Other Economics Commons^™

Introduction To The Special Issue On The Economics Of Religion, Jared Rubin

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

"The economics and political science of religion have blossomed into full-fledged fields in the last decade and a half. What was once a field on the far outskirts of economics and political science now regularly publishes in its top journals (see Figure 1).¹ By 1998, the field was large enough for Iannaccone (1998) to write a survey of the shape of the field. The field was very much at its infancy at that time, and most of the best work was done by sociologists and/or published in sociology journals. This has changed significantly in the 22 years since Iannaccone's …

Intertemporal Choice Experiments And Large-Stakes Behavior, Diego Aycinena, Szabolcs Blazsek, Lucas Rentschler, Charles Sprenger

ESI Working Papers

Intertemporal choice experiments are increasingly implemented to make inference about discounting and marginal utility, yet little is known about the predictive power of resulting measures. This project links standard experimental choices to a decision on the desire to smooth a large-stakes payment | around 10% of annual income | through time. In a sample of around 400 Guatemalan Conditional Cash Transfer recipients, we find that preferences over large-stakes payment plans are closely predicted by experimental measures of patience and diminishing marginal utility. These represent the first findings in the literature on the predictive content of such experimentally elicited measures of …

Uncertainties Abound In Nebraska Livestock Market Forecasts, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

About one of the only things certain about forecasts this year has been the great deal of uncertainty. Numerous “novel” situations have confronted the industry making it difficult to estimate price magnitudes rather than just price direction. Clustered plant closures, government quarantine restrictions, and increasing at home phone consumption are just a few of the major issues the beef industry has had to tackle in the last six to eight months. Some things have returned to “normal” such as packing plant capacity and food service demand. Others are still in ongoing recovery.

Who knows what “normal” or “standard operating procedure” …

Technology Transfer In Spatial Competition When Licensees Are Asymmetric, Sougata Poddar, Swapnendu Banerjee, Monalisa Ghosh

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

We study technology transfer in a spatial competition with two asymmetric licensees (firms) with an outside innovator who decides how many licenses to offer and the optimal licensing contract. We show the optimal licensing policy is pure royalty contract to both licensees leading to a complete diffusion of the new technology. The result holds irrespective of the cost differentials between the licensees and for innovation of all sizes, that is, drastic or non‐drastic. This robust finding although supports the dominance of royalty licensing in practice; however, consumers may not be necessarily better off. We also throw light on the situation …

Comparing Profitability And Management Factors Across Operation Type: Independent Vs. Contract Growing, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

First paragraph:

There is strong local and national interest in adding hog barns to existing row crop operations. Declining on farm income over the past several years has accelerated this interest. Grain operations cite diversifying farm income, adding another family to the farm operation, and/or replacing commercial fertilizer expense as the primary reasons for adding a hog barn.

A Historical Perspective On The Holcomb Fire: Differences And Similarities To The Covid-19 Situation And Other Significant Market Events, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

Copyright 2020, the author. Used by permission.

Financial Health Of Grain Operations After Adding A Hog Barn, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

There is strong local and national interest in adding hog barns to existing row crop operations. Declining on farm income over the past several years has accelerated this interest. Grain operations cite diversifying farm income, adding another family to the farm operation, and/or replace commercial fertilizer expense as the primary reasons for adding a hog barn.

While there is industry demand to increase hog contract growing, these agreements can possess significant benefits and risks to producers. This is the second of a four part series which will discuss some financial and legal implications of adding a hog barn to an …

Hog Barn Density And Location In U.S. And Nebraska, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

There is strong local and national interest in adding hog barns to existing row crop operations. Declining on farm income over the past several years has accelerated this interest. Grain operations cite diversifying farm income, adding another family to the farm operation, and/or replace commercial fertilizer expense as the primary reasons for adding a hog barn.

While there is industry demand to increase hog contract growing, these agreements can possess significant benefits and risks to producers. This is the first of a four part series which will discuss some financial and legal implications of adding a hog barn to an …

Evidence For Height And Immune Function Trade-Offs Among Preadolescents In A High Pathogen Population, Angela R. Garcia, Aaron Blackwell, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Hillard Kaplan, Michael Gurven

ESI Publications

Background

In an energy-limited environment, caloric investments in one characteristic should trade-off with investments in other characteristics. In high pathogen ecologies, biasing energy allocation towards immune function over growth would be predicted, given strong selective pressures against early-life mortality.

Methodology

In the present study, we use flow cytometry to examine trade-offs between adaptive immune function (T cell subsets, B cells), innate immune function (natural killer cells), adaptive to innate ratio and height-for-age z scores (HAZ) among young children (N = 344; aged 2 months–8 years) in the Bolivian Amazon, using maternal BMI and child weight-for-height z scores (WHZ) as …

The Quest For Greener Pastures: Evaluating The Livelihoods Impacts Of Providing Vegetation Condition Maps To Pastoralists In Eastern Africa, Elia Machado, Helene Purcell, Andrew M. Simons, Stephanie Swinehart

Publications and Research

The survival of millions of pastoral households in Eastern Africa has become increasingly at risk. Due to mounting socioeconomic and climatic stressors, pastoral households are faced with making migration decisions under increasing uncertainty about resource availability and limited coping strategies. We assess the potential of providing vegetation condition maps to support the migration decision of pastoralists in Ethiopia and Tanzania and the effect of map usage on their herd condition and size. The maps were generated from remotely sensed data using the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) as a proxy for vegetation condition and overlain with pastoralists’ preferred grazing areas. …

Multiplex Network Ties And The Spatial Diffusion Of Radical Innovations: Martin Luther’S Leadership In The Early Reformation, Sascha O. Becker, Yuan Hsiao, Steven Pfaff, Jared Rubin

ESI Publications

This article analyzes Martin Luther’s role in spreading the early Reformation, one of the most important episodes of radical institutional change in the last millennium. We argue that social relations played a key role in its diffusion because the spread of heterodox ideologies and their eventual institutionalization relied not only on private “infection” through exposure to innovation but also on active conversion and promotion of that new faith through personal ties. We conceive of that process as leader-to-follower directional influence originating with Luther and flowing to local elites through personal ties. Based on novel data on Luther’s correspondence, Luther’s visits, …

Menu-Dependent Food Choices And Food Waste, Hongxing Liu, Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres, Danyi Qi

ESI Working Papers

We use a combination of randomized field experiments and online surveys to test how the menu design affects food choices and food waste. In our field experiment, participants face one of two menus: a narrow menu that only displays a small portion of food, or a broad menu that also contains bigger portions. While all options are equally available in both menus, they differ in how easy and fast the different choices can be made. Our results show that, compared to the broad menu, participants in the narrow menu ordered smaller portions of food. Importantly, food intake was similar across …

What Are Total Export Commitments Telling Us About Beef’S Potential In 2020: Positive Signs?, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

Overarching Market Conditions

The recent cattle on feed report suggests that cattle feedlots are coming closer to sorting through much of the backlog associated with plant closures and shutdowns as a result of plant workers testing positive for COVID-19 and plants implementing CDC and OSHA worker health recommendations. For example, the number of cattle on feed over 90 days has dipped below 2019 levels for the first time since April. However, cattle on feed over 120 days is still about 10% higher than 2019. The result of cattle being on feed longer is sustained record level dressed weights for both …

A Notion Of Prominence For Games With Natural-Language Labels, Alessandro Sontuoso, Sudeep Bhatia

ESI Working Papers

We study games with natural-language labels (i.e., strategic problems where options are denoted by words), for which we propose and test a measurable characterization of prominence. We assume that – ceteris paribus – players find particularly prominent those strategies that are denoted by words more frequently used in their everyday language. To operationalize this assumption, we suggest that the prominence of a strategy-label is correlated with its frequency of occurrence in large text corpora, such as the Google Books corpus (“n-gram” frequency). In testing for the strategic use of word frequency, we consider experimental games with different incentive structures (such …

Drought Decisions: Profit Maximizing Decisions During And After Drought Conditions, Robert Tigner, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

In summary, using available price risk management tools can effectively reduce some of the market price risk variability that is inherent in agricultural production that are caused by either production or price risk.

A Simple, Ecologically Rational Rule For Settling Found Property Disputes, Bart J. Wilson

ESI Publications

Who has property in a found item X, which is contained in Y? The finder of X or the person who has property in Y? The common law says it depends. It depends upon whether the owner of Y knew about X, or whether X was lost or mislaid, or how small the weight of X is relative to Y (as compared to its value), or whether the finder was an employee of the owner of Y, to name just a few. Wilson (2020) hypothesizes that humans universally cognize property as being contained in a …

Trust And Trustworthiness In Procurement Contracts With Retainage, Matthew J. Walker, Elena Katok, Jason Shachat

ESI Working Papers

In complex procurement projects, it is difficult to write enforceable contracts that condition price upon quality. Supplier non-performance becomes an acute risk, particularly when there is intense competition for the contract. An established incentive mechanism used to mitigate the problem of supplier non-performance is retainage, in which the buyer sets aside a portion of the purchase price. After project completion, the buyer determines the amount of retainage that is released to the seller, considering any defects that arise. While generally a feasible contract form to implement, the practical difficulties in assessing completion introduce a moral hazard for the buyer. We …

Study On Economy Of Slow Steaming, Shang Gao

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Consistent Differences In A Virtual World Model Of Ape Societies, Bart J. Wilson, Sarah F. Brosnan, Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf, Crickette M. Sanz

ESI Publications

Practical and ethical constraints limit our ability to experimentally test socioecological theory in wild primates. We took an alternate approach to model this, allowing groups of humans to interact in a virtual world in which they had to find food and interact with both ingroup and outgroup avatars to earn rewards. We altered ratios and distributions of high- and low-value foods to test the hypothesis that hominoids vary with regards to social cohesion and intergroup tolerance due to their feeding ecology. We found larger nesting clusters and decreased attacks on outgroup competitors in the Bonobo condition versus the Chimpanzee condition, …

The Impact Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Economic Behaviours And Preferences: Experimental Evidence From Wuhan, Jason Shachat, Matthew J. Walker, Lijia Wei

ESI Working Papers

We examine how the emergence of Covid-19 in Wuhan, and the ramifications of associated events, influence pro-sociality, trust and attitudes towards risk and ambiguity. We assess these influences using an experiment consisting of financially incentivized economic tasks. We establish causality via the comparison of a baseline sample collected pre-epidemic with five sampling waves starting from the imposition of a stringent lock- down in Wuhan and completed six weeks later. We find significant long-term increases - measured as the difference between the baseline and final wave average responses - in altruism, cooperation, trust and risk tolerance. Participants who remained in Wuhan …

Does Free Information Provision Crowd Out Costly Information Acquisition? It’S A Matter Of Timing, Diego Aycinena, Alexander Elbittar, Andrei Gomberg, Lucas Rentschler

ESI Working Papers

We consider the issue of how timing of provision of additional information affects information-acquisition incentives. In environments with costly attention, a sufficiently confident agent may choose to act based on the prior, without incurring those costs. However, a promise of additional information in the future may be used to encourage additional attentional effort. This may be viewed as a novel empirical implication of rational inattention. In a lab experiment designed to test this theoretical prediction, we show that promise of future “free” information induces subjects to acquire information which they would not be acquiring without such a promise.

Preserving History Or Property Values: Historic Preservation And Housing Prices In Washington, Dc, Lev Klarnet

Undergraduate Economic Review

Neighborhood historic preservation has been highly controversial in Washington, DC, as proponents claim it preserves valuable architecture and critics claim in increases unaffordability. Using a dataset of all residential and condominium property sales in DC between 1992 and 2019, I find that the effect of historic designation on property values within historic districts is heterogeneous. While residential property values increase by 9%, condominium prices fall by 6.3% after designation. This paper also uniquely controls for endogeneity—which arises if in response to rising housing prices, neighborhood groups seek historic designation—by researching the party that nominated each historic district.

Predictors Of Social Distancing And Mask-Wearing Behavior: Panel Survey In Seven U.S. States, Plamen Nikolov, Andreas Pape, Ozlem Tonguc, Charlotte Williams

Economics Faculty Scholarship

This paper presents preliminary summary results from a longitudinal study of participants in seven U.S. states during the COVID-19 pandemic. In addition to standard socio-economic characteristics, we collect data on various economic preference parameters: time, risk, and social preferences, and risk perception biases. We pay special attention to predictors that are both important drivers of social distancing and are potentially malleable and susceptible to policy levers. We note three important findings: (1) demographic characteristics exert the largest influence on social distancing measures and mask-wearing, (2) we show that individual risk perception and cognitive biases exert a critical role in influencing …

New Kid On The Blockchain: The Rise Of Cryptocurrency In The Global Arena: Humanitarian Usage With Blockchain, Rhonda S. Binda

Open Educational Resources

In 2018, the world was shaken by the fast rise of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that use a decentralized, blockchain technology for payment transfers outside of the traditional banking system. The potential impact this alternative form of banking could have in the medium and long term on the over 2 billion people globally unbanked is tremendous. Additionally, blockchain itself is being used for value transfer combined with bio and genetic tagging technologies in refugee camps for example, bringing to rise a new era where technology for development is disrupting education, healthcare and security programs globally.

The Role Of Cost, Scale, And Property Attributes In Landowner Choice Of Stormwater Management Option., W. Bowman Cutter, Alexander Pusch

Pomona Economics

Cities throughout the world are experimenting with Low Impact Development (LID) strategies to replace ecosystem services degraded by urbanization. Stormwater management may need both centralized/publicly-managed infrastructure and decentralized provision by landowners. For landowners to participate in these programs they will need some latitude in the choice of techniques and siting. However, these landowner choices will affect the bundle of ecosystem services provided (such as infiltration, aesthetics, pollution filtering, and others) as well as their spatial distribution. We studied the Santa Monica (CA) stormwater regulations that require stormwater management on a large portion of development and redevelopment but allow a significant …

The Shadow Cost Of Parking Minimums: Evidence From Los Angeles County, Sofia Franco, W. Bowman Cutter, Skyler Lewis

Pomona Economics

Minimum Parking Requirements (MPRs) are almost universal in U.S. cities and common in the rest of the world. In the U.S., parking requirements for commercial buildings commonly require 700 ft² of parking for each 1000 ft² of floor space. To the extent this is a binding requirement, MPRs could result in distortion in commercial development. MPRs require either the allocation of land for parking, or very costly substitution of structured parking for land. Therefore, MPR distortions are likely to increase with the value of land. A steep gradient in the cost of the MPRs leads to the possibility …

Mechanisms Study: Using Game Theory To Assess The Effects Of Social Norms And Social Networks On Adolescent Smoking In Schools—Study Protocol, Ruth F. Hunter, Felipe Montes, Jennifer M. Murray, Sharon C. Sanchez-Franco, Shannon C. Montgomery, Joaquín Jaramillo, Christopher Tate, Rajnish Kumar, Laura Dunne, Abhijit Ramalingam, Erik O. Kimbrough, Erin Krupka, Huiyu Zhou, Laurence Moore, Linda Bauld, Blanca Llorente, Olga L. Sarmiento, Frank Kee

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

This proof of concept study harnesses novel transdisciplinary insights to contrast two school-based smoking prevention interventions among adolescents in the UK and Colombia. We compare schools in these locations because smoking rates and norms are different, in order to better understand social norms based mechanisms of action related to smoking. We aim to: (1) improve the measurement of social norms for smoking behaviors in adolescents and reveal how they spread in schools; (2) to better characterize the mechanisms of action of smoking prevention interventions in schools, learning lessons for future intervention research. The A Stop Smoking in Schools Trial (ASSIST) …

Data For "Consistent Differences In A Virtual World Model Of Ape Societies", Bart J. Wilson, Sarah F. Brosnan, Elizabeth V. Lonsdorf, Crickette M. Sanz

Business and Economics Faculty Data Sets

The zip file contains the data for the paper entitled "Consistent Differences in a Virtual World Model of Ape Societies" which appears in Scientific Reports.

The Property Species: Mine, Yours, And The Human Mind, Bart J. Wilson

Economics Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Arguing that neither the sciences nor the humanities synthesizes a full account of property, the book offers a cross-disciplinary compromise that is sure to be controversial: Property is a universal and uniquely human custom. Integrating cognitive linguistics with philosophy of property and a fresh look at property disputes in the common law, the book makes the case that symbolic-thinking humans locate the meaning of property within a thing. That is, all human beings and only human beings have property in things, and at its core, property rests on custom, not rights. Such an alternative to conventional thinking contends that the …

Opportunity Cost, Inattention And The Bidder's Curse, David J. Freeman, Erik O. Kimbrough, J. Philipp Reiss

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Auction winners sometimes suffer a “bidder’s curse”, paying more for an item at auction than the fixed price charged for an identical item by other sellers. This seemingly irrational behavior is puzzling because the information necessary to avoid overpaying would appear to be readily available to bidders, yet they seem to ignore it. To understand this behavior, we consider the bidders’ decisions whether to acquire information about the fixed price before bidding, in the presence of opportunity costs. Our theory introduces costly information acquisition into an auction model, with a fixed price aftermarket selling an identical good. When information about …