Other Economics Commons^™

The Causality Between Budget Deficits And Interest Rates In Asean Countries, Janhavi Nerurkar

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates the correlation between budget deficits and interest rates across countries of varying income levels across Southeast Asia using the Granger-causality econometric model. It consists of a time series analysis of budget deficits (local currency unit) and real interest rates in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and Singapore from 1990 to 2011.This analysis concludes that budget deficits and interest rates do not cause one another in the countries under consideration.

The Effect Of Macroeconomic Variables On Domestic Homeownership Rates, Patrick Graydon

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates how various macroeconomic variables affect homeownership rates in the United States. Some of the variables explored in this study include interest rates, unemployment rate, average household income, inflation rate, GDP, population, and residential construction. The paper uses quarterly data from quarter one of 2000 to quarter three of 2012. The results show the economic indicators that are closely correlated with the rate of homeownership.

An Empirical Study Of Salary Discrimination In Professional Basketball, Joshua Reynolds

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates the racial differences in salaries amongst professional basketball players during the 2011-2012 season. Prior studies from the 1980s and 1990s show that white and black players have earned a comparable mean salary, based on performance variables and other player characteristics. However these studies have shown, that taking race in as a factor when running regressions of the data, preference exists towards white player salaries. This paper looks to see if the recent shift in demographic makeup of the NBA prevalent during the late 1990s and 2000s has led to a more equitable distribution of salaries based on …

Education And Wellbeing Of A Country, Michael Arons

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper examines education, employment sectors and GDP per capita. The study examines which aspects of education math, reading, or science is more important to an economy, and how they affect different employment sectors. The model will attempt to show if educational subject scores have an impact in different sectors of the economy. The main function of this model is to decipher how education affects the wellbeing of a country. The results will attempt to discern whether education impacts employment in various sectors, and conversely GDP per capita.

The Relationship Between The Stock Market And Economic Indicators: Evidence From Singapore And Hong Kong, Kahini Dalal

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper examines the relationship between the stock markets and economic variables of the selected countries: Singapore and Hong Kong. The quarterly data collected for Gross Domestic Product, Foreign Exchange Rates, Inflation and Current Account Balance, as well as Stock Prices ranges from January 2002 to December 2012. The analysis is focused on the results of the Cointegration and Granger Causality tests to estimate the relationship of the various economic indicators and the stock market indices. This estimation enables to assess whether the stock market index of the respective country is a good representation of the economic health of the …

Institutional Quality, Income Inequality, And Economic Growth In Latin American Countries, Courtney Pomer

Empirical Economic Bulletin, An Undergraduate Journal

This paper investigates the possibility of the institutional quality of a country having an effect on income inequality and economic growth in Latin American Countries. The study incorporates the gini variable and growth rates of GDP in each country to examine the influence of corruption on the various countries throughout Latin America. Looking at previous research it has been found that corruption is positively correlated with income inequality and negatively correlated with economic growth. The variable for corruption in this study however measures the control of corruption in each country, so we will be looking at the institutional quality and …

Violence, Access, And Competition In The Market For Protection, Adam Smith

Economics Department Faculty Publications & Research

We conduct a laboratory experiment to examine the performance of a market for protection. As the central feature of our treatment comparisons, we vary the access that “peasants” have to violence-empowered “elites”. The focus of the experiment is to observe how elites price and operate their protective services to peasants, and to observe the degree to which elites engage in wealth-destroying violence in competition amongst each other for wealth generating peasants. We find that greater access to peasants strikingly increases violence among the elites, but with limited access the elites markedly extract more tribute from the peasants. Our findings are …

Faith, Science And Religion, Vernon L. Smith

ESI Publications

No abstract provided.

Cognitive Systems For Revenge And Forgiveness, Michael E. Mccullough, Robert Kurzban, Benjamin A. Tabak

ESI Publications

Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems (including homicide, bodily harm, theft, mate poaching, cuckoldry, reputational damage, sexual aggression, and the infliction of these costs on one's offspring, mates, coalition partners, or friends). One solution to this problem is to impose retaliatory costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and other observers will lower their estimates of the net benefits to be gained from exploiting the retaliator in …

Integrated Scenarios For Energy: A Methodology For The Short Term, Tadhg O'Mahony

Articles

Quantitative point forecasts of energy and emissions have experienced difficulty with responding to uncertainty. Accuracy issues arise even in the short term with consequences for policy. The technique of scenario analysis is increasingly applied in scientific inquiry on the long term but it also has utility in the short term. This paper presents a discussion of the use of forecasts for prediction and proposes integrated or ´hybrid´ exploratory qualitative and quantitative scenarios in its stead. Various methodological issues are explored towards formulation of a scenario development process. Integrated scenarios structure thinking on the future, bound uncertainty, document important assumptions, aid …

Courts Should Apply A Relatively More Stringent Pleading Threshold To Class Actions, Matthew B. Lawrence

Faculty Articles

Policymakers from Senator Edward Kennedy to Civil Rules Advisory Committee Reporter Edward Cooper have proposed that class actions be subject to a more stringent pleading threshold than individually-filed suits, yet the question has not been fully explored in legal scholarship. This Article addresses that gap. It shows that courts following the guidance of Bell Atlantic v. Twombly should apply a relatively more stringent pleading threshold to class actions, and a relatively less stringent threshold to individually-filed suits.

This contribution is set forth in two steps. First, this Article explains that, all else being equal, the anticipated systems’ costs and benefits …

Two Essays On Housing: Using Hedonic And Quasi-Experimental Methods In (Dis)Amenity Valuation With Housing Data: The Case Of Communication Antennas, And The Value Of Brand Name Franchises Compared To Local Real Estate Brokerage Firms, Stephen L. Locke

Theses and Dissertations--Economics

This dissertation consists of two essays on housing, the first on estimation strategies for the valuation of a local disamenity and the second on the structure of the market for the services of real estate brokers.

The purpose of the first essay is to apply hedonic and quasi-experimental methods to measure the value of any disamenity caused by communication antennas. Crucial to unbiased estimates is accounting for both endogenous antenna location and changes in unobservable housing and neighborhood characteristics. Spatial fixed effects are used to control for unobservable characteristics that can influence the location decisions of residents and the location …

The Organization Of Banking And Supervision, Introduction And Overview, Clas Wihlborg

Business Faculty Articles and Research

"The focus of this Special Issue is on organizational reforms in the financial sector in the aftermath of the financial crisis 2007-2009 and the subsequent euro-zone crisis. In particular, the perception that many banks were too big and too complex to fail during the crisis, which led to very costly bailouts at tax-payers expense in several countries, has fueled a number of proposals to limit the size and the complexity of financial institutions, as well as proposals to reorganize public authorities responsible for supervision and crisis management."

How Universal Is The Big Five? Testing The Five-Factor Model Of Personality Variation Among Forager-Farmers In The Bolivian Amazon, Michael Gurven, Christopher Von Rueden, Maxim Massenkoff, Hillard Kaplan, Marino Lero Vie

ESI Publications

The five-factor model (FFM) of personality variation has been replicated across a range of human societies, suggesting the FFM is a human universal. However, most studies of the FFM have been restricted to literate, urban populations, which are uncharacteristic of the majority of human evolutionary history. We present the first test of the FFM in a largely illiterate, indigenous society. Tsimane forager–horticulturalist men and women of Bolivia (n = 632) completed a translation of the 44-item Big Five Inventory (Benet-Martínez & John, 1998), a widely used metric of the FFM. We failed to find robust support for the FFM, based …

Portfolio Company Selection Criteria: Accelerators Vs Venture Capitalists, Cody Chang

CMC Senior Theses

The explosive growth of ‘accelerators’ in the United States has given entrepreneurs and their startups the opportunity to pursue seed-stage financing. While the specific economic role of accelerators remains unclear, a study comparing the selection of portfolio companies between accelerators and venture capitalists was performed. A difference of means was performed on the responses per question between the collected 19 accelerators’ response and the 100 venture capitalists’ response, recorded from a prior study. It is found that venture capitalists place significantly more weight, than accelerators, on the potential of the startup’s product or service to be proprietary, to enter a …

Conditional Cash Transfers And Child Health: The Case Of Malawi, Ryan F. Boone

CMC Senior Theses

This paper analyzes the impacts of the Malawi Social Cash Transfer Scheme. The goal of this paper is to help improve the design of cash transfers. First of all, I analyze whether the cash transfer positively affects child health variables despite occurring in a region with poor supply side health institutions. I find significant results for many child level variables, such as frequency of illnesses, but insignificant improvements in anthropometric measurements. Secondly, I examine whether female-headed households invest more in child health than male-headed households. The results show that the impacts of the cash transfer did not depend on the …

An Empirical Analysis Of Differences In Environmental Transparency Across Firms, Sean Robert Smith

CMC Senior Theses

In recent years, many firms have voluntarily taken actions to gradually increase the transparency of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) efforts. Using data on a sample of U.S. firms, this paper empirically examines the factors that encourage firms to choose different levels of CSR transparency. This adds to the previous literature that has focused only on the binary decision to engage or not to engage in CSR, as opposed to the extent and comprehensiveness of voluntary CSR reporting. Environmental transparency data are collected from the Roberts Environmental Center (REC) at Claremont McKenna College, while data for firm characteristics and toxic …

Fossil Fuel Subsidies: Impacts And Reform Strategies, Jennifer E. Good

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis uses cross-country panel regressions to identify the effects of fossil-fuel subsidies for both oil importers and oil exporters on GDP growth, industry growth, crowding out of government expenditures in education, health, and infrastructure, government debt, carbon dioxide emissions, inequality and poverty. Fossil-fuel subsidies are found to be associated with lower levels of growth and industry growth, less government expenditure on health and education, poorer infrastructure quality, more government debt, and higher rates of carbon dioxide emissions. No relationship is found between fossil fuel subsidies and poverty and inequality. These results confirm the arguments of those that argue that …

What's Left Of Micro, Anwar Shaikh Phd

Archives of Anwar Shaikh

This collection includes.

• Shaikh, A. (2013, November 10). Comments [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Disagreements [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (n.d.). Rethinking micro [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (2013, November 10). Ceylon bicycle repair shop: Rethinking micro (UMass/NSSR student conference) [Unpublished handwritten manuscript].

• Shaikh, A. (2009, December 3). What’s left of microeconomics: Lecture outline [Unpublished manuscript].

• Guerrien, B. (2002, March 15). Is there anything worth keeping in standard microeconomics? Post-Autistic Economics Review, (12), Article 1. Post-Autistic Economics Network.

• Harcourt, G. C. (2002, May 2). Comment on Bernard Guerrien’s essay. Post-Autistic Economics …

When Parity Promotes Peace: Resolving Conflict Between Asymmetric Agents, Erik O. Kimbrough, Roman M. Sheremeta, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

Due to the high costs of conflict both in theory and practice, we examine and experimentally test the conditions under which conflict between asymmetric agents can be resolved. We model conflict as a two-agent rent-seeking contest for an indivisible prize. Before conflict arises, both agents may agree to allocate the prize by fair coin flip to avoid the costs of conflict. The model predicts that “parity promotes peace”: in the pure-strategy equilibrium, agents with relatively symmetric conflict capabilities agree to resolve the conflict by using a random device; however, with sufficiently asymmetric capabilities, conflicts are unavoidable because the stronger agent …

Cheap Talk With Two Audiences: An Experiment, Mikhail Drugov, Roberto Hérnan-Gonzalez, Praveen Kujal, Marta Troya Martinez

ESI Working Papers

In this paper we experimentally test strategic information transmission between one informed and two uninformed agents in a cheap-talk game. We find evidence of the "disciplining" effect of public communication as compared to private; however, it is much weaker than predicted by the theory. Adding a second receiver naturally increases the complexity of strategic thinking when communication is public. Using the level-k model, we exploit the within subject design to show how individuals decrease their level-k in public communication. Surprisingly, we find that individuals become more sophisticated when they communicate privately with two receivers rather than one.

Do Prediction Markets Aid Defenders In A Weak‐Link Contest?, Cary Deck, Li Hao, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

Laboratory experiments have demonstrated that prediction market prices weakly aggregate the disparate information of the traders about states (moves) of nature. However, in many practical applications one might want to predict the move of a strategic participant. This is particularly important in aggressor‐defender contests. This paper reports a set of such experiments where the defender may have the advantage of observing a prediction market on the aggressor’s action. The results of the experiments indicate that: the use of prediction markets does not increase the defender’s win rate; prediction markets contain reliable information regarding aggressors’ decisions, namely excess bid information, that …

Recalibrational Emotions And The Regulation Of Trust-Based Behaviors, Eric Schniter, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

Though individuals differ in the degree to which they are predisposed to trust or act trustworthy, we theorize that trust-based behaviors are universally determined by the calibration of conflicting short- and long-sighted behavior regulation programs, and that these programs are calibrated by emotions experienced personally and interpersonally. In this chapter we review both the main-stream and evolutionary theories of emotions that philosophers, psychologists, and behavioral economists have based their work on and which can inform our understanding of trust-based behavior regulation. The standard paradigm for understanding emotions is based on mapping their positive and negative affect valence. While Valence Models …

Religious Identity And The Provision Of Public Goods: Evidence From The Indian Princely States, Latika Chaudhary, Jared Rubin

ESI Working Papers

Religious identity affects preferences and can consequently affect policy. We propose two mechanisms through which a ruler's religious identity can affect public good provision: i) greater provision of goods in regions where more subjects are the ruler's co-religionists, and ii) lower provision of goods where private markets provide a substitute to the ruler's co-religionists. Empirically, identifying the causal effect of religious identity on policy is often impossible, since the religious identity of rulers rarely changes over time and place. We address this problem by exploiting the variation in the religion of rulers in the Indian Princely States in the early …

Commitment Problems In Conflict Resolution, Erik O. Kimbrough, Jared Rubin, Roman M. Sheremeta, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

Commitment problems are inherent to non-binding conflict resolution mechanisms, since an unsatisfied party can ignore the resolution and initiate conflict. We provide experimental evidence suggesting that even in the absence of binding contractual agreements individuals often avoid conflict by committing to the outcome of a conflict resolution mechanism. Commitment problems are mitigated to a greater extent for groups who opt-in to the conflict resolution mechanism, but only when opting-in is costly. Although conflict rates are higher when opting-in is costly than when it is free or exogenously imposed, commitment problems are greatly reduced amongst those groups who choose to opt-in.

Prediction Markets In The Laboratory, Cary Deck, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

"The idea that there is wisdom from the collective has been forcefully described in “The Wisdom of the Crowds” by James Surowiecki, who argues that the aggregation of information in groups results in better decisions than those that are afforded by any single member of the group. Markets, like opinion polls, are one mechanism for aggregating disparate pieces of information. The aggregation properties of prices were first noted by Hayek (1945) and were formally examined by Muth (1961). In particular, Hayek argues that market prices serve the purpose of sharing and coordinating local and personal knowledge, while Muth shows that …

The Impact Of Competition On Prices With Numerous Firms, Xavier Gabaix, David Laibson, Deyuan Li, Hongyi Li

ESI Working Papers

We use extreme value theory (EVT) to develop insights about price theory. Our analysis reveals detail-independent equilibrium properties that characterize a large family of models. We derive a formula relating equilibrium prices to the level of competition. When the number of rms is large, markups are proportional to 1= (nF' [F^-1 (1- 1/n)], where F is the random utility noise distribution and n is the number of rms. This implies prices are pinned down by the tail properties of the noise distribution and that prices are independent of many other institutional details. The elasticity of the markup with respect to …

Guanxi, Networks And Economic Development: The Impact Of Cultural Connections, Patricia Anne Weeks

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study is to explore the mechanics of guanxi in an organizational setting, focusing on the use of interpersonal relationships within Chinese firms to discover how firms initiate, build and use guanxi networks. Two richly detailed case studies document changes that take place over time in two distinct networks with respect to key actors and their contacts. This research also investigates patterns of social structure that emerge over time in these two distinct cases looking at brokerage relationships, network density, and dyadic redundancy in three waves at six month intervals. The cases are dissimilar in all aspects …