Economic Theory Commons^™

An Outlay Equivalence Analysis Of South African Households, Samuel Peevey

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

A significant amount of evidence suggests that gender inequality in the developing world negatively impacts women and girls’ health, education and future wage potential. This thesis investigates whether households in South Africa discriminated against their girl children, in favor of their boy children. Additionally, I will investigate whether household heads favored children matching their own sex. Using the 1^st wave of the National Income Dynamics Study and Angus Deaton’s outlay-equivalence ratio method, I will estimate the impact, 8 age and sex categories have on their household’s adult goods expenditure. I found statistically significant but practically insignificant evidence, from a …

Examining The Impact Of Modern Money Theory On Non-Traditional Means Of Increasing Aggregate Demand, Storm Boris

Economics Honors Papers

The recent period of ultra-low interest rates and chronically inadequate aggregate demand has led to a series of prominent new proposals of nontraditional means of increasing aggregate demand. That same stagnation has allowed for the increasing influence within the field of Modern Money Theory, a theoretical framework derived from historical observations regarding the role of money. I will explore the impact of Modern Money Theory (MMT) on two of the most prominent proposals for increasing aggregate demand, helicopter money and negative interest rates. I will explain why MMT would suggest, not only are these policies either limited in their effectiveness, …

Behavioral Economics, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes: 

• Shaikh, A. (2017, May 4). Thank-you card from students [Handwritten greeting card]. The New School for Social Research. Unpublished. Signed by multiple students expressing gratitude for instruction in behavioral economics.
• Shaikh, A. (2017). Behavioral economics: Course outline [Handwritten lecture notes, partial draft]. The New School for Social Research. Unpublished. 
• Shaikh, A. (2017). Annotations on Richard Thaler and nudging [Handwritten sticky note and marginalia on printed article]. The New School for Social Research. Unpublished. 
• Shaikh, A. (2017, December 5). Behavioral economics: Class discussion notes [Handwritten lecture notes]. The New School for Social Research. Unpublished. T
• [Author unknown]. (n.d.). …

Impact Of Network Externality On End-User Piracy: Revisited, Sougata Poddar, Yuanzhu Lu

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We revisit the issue whether a strong presence of network externality in the digital products market could be a reason for the copyright holders to allow piracy. We find that except under a limited circumstance this is not true in a framework that involves IPR protection and copyright holder's costly effort to prevent piracy. We further show that as the degree of network externality increases, the strategic piracy deterrence level of the copyright holder increases and the actual rate of piracy decreases.

Inequality Mexico, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

23-3_Eminent Economist Galleys.pdf You said: as an archivist detailing a new entry, analyze the uploaded file and give an outline of the material with all dates standardized, all bullet-point item formatting, and sentence case for titles, and italics for all titles, 1.5 spacing between paragraphs, and expand the published items into full apa references with publisher details and journal information but without internet links, or any further description of the different items, standardize the handwritten notes, emails, and comments into full apa-style manuscript citations so they match the level of formality of the published papers, with all handwritten notes credited …

A Study Of The Factors Involved And The Strategies Employed By Michigan School Districts In Developing Deficit Elimination Plans, Sue C. Carnell

Master's Theses and Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this research was to study the factors that contribute to financial deficits, examine the strategies used to reduce deficits, and explore the barriers that may prohibit the reduction of financial deficits. As part of legislative mandates, school superintendents are faced with creating a deficit elimination plan to reduce the financial deficits facing their districts. In 2013, the State of Michigan began to shut down financially challenged districts for the first time. School districts labeled as “deficit districts” struggled to remove the designation assigned to them. Fifty-eight traditional Michigan public school districts with financial deficits between school years …

The Real Estate And Stock Market During The Great Depression: Construction Permit Growth As A Leading Economic Indicator For Stock Returns, Will Cresap

CMC Senior Theses

The 1929 stock market crash on Black Thursday, followed by the subsequent four-year period of extreme economic downturn, signifies an extremely profound piece of U.S. history. During this time, global economic productivity – measured by GDP – decreased while the U.S. unemployment rate increased staggeringly. Leveraging construction permits as a forward-looking measure of economic activity, I empirically evaluate the effect of construction permits – specifically, the lagged growth rate of monthly construction permits – and lagged monthly stock returns on monthly Standard & Poor's 500 (S&P 500) stock returns. Lagged construction permit returns and lagged stock returns provide early indications …

Pluralism Vs Eclecticism Notes, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

24-22_Distrbution of Labor Income in Turkey.pdf You said: as an archivist detailing a new entry, analyze the uploaded file and give an outline of the material with all dates standardized, all bullet-point item formatting, and sentence case for titles, and italics for all titles, 1.5 spacing between paragraphs, and expand the published items into full apa references with publisher details and journal information but without internet links, or any further description of the different items, standardize the handwritten notes, emails, and comments into full apa-style manuscript citations so they match the level of formality of the published papers, with all …

Climate Change Crisis: Prescribing Alternative Economic Policy Using An Austrian Framework, Elina N. Mcgill

Honors Program Theses

This paper reviews the literature surrounding climate change adaptation and mitigation to assess the possible contributions and limitations of heterodox economics to climate change policy. Through interdisciplinary research between economics and environmental issues, this paper aims to stress the importance of utilizing heterodox schools of economics to create more pragmatic and dynamic policy. The secondary aim is to use Austrian frameworks to contribute to the construction of feasible, efficient, and equitable climate change policy. This paper used qualitative and textual analysis of the Austrian schools of economics conceptualize possible policy responses to climate change. Research found that the Austrian prescription …

On Estimating Market Microstructure Noise Variance, Yingjie Dong, Yiu Kuen Tse

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the market microstructure noise-variance estimation of high-frequency stock prices. Based on the Hansen and Lunde (2006) approach, we propose estimates using subsampling method at different time scales. We conduct a Monte Carlo study to compare our method against others in the literature. Our results show that our proposed estimates have lower (absolute) mean error and root mean-squared error, and their performance is quite stable at different time scales.

Strategy-Proofness Of The Probabilistic Serial Rule On Sequentially Dichotomous Domains, Peng Liu

Research Collection School Of Economics

A class of preference domains is proposed: sequentially dichotomous domains. On any sequentially dichotomous domain, the probabilistic serial rule (Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001)) is sd-strategy-proof. In addition, any sequentially dichotomous domain is maximal for the probabilistic serial rule to be sd-strategy-proof.

Cognitive Performance Across The Life Course Of Bolivian Forager-Farmers With Limited Schooling, Michael Gurven, Eric Fuerstenberg, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Bret Beheim, Helen Davis, Hillard Kaplan

ESI Publications

Cognitive performance is characterized by at least two distinct life course trajectories. Many cognitive abilities (e.g. “effortful processing” abilities including fluid reasoning, and processing speed) improve throughout early adolescence and start declining in early adulthood, while other abilities (e.g. “crystallized” abilities like vocabulary breadth) improve throughout adult life, remaining robust even at late ages. Although schooling may impact performance and cognitive “reserve”, it has been argued that these age patterns of cognitive performance are human universals. Here we examine age patterns of cognitive performance among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia, and test whether schooling is related to differences in cognitive performance …

Error Correction Exchange Rate Modeling For Bangladesh, Dipanwita Barai

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Several error correction models are estimated for analyzing the nominal exchange rate dynamics of Bangladesh between the taka and the United States dollar using annual data. The theoretical frameworks utilized include balance of payments and the monetary construct. The bilateral taka / dollar exchange rate model based on the balance of payments approach exhibits better econometric and statistical traits than the model based on the monetary construct. Out-of-sample simulation indicates, however, that the balance of payments ARDL model does not generate very accurate forecasts for this bilateral exchange rate.

Is Silence The Answer?, Gator Adams

CMC Senior Theses

This study examines the relationship between company management guidance, and ex-ante crash risk over the duration of 2008(Jan 2006-Dec 2009) financial crisis using the implied volatility skew, which is based upon ex-ante volatility implied by the pricing model developed by Black-Scholes (1973). The study finds that over the duration of this crisis period, management guidance decreases with a rise in ex-ante crash risk. Further, the study provides evidence on the relationship of management guidance and earnings volatility, and how that is affected by a firm's industry product concentration based on the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) score.

Governance By Economist: An Historical Note On The Keynesian Revolution, Lewis Karstensson

Molasky Family Department of Economics and Real Estate Faculty Research

An inferential analysis of the performance of the United States economy with respect to production, employment, and average price level over the twentieth century by presidential administration.

Mixed-Scale Jump Regressions With Bootstrap Inference, Jia Li, Viktor Todorov, George Tauchen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop an efficient mixed-scale estimator for jump regressions using high-frequency asset returns. A fine time scale is used to accurately identify the locations of large rare jumps in the explanatory variables such as the price of the market portfolio. A coarse scale is then used in the estimation in order to attenuate the effect of trading frictions in the dependent variable such as the prices of potentially less liquid assets. The proposed estimator has a non-standard asymptotic distribution that cannot be made asymptotically pivotal via studentization. We propose a novel bootstrap procedure for feasible inference and justify its asymptotic …

When Price Precision Pays In Negotiations, Michael Schaerer

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

When negotiating, is an offer of 99.95 euros better than 100 euros? Our recent study shows that there is no universally true answer to the question of price precision and that the right strategy depends on with whom you are negotiating.

Jump Regressions, Jia Li, Viktor Todorov, George Tauchen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop econometric tools for studying jump dependence of two processes from high-frequency observations on a fixed time interval. In this context, only segments of data around a few outlying observations are informative for the inference. We derive an asymptotically valid test for stability of a linear jump relation over regions of the jump size domain. The test has power against general forms of nonlinearity in the jump dependence as well as temporal instabilities. We further propose an efficient estimator for the linear jump regression model that is formed by optimally weighting the detected jumps with weights based on the …

Bubbles In Experimental Asset Markets, Praveen Kujal, Owen Powell

ESI Working Papers

"One can define a bubble as a persistent increase in the price of an asset over and above its fundamental value with an abrupt fall in prices when no buyers are available to make purchases. The occurrence of market bubbles has a long history, starting with the Dutch Tulip Mania (1624-1637) to the South Sea and Mississippi Bubble (1716-1720), the British Railway Mania (1840´s) to the crash of 1929. Recent events have been the crash of 1987, the dot-com bubble (1990s) to the most recent housing crisis in early 2000. Even though bubbles, and a subsequent crash, may reallocate resources …

Humans’ (Incorrect) Distrust Of Reflective Decisions, Antonio Cabrales, Antonio M. Espín, Praveen Kujal, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Working Papers

Recent experiments suggest that social behavior may be shaped by the time available for decision making. It is known that fast decision making relies more on intuition whereas slow decision making is affected by reflective processes. Little is known, however, about whether people correctly anticipate the effect of intuition vs. reflection on others’ decision making. This is important in everyday situations where anticipating others’ behavior is often essential. A good example of this is the extensively studied Trust Game where the trustor, by sending an amount of money to the trustee, runs the risk of being exploited by the trustee’s …

Capitalism - Oxford University Press, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Economic processes and time scales in classical tradition(unpublished manuscript), by Anwar Shaikh, PhD, dated 2017-10-03.
  • Typed manuscript outlining four economic adjustment processes within the classical tradition framework, including fast, medium, medium-slow, and slow processes related to selling prices, circulating capital, capacity utilization, profit-rate equalization, and technical change.
  • Handwritten notes by Anwar Shaikh, PhD, titled 4 speeds ↔ 4 instruments, dated 2017-10-04, discussing adjustment mechanisms involving circulating capital, fixed capital, capacity utilization, profit-rate equalization, entry and exit of firms, technical change, and regulating conditions across industries.
  • Handwritten annotations by Anwar Shaikh, PhD, concerning the equalization of …

Luis Daniel Gonzalez, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes:

• Luis Daniel Gonzalez. NA-24-12. 2017.

• Michael Lahr → I-O coefficients have a beta distribution in each column. 2017. Manuscript note credited to Anwar Shaikh, PhD.

• Michael Lahr — Luis Daniel defense. October 31, 2017. Manuscript note credited to Anwar Shaikh, PhD.

• Comments on Chapter 1: constraints, equilibrium, and empirical regularities. October 31, 2017. Manuscript note credited to Anwar Shaikh, PhD.

• Chapter 1: w-r can be linear if ρi’s are linear, in which case the composition of output. Manuscript note credited to Anwar Shaikh, PhD.

• Chapter 1: empirical regularities imply “constraints”. Manuscript …

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Risk Preference, Time Preference, And Salience Perception, Jonathan Leland, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

A model of decision making is introduced that provides a unified approach for predicting choices under risk and over time. The model predicts systematic departures from expected utility and discounted utility using the same mathematical structure and the same psychological intuition and shows that a dozen diverse choice anomalies can be given a common underlying explanation. The model weights attribute differences both by their importance (consistent with expected utility and discounted utility) and by their salience or similarity (consistent with procedural models based on heuristics), and so provides a bridge between rational and heuristic representations of decision making.

A Flexible And Customizable Method For Assessing Cognitive Abilities, Andrea Civelli, Cary Deck

ESI Working Papers

Raven's Progressive Matrices are a broadly used tool for measuring cognitive ability. This paper develops and validates a set of nonverbal puzzles that can be viewed as an extension of or substitute for the well-known Ravens tasks. Specifically, we describe the characteristics of our puzzles and provide a calibration of the matrices in terms of response accuracy and response time as a function of these characteristics. Then we directly compare within-subject performance on our puzzles and Ravens tasks. Finally, we replicate a previous experimental paper, substituting our puzzles for the Ravens matrices, and show the two tools have similar predictive …

Minimal Frames And Transparent Frames For Risk, Time, And Uncertainty, Jonathan Leland, Mark Schneider, Nathaniel Wilcox

ESI Working Papers

It has been argued that behavior differs between transparent and nontransparent representations of a decision. However, the notion of a ‘transparent representation’ has not been precisely defined. We address this gap by providing formal definitions of ‘transparent frames’ for risk and time, establishing their uniqueness, presenting an approach to construct such frames, and comparing these framesto the ‘standard’ presentation format. Our typology of frames provides a logic for predicting systematic shifts in risk and time preferences as well as changes in the violation rates of rational choice theory. We conduct an experiment for choice under risk to investigate the framing …

All-Pay Auctions With Ties, Alan Gelder, Dan Kovenock, Brian Roberson

ESI Working Papers

We study the two-player, complete information all-pay auction in which a tie ensues if neither player outbids the other by more than a given amount. In the event of a tie, each player receives an identical fraction of the winning prize. Thus players engage in two margins of competition: losing versus tying, and tying versus winning. Two pertinent parameters are the margin required for victory and the value of tying relative to winning. We fully characterize the set of Nash equilibria for the entire parameter space. For much of the parameter space, there is a unique Nash equilibrium which is …

A Perspective On Electronic Alternatives To Traditional Currencies, Gabriele Camera

ESI Working Papers

The institution of money is rapidly evolving thanks to developments in computer-based cryptography. Technological advances have made possible the creation of cost-effective electronic alternatives to banknotes and coins, which are the traditional physical currencies. This document aims to describe — based on scientific literature — the use and characteristics of money, some of the problems associated with issuing a new currency or a new payment instrument, and the possible comparative advantages of a central bank in leading the way relative to private issuers.

Asymmetric Social Norms, Gabriele Camera, Alessandro Gioffré

ESI Working Papers

Studies of cooperation in infinitely repeated matching games focus on homogeneous economies, where full cooperation is efficient and any defection is collectively sanctioned. Here we study heterogeneous economies where occasional defections are part of efficient play, and show how to support those outcomes through contagious punishments.

Sharing Sequential Values In A Network, Ruben Juarez, Chiu Yu Ko, Jingyi Xue

Research Collection School Of Economics

Consider a sequential process where agents have individual values at every possible step. A planner is in charge of selecting steps and distributing the accumulated aggregate values among agents. We model this process by a directed network where each edge is associated with a vector of individual values. This model applies to several new and existing problems, e.g., developing a connected public facility and distributing total values received by surrounding districts; selecting a long-term production plan and sharing final profits among partners of a firm; choosing a machine schedule to serve different tasks and distributing total outputs among task owners. …

Using Experiments To Compare The Predictive Power Of Models Of Multilateral Negotiations, Cary Deck, Charles J. Thomas

ESI Working Papers

We conduct unstructured negotiations in a laboratory experiment designed to empirically assess the predictive power of three approaches to modeling the multilateral negotiations observed in diverse strategic settings. For concreteness we consider two sellers negotiating with a buyer who wants to make only one trade, with the modeling approaches distinguished by whether the buyer negotiates with the sellers sequentially, simultaneously, or in a “take-it-or-leave-it” fashion. Our experiment features two scenarios within which the three approaches have observationally distinct predictions: a differentiated scenario with one high-surplus and one low-surplus seller, and a homogeneous scenario with identical high-surplus sellers. In both scenarios …