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2020

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Articles 91 - 120 of 183

Full-Text Articles in Econometrics

Sanctuary Cities And Their Respective Effect On Crime Rates, Adam R. Schutt May 2020

Sanctuary Cities And Their Respective Effect On Crime Rates, Adam R. Schutt

Undergraduate Economic Review

According to the U.S. Center for Immigration Studies (2017), cities or counties in twenty-four states declare themselves as a place of “sanctuary” for illegal immigrants. This study addresses the following question: Do sanctuary cities experience higher crime rates than those cities that are not? Using publicly available data, this regression analysis investigates the relationship between crime rates in selected cities and independent variables which the research literature or the media has linked to criminal activity. Results of this research reveal that sanctuary cities do not experience higher violent or property crime rates than those cities that are not sanctuary cities.

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Running On Fumes: The Long And Short-Run Effects Of British Columbia's Carbon Tax On Gasoline Consumption, Martin A. Long May 2020

Running On Fumes: The Long And Short-Run Effects Of British Columbia's Carbon Tax On Gasoline Consumption, Martin A. Long

Honors Thesis

British Columbia (BC) implemented a carbon tax in 2008 at the rate of ten Canadian dollars (CAD) per metric ton of carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2e). In April of 2019, the tax was set at a rate of CAD 40 per metric ton of CO2e with a dual mandate to reduce fuel consumption while not contracting economic output. This paper attempts to estimate the effect of British Columbia’s carbon tax on per capita gasoline consumption using panel data regression. To assess the empirical evidence, provincial-level monthly data from ten Canadian provinces was collected and analyzed over the period 1991 to 2018. …

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Regional Household Economic Stress And Retail Sales Fluctuations, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Ana P. Gutierrez-Zubiate May 2020

Regional Household Economic Stress And Retail Sales Fluctuations, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., Ana P. Gutierrez-Zubiate

Departmental Papers (E & F)

Economic stress indices are used to monitor business cycle conditions in several regions.Although the deployment of these tools is spreading, there have been relatively few efforts to empirically assess the performance of these gauges, especially at the regional level.This study takes advantage of one such index that is published monthly and has more than 15 years of historical data.Results obtained confirm an inverse relationship between household economic duress and retail sales activity, but it is not found to be statistically reliable over the long-run.Deviations from equilibrium are found to last for 142 months.More relevantly, a 1-point increase in the index …

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Shocks To Aggregate Demand And Aggregate Supply In The Midst Of Covid-19, Anna M. Gellerman May 2020

Shocks To Aggregate Demand And Aggregate Supply In The Midst Of Covid-19, Anna M. Gellerman

Publications and Research

COVID-19 sent shockwaves throughout the economy, changing the amounts of goods and services distributed and altering the demand. This article discusses the negative demand shock and adverse supply shock that the U.S. economy faced in 2020, and the policies that the government implemented to reverse these effects.

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Mentoring Effects On Microbusiness Growth In Medellín, Colombia, Diana Herrera May 2020

Mentoring Effects On Microbusiness Growth In Medellín, Colombia, Diana Herrera

Master's Theses

Microbusinesses are stagnant in growth across least developed countries due to their lack of managerial skills and limited access to the credit market. Current business methods aimed at increasing profitability for microentrepreneurs with limited capital in developing countries are only moderately successful in increasing growth. Having a mentor that has a localized business understanding can provide their mentee with the proper guidance on how to effectively manage their business to increase growth. This paper presents the results for a randomized controlled trial which identifies the average treatment effects of meeting with a mentor and observes the impact on business growth …

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Income Inequality In America: Conclusions From 100 Years Of Income Tax Data And Cross-Country Comparisons, Noriel Campos May 2020

Income Inequality In America: Conclusions From 100 Years Of Income Tax Data And Cross-Country Comparisons, Noriel Campos

Master's Theses

In 1913, taxation of income was permanently introduced in the United States. Other similarly developed countries soon followed suit. From there, income inequality in the United States dropped significantly, and the decline in Europe was even more dramatic. First, this paper considers the changes over time of the share of national income gained by the top 1% of income earners in seven countries going back to World War Two. A second analysis considers the impact that tax policy may have had on the share of income accruing to the top 1% of U.S. income earners between 1980 and 2014, a …

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Estimating Predictors Of Mental Well-Being Through Analysis Of Children’S Drawings: The Case Of Syrian Refugees, Stephanie Smith May 2020

Estimating Predictors Of Mental Well-Being Through Analysis Of Children’S Drawings: The Case Of Syrian Refugees, Stephanie Smith

Master's Theses

There are currently over 65 million individuals that have been forcibly displaced globally. The cumulative trauma that comes from the refugee experience and exposure to violence has proven to have long-term negative psychological outcomes and thus negative impacts on human capital in the long run. Given that over 50% percent of the global refugee population are children, the ability to efficiently and accurately assess their mental well-being is of critical importance. Using data from over 2000 refugee children in Jordan, I use machine learning techniques to find key predictors of psychological distress, PTSD, and exposure to violence found in children’s …

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Who Benefits From Park And Recreation Improvements In San Francisco? A Case Study Of Recreation Center Renovations In San Francisco, Safia Belayadi May 2020

Who Benefits From Park And Recreation Improvements In San Francisco? A Case Study Of Recreation Center Renovations In San Francisco, Safia Belayadi

Master's Theses

The purpose of this study is to examine the efficacy of city policies undertaking public goods investments to benefit disadvantaged communities in San Francisco. Namely, is the process of improving the quality of public goods serving targeted populations, or does it lead to unintended consequences such as gentrification? I take advantage of the timing of city recreation center renovations and the synthetic control method to capture any difference in the proportion of users that is poor before and after the renovation date. I use San Francisco Recreation and Park Department registrant data containing user zip codes and census demographic data …

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The Effect Of Sex Of Firstborn Children On Attitudes Towards Intimate Partner Violence, Shuvam Rizal May 2020

The Effect Of Sex Of Firstborn Children On Attitudes Towards Intimate Partner Violence, Shuvam Rizal

Master's Theses

What are the different ways in which one’s life is influenced by the sex of their children? Is there an effect on how they view Intimate Partner Violence? If so, is there a difference in how the male parent is affected by the sex of his child than the female parent? Bodies of conflicting Social Sciences literature suggest having a daughter makes one both more and less likely to engage in Intimate Partner Violence. In this paper, I approach this question through the use of a Linear Probability Fixed-Effects model on Demographic Health Surveys (DHS) datasets, using data from the …

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The Role Of High-Fructose Corn Syrup Imports In Child And Women Obesity, Anna Subirana Bofill May 2020

The Role Of High-Fructose Corn Syrup Imports In Child And Women Obesity, Anna Subirana Bofill

Master's Theses

High Fructose Corn Syrup is believed to be responsible for the increase of the obesity epidemic that is affecting both developed and developing countries, yet to date there are no rigorous analyses that quantify this effect. To estimate the impact of consumption of HFCS on obesity, I have paired country-specific data on imports of HFCS from the United Nations International Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade) with women and child health data from around 70 countries from 1985 to 2018. The results show that conditional on space and time fixed effects, imports of HFCS with a high concentration of fructose have …

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Wellbeing And Marriage: Does Marriage Improve Mental Health?, Maranda L. (Kahl) Joyce May 2020

Wellbeing And Marriage: Does Marriage Improve Mental Health?, Maranda L. (Kahl) Joyce

Undergraduate Economic Review

With the decline in marriage rates and the rise in mental health issues, understanding the potential correlation between marital status and overall mental health is of economic importance. This research explores the potential effects of marital status on mental health in the U.S., using microdata from the 2016 Behavior Risk Factor Surveillance System. The role of marital status is examined on three different dependent variables. My results suggest that marriage is associated with a decrease in number of days of poor mental health, a decrease in the likelihood of a depressive disorder diagnosis, and an increase in overall life satisfaction.

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An Economic Analysis Of The Short-Term Rental Market: Local Regulatory Decisions, Joseph L. Kauffman, Harrison D. Hooper May 2020

An Economic Analysis Of The Short-Term Rental Market: Local Regulatory Decisions, Joseph L. Kauffman, Harrison D. Hooper

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

In recent years, short-term home rental companies such as Airbnb and Vacation Rentals by Owner (VRBO) have grown in popularity throughout the United States and the world. The lack of regulation of this rapid growth, which stemmed from the legal grey area these rentals fall under, caused some states to adopt specific regulatory policies. These regulatory policies attempt to better monitor this sector, to tax rental earnings, and to reduce perceived negative externalities to this new market. This thesis researches the benefits and costs that short-term rentals (STRs) provide to cities and the regulatory implications on the growing rental market. …

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Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Quantitative Easing: An Svar Approach, Seth T. Walker May 2020

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Quantitative Easing: An Svar Approach, Seth T. Walker

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

The 2008 recession affected the American economy more than any recession since the Great Depression. Unlike its response to the Great Depression, the Federal Reserve aimed to stimulate the economy through all means in its power. However, the Federal Reserve’s conventional monetary policy tools were not viable options due to the zero lower bound. As a result, the Federal Reserve pursued an unconventional monetary policy tool known as quantitative easing which involved purchases of long-term assets on a scale never before seen in the United States. Since its inception, quantitative easing has faced significant scrutiny over its merit and has …

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Shutdown Policies And Worldwide Conflict, Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Nathalie Monnet, Rohit Ticku May 2020

Shutdown Policies And Worldwide Conflict, Nicolas Berman, Mathieu Couttenier, Nathalie Monnet, Rohit Ticku

ESI Working Papers

We provide real-time evidence on the impact of Covid-19 restrictions policies on conflicts globally. We use daily information on conflict events and government policy responses to limit the spread of coronavirus to study how conflict levels vary following shutdown and lockdown policies. We use the staggered implementation of restriction policies across countries to identify their effect on conflict incidence and intensity. Our results show that imposing a nation-wide shutdown reduces the likelihood of daily conflict by around 9 percentage points. The reduction is driven by a drop in the incidence of battles, protests and violence against civilians. Across actors the …

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Comovement And Instability In Cryptocurrency Markets, Pierangelo De Pace, Jayant Rao May 2020

Comovement And Instability In Cryptocurrency Markets, Pierangelo De Pace, Jayant Rao

Pomona Economics

We analyze the extent of comovement between daily price returns of nine major cryptocurrencies during the first three main phases of their development, from April 2013 to November 2018. We assess its evolution using bivariate and multivariate modelling approaches, and detect pronounced time variation. Generally, comovement is initially low and positive, but increases between early 2017 and late 2018. We then adopt a right-tail version of the Augmented Dickey-Fuller unit root test to identify periods of mildly explosive behavior (statistical instability) in the Network Value to Transactions (NVT) ratio (a measure of the dollar value of cryptocurrency transaction activity relative …

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Female Labor Force Participation And Economic Growth: Granger Causality Test, Zulakha Rahman May 2020

Female Labor Force Participation And Economic Growth: Granger Causality Test, Zulakha Rahman

Theses and Dissertations

Does rising female labor force participation precede economic growth, or does the relationship run in the other direction? This paper addresses this question by performing a Granger causality test to examine the relationship between economic growth and female labor force participation worldwide. The economic growth –is measured in two ways: using Growth Domestic Product, Purchasing Power Parity (constant 2011 international dollar) and Growth Domestic Product using local currency units. The test uses a completely balanced panel dataset spanning over 28 years from 1990 to 2018 and using 151 countries for Purchasing Power Parity dataset and 154 countries in GDP in …

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Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- May 2020, Leonard Lardaro May 2020

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- May 2020, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

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Colonial Legacies And Institutional Legitimacy: Explaining Variation In State-Level Informal Economy Size, Makayla Barker May 2020

Colonial Legacies And Institutional Legitimacy: Explaining Variation In State-Level Informal Economy Size, Makayla Barker

Political Science Honors Projects

Abstract: Why are some states’ economies more formal than others? This question has critical significance for policy-makers who endeavor to tap into the reservoir of tax revenue and entrepreneurship that informal economies contain. More importantly, large informal economies inhibit public good provision and perpetuate the impoverishment, marginaliza- tion, and political instability of select communities. Despite major variation in the size of informal economies across states, most scholarship on the informal economy concentrates only on the causes and consequences of the phenomenon, while neglecting to address its variation. This thesis builds on a canon of scholarship surrounding colonial legacies, new- institutional …

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An Econometric Analysis Of Homelessness Risk-Factors, Zac Smith May 2020

An Econometric Analysis Of Homelessness Risk-Factors, Zac Smith

Economics Undergraduate Honors Theses

This paper explores the issue of homelessness within the United States and seeks to create an econometric model that identifies predicting factors of homelessness at a state level which can be used to estimate the size of homeless populations. The author analyzed the role of 16 factors including income inequality, minimum wage, unemployment, rental cost, poverty, education, veteran status, and substance abuse on the 2017 state homeless populations. Using an ordinary least squares regression, the model produced five significant variables: adjusted minimum wage, percent of income spent on rent, possession of health insurance, average winter temperature, and the unemployment rate. …

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The Effects Of South Africa's Unexpected Monetary Policy Shocks In The Common Monetary Area, Bonang N. Seoela May 2020

The Effects Of South Africa's Unexpected Monetary Policy Shocks In The Common Monetary Area, Bonang N. Seoela

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The Common Monetary Area (CMA) is a multilateral agreement that provides a framework for a fixed exchange rate regime between the South-African Rand and the currencies of Lesotho, Eswatini, and Namibia (LEN). The nature of the arrangement restrains the LEN countries from exercising independent discretionary monetary policy. As a result, they must rely on the South African authorities for policy formulation and implementation. Interest rates in the LEN countries cannot deviate too far from those in South Africa. Given this limited scope for monetary policy in the LEN countries, this study investigates how each member country adjusts to shocks to …

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Analyzing Competitive Balance In Professional Sport, Kevin Alwell May 2020

Analyzing Competitive Balance In Professional Sport, Kevin Alwell

Honors Scholar Theses

In this paper we review several measures to statistically analyze competitive balance and report which leagues have a wider variance of performance amongst its competitors. Each league seeks to maintain high levels of parity, making matches and overall season more unpredictable and appealing to the general audience. Here we quantify competitive advantage across major sports leagues in numbers using several statistical methods in order for leagues to optimize their revenue.

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"Bad Hombres" And The Bully Pulpit: A Study Of Presidential Rhetoric On Social Media And Behavioral Responses Of The Immigrant Population, Mary Vlamis May 2020

"Bad Hombres" And The Bully Pulpit: A Study Of Presidential Rhetoric On Social Media And Behavioral Responses Of The Immigrant Population, Mary Vlamis

Honors Scholar Theses

For years, social scientists have studied the impact of presidential rhetoric on public opinion and consumer behavior. This paper adds to the literature on presidential rhetoric by investigating how presidential statements on social media change public behavior in a reaction to these statements. President Trump's immigration policy tweets are used to examine if there is a relationship between the president's statements and changes in behavior using and Google searches. I find no relationship between the instance of a President Trump’s tweet and changes in searching for related topics among both large immigrant populations and Trump supporters.

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Econometric Methods And Data Science Techniques: A Review Of Two Strands Of Literature And An Introduction To Hybrid Methods, Tian Xie, Jun Yu, Tao Zeng May 2020

Econometric Methods And Data Science Techniques: A Review Of Two Strands Of Literature And An Introduction To Hybrid Methods, Tian Xie, Jun Yu, Tao Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

The data market has been growing at an exceptional pace. Consequently, more sophisticated strategies to conduct economic forecasts have been introduced with machine learning techniques. Does machine learning pose a threat to conventional econometric methods in terms of forecasting? Moreover, does machine learning present great opportunities to cross-fertilize the field of econometric forecasting? In this report, we develop a pedagogical framework that identifies complementarity and bridges between the two strands of literature. Existing econometric methods and machine learning techniques for economic forecasting are reviewed and compared. The advantages and disadvantages of these two classes of methods are discussed. A class …

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Detecting Latent Communities In Network Formation Models, Shujie Ma, Liangjun Su, Yichong Zhang May 2020

Detecting Latent Communities In Network Formation Models, Shujie Ma, Liangjun Su, Yichong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a logistic undirected network formation model which allows for assortative matching on observed individual characteristics and the presence of edge-wise fixed effects. We model the coefficients of observed characteristics to have a latent community structure and the edge-wise fixed effects to be of low rank. We propose a multi-step estimation procedure involving nuclear norm regularization, sample splitting, iterative logistic regression and spectral clustering to detect the latent communities. We show that the latent communities can be exactly recovered when the expected degree of the network is of order log n or higher, where n is the number …

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Asymptotic Theory For Near Integrated Processes Driven By Tempered Linear Processes, Farzad Sabzikar, Qiying Wang, Peter C. B. Phillips May 2020

Asymptotic Theory For Near Integrated Processes Driven By Tempered Linear Processes, Farzad Sabzikar, Qiying Wang, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

In an early article on near-unit root autoregression, Ahtola and Tiao (1984) studied the behavior of the score function in a stationary first order autoregression driven by independent Gaussian innovations as the autoregressive coefficient approached unity from below. The present paper develops asymptotic theory for near-integrated random processes and associated regressions including the score function in more general settings where the errors are tempered linear processes. Tempered processes are stationary time series that have a semi-long memory property in the sense that the autocovariogram of the process resembles that of a long memory model for moderate lags but eventually diminishes …

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Forecast Combinations In Machine Learning, Yue Qiu, Tian Xie, Jun Yu May 2020

Forecast Combinations In Machine Learning, Yue Qiu, Tian Xie, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper introduces novel methods to combine forecasts made by machine learning techniques. Machine learning methods have found many successful applications in predicting the response variable. However, they ignore model uncertainty when the relationship between the response variable and the predictors is nonlinear. To further improve the forecasting performance, we propose a general framework to combine multiple forecasts from machine learning techniques. Simulation studies show that the proposed machine-learning-based forecast combinations work well. In empirical applications to forecast key macroeconomic and financial variables, we find that the proposed methods can produce more accurate forecasts than individual machine learning techniques and …

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Institutions, Opportunism And Prosocial Behavior: Some Experimental Evidence, Antonio Cabrales, Irma Clots-Figueras, Roberto Hernán-González, Praveen Kujal May 2020

Institutions, Opportunism And Prosocial Behavior: Some Experimental Evidence, Antonio Cabrales, Irma Clots-Figueras, Roberto Hernán-González, Praveen Kujal

ESI Working Papers

Formal or informal institutions have long been adopted by societies to protect against opportunistic behavior. However, we know very little about how these institutions are chosen and their impact on behavior. We experimentally investigate the demand for different levels of institutions that provide low to high levels of insurance and its subsequent impact on prosocial behavior. We conduct a large-scale online experiment where we add the possibility of purchasing insurance to safeguard against low reciprocity to the standard trust game. We compare two different mechanisms, the private (purchase) and the social (voting) choice of institutions. Whether voted or purchased, we …

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Information Aggregation And The Cognitive Make-Up Of Traders, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter May 2020

Information Aggregation And The Cognitive Make-Up Of Traders, Brice Corgnet, Mark Desantis, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

We assess the effect of the cognitive make-up of traders on the informational efficiency of markets. We put forth that cognitive skills, such as cognitive reflection, are crucial for ensuring the informational efficiency of markets because they endow traders with the ability to infer others’ information from prices. Using laboratory experiments, we show that information aggregation is significantly enhanced when (i) all traders possess high levels of cognitive sophistication and (ii) this high level of cognitive sophistication is common information for all traders. Our findings shed light on the cognitive and informational constraints underlying the efficient market hypothesis.

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Neoclassical Supply And Demand, Experiments, And The Classical Theory Of Price Formation, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith May 2020

Neoclassical Supply And Demand, Experiments, And The Classical Theory Of Price Formation, Sabiou M. Inoua, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Working Papers

"The 1870s neoclassical marginal revolution in economics culminated a century later in a striking conclusion: The core utility maximization principle of neoclassical economics was shown to have no interesting implication for aggregate market behavior (Sonnenschein, 1972, 1973a, 1973b; Debreu, 1974; Mantel, 1974; Kirman, 1989; Shafer & Sonnenschein, 1993; Rizvi, 2006). We argue that neoclassical price theory was founded on two axioms—price-taking behavior and the law of one price in a market—that, if imposed on the theory, were logically inconsistent with a theory of market price formation. This logical gap in neoclassical theory was filled essentially with thought experiments: Jevons derives …

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The Effect Of Sex Of Firstborn Children On Fertility Preferences, Lauren Lamson May 2020

The Effect Of Sex Of Firstborn Children On Fertility Preferences, Lauren Lamson

Master's Theses

Fertility rates around the world are falling at the same time that male-skewed sex ratios at birth are on the rise. The individual fertility choices people make contribute to this inverse relationship, exacerbating the problem of “missing women” as well as a number of other adverse social and economic effects. The decision to have a child is extremely complex. Distilling the interaction between fertility and sex compositional preferences, fertility levels, and gender norms is an important step toward understanding both the reproductive choices people make as well as the formation of fertility preferences. I use individual-level data from the Demographic …

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