general sources of foreign aid are detrimental to a country's economic growth. I find that net ODA per capita acts as a substitute for local government investment in pro-growth policies. As such, foreign aid should only be used in targeted and specific cases.

Implementing (Environmental) Justice: Equity And Performance In California's S.B. 535, Meagan Tokunaga

Pomona Senior Theses

This thesis evaluates the equity performance of a recent state environmental justice policy, California’s Senate Bill 535 (S.B. 535). “Environmental justice” refers to the disproportionate environmental harm imposed on low-income and minority communities. S.B. 535 uses competitive grants to provide funding to these communities. The research is centered around two questions: (1) to what extent has S.B. 535 experienced successful implementation in its first year of operation, and (2) how can policy actors improve implementation while balancing performance and equity goals? In regards to the first question, I utilize a case study of the policy’s implementation within 17 local governments …

Three Essays On Financial Econometrics, Jiang Liang

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This dissertation develops several econometric techniques to address three issues in financial economics, namely, constructing a real estate price index, estimating structural break points, and estimating integrated variance in the presence of market microstructure noise and the corresponding microstructure noise function. Chapter 2 develops a new methodology for constructing a real estate price index that utilizes all transaction price information, encompassing both single-sales and repeat-sales. The method is less susceptible to specification error than standard hedonic methods and is not subject to the sample selection bias involved in indexes that rely only on repeat sales. The methodology employs a model …

Shikkhangon: A Non-Disruptive Primary Education Center For The Underprivileged Children In Bangladesh, Nisar Ahmed

Journal for the Advancement of Developing Economies

Over the last few decades, Bangladesh has achieved significant progress in providing access to primary education for all children. But, the underprivileged segment of the population still cannot send their children to schools, primarily due to the inflexible nature of the traditional school system that conflicts with their lifestyle and livelihood. Also, the quality of students’ achievements under the traditional system suffers due to low quality of pedagogy. In order to provide a quality education befitting the lifestyle of the underprivileged, a departure from the traditional schooling is proposed. This new model allows students to access and learn from motivated …

Developing Economies By Advancing Entrepreneurship: An Interview With Amaury De Parcevaux, Simone T.A. Phipps, Amaury De Parcevaux

Journal for the Advancement of Developing Economies

Today, Amaury de Parcevaux is the President of Beeleev, a company he co-founded with Hugues Franc, Founder and CEO. Franc and de Parcevaux attended boarding school together in France, and reflect the vision and mission of Beeleev, which aims to build a collaborative business platform for entrepreneurs seeking to grow their business internationally. Entrepreneurs can benefit from Beeleev via membership. Beeleevers’ membership opens a farreaching network that connects entrepreneurs from different countries, providing the necessary contacts to aid entrepreneurs as they conduct business in another country. For example, if an American entrepreneur needs to find a way into the Korean …

Technical Efficiency Of Onion Production In Pakistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province, District Malakand, Abid Khan

Journal for the Advancement of Developing Economies

This research was conducted to estimate the technical efficiency and determinants of onion production, by using the Cobb-Douglas stochastic frontier production function with the inefficiency effects model. A multistage sampling technique was used to collect data, randomly, from 93 respondents. The empirical results showed that urea, farm yard manure (FYM), irrigation, and pesticides were the major factors that influence changes in onion production. Farm-specific variables such as education and area were found to have significant effects on the technical inefficiency among the onion producers. The technical efficiency of farmers varied from 0.7478 to 0.9851 with a mean technical efficiency of …

Cell Phone Repairers In Cameroon, 2000-2013, Walter Gam Nkwi

Journal for the Advancement of Developing Economies

This article focuses on cell phone repairers in Cameroon history. It examines how the cell phone has been appropriated by Cameroonians by repairing and extending its life. It questions the ways the repairers have understood the inner parts of the cell phones. How has the repairing of cell phones led to sustaining the livelihood of the repairers? It appears that life would have been unimaginable in the second half of the 21st century without better communication. In Africa mobile phone communication has expanded exponentially over the last decade and will hopefully continue to do so during the coming decades. Cell …

Why Do Countries Cooperate? The Effect Of Cross-Border Pollution, Eric D. Johnson

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

As evidence regarding the consequences of climate change grows, the need to act cooperatively becomes increasingly apparent. International environmental agreements are one of many means being pursued to improve environmental management and combat climate change at large. This study examines factors that influence international environmental treaty participation among European countries. Using panel data on 35 European countries for 1980-1999, joint treaty participation is estimated as a function of various globalization variables with specific attention given to the effects of cross-border air pollution, foreign direct investment, and trade. These results suggest that cross-border air pollution does increase cooperation even after controlling …

Firm Characteristics And Organizational Change: The Effects Of Electronic Commerce In The United States Manufacturing Industry, Candice Y. Wallace

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

This dissertation seeks to provide insight to how e-commerce adoption and utilization change the condition of U.S. Manufacturing establishments, by answering two interrelated questions: (1) What are the characteristics of manufacturing establishments that were early adopters of e-commerce activities?; (2) Once e-commerce is adopted, how has adoption affected employment within manufacturing establishments? The U.S. manufacturing industry was selected for analysis as manufacturing has been and continues to be an important sector for employment and the overall U.S. economy and has been the primary sector responsible for the majority of Business-to-Business e-commerce activity.

Using two econometric models, seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) …

Estimation And Identification Of Change Points In Panel Models With Nonstationary Or Stationary Regressors And Error Term, Badi H. Baltagi, Chihwa Kao, Long Liu

Center for Policy Research

This paper studies the estimation of change point in panel models. We extend Bai (2010) and Feng, Kao and Lazarová (2009) to the case of stationary or nonstationary regressors and error term, and whether the change point is present or not. We prove consistency and derive the asymptotic distributions of the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and First Difference (FD) estimators. We find that the FD estimator is robust for all cases considered.

Price, Perceived Value And Customer Satisfaction: A Text-Based Econometric Analysis Of Yelp! Reviews, Eleanor A. Dwyer

Scripps Senior Theses

We examine the antecedents of customer satisfaction in the restaurant sector, paying particular attention to perceived value and price level. Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation, we extract latent topics from the text of Yelp! reviews, then analyze the relationship between these topics and satisfaction, measured as the difference between review rating and user average review rating.

Heteroskedasticity Of Unknown Form In Spatial Autoregressive Models With A Moving Average Disturbance Term, Osman Dogan

Publications and Research

In this study, I investigate the necessary condition for the consistency of the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of spatial models with a spatial moving average process in the disturbance term. I show that the MLE of spatial autoregressive and spatial moving average parameters is generally inconsistent when heteroskedasticity is not considered in the estimation. I also show that the MLE of parameters of exogenous variables is inconsistent and determine its asymptotic bias. I provide simulation results to evaluate the performance of the MLE. The simulation results indicate that the MLE imposes a substantial amount of bias on both autoregressive and …

Successfully Financing Classical Music Kickstarter Projects, Sarah Chung

Scripps Senior Theses

With the rise of technology and finance, crowdfunding has been uprising as a popular method of financing projects. Kickstarter provides an online platform in which anyone with Internet access can upload their own project “pitch” to gain funding for their idea on an all-or-nothing model. My thesis explores financial trends and factors that potentially contribute to a successful Kickstarter campaign within the classical music projects subcategory. I use a logistic regression and the Ordinary Least Squares model to examine a dataset of already successfully funded projects and a second dataset that contains both successfully and unsuccessfully funded projects that were …

Limit Theory For An Explosive Autoregressive Process, Xiaohu Wang, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

Large sample properties are studied for a first-order autoregression (AR(1)) with a root greater than unity. It is shown that, contrary to the AR coefficient, the least-squares (LS) estimator of the intercept and its t-statistic are asymptotically normal without requiring the Gaussian error distribution, and hence an invariance principle applies. The coefficient based test and the t test have better power for testing the hypothesis of zero intercept in the explosive process than in the stationary process.

Nonparametric Threshold Regression: Estimation And Inference, Daniel J. Henderson, Christopher F. Parmeter, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

The present work describes a simple approach to estimating the location of a threshold/changepoint in a nonparametric regression. This model has connections both to the time-series and regressiondiscontinuity literatures. The estimator leverages a simple decomposition, giving it the form of asemiparametric smooth coefficient model. Optimal bandwidth selection and a suite of testing facilitiesare also presented. Several empirical examples are provided to illustrate the implementation of themethods discussed here.