Other Economics Commons^™

The Economic Impact Of Forest Harvest Practices On Washington State Park Visitation, Tyler Humphries

All Master's Theses

Washington State receives timber contributions from 34 out of its 39 counties, making it a top producer of timber in the United States. Because of the widespread and abundant number of harvests, many forests that society values are affected via diminished aesthetic appeal. Of these affected areas are Washington State Parks and the areas around them. This study seeks to estimate the economic impact that forest harvest practices have on the visitation of Washington State Parks. Through the use of GIS and fixed effect regression analysis, I estimate the impact that over 100,000 permitted forest cuts have on the visitation …

Does Racial Discrimination Exist In The Nba?, Logan Kendall

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper aims to examines the affect of race on compensation for NBA players. Based on prior research, I pose the hypothesis that racial discrimination does exist in the NBA with there being a premium for white players. A second hypothesis I present based on the previous research is that the premium for white players exist for only some groups of players and for other groups there with not exist discrimination based on player race. By using career data from every player who played in the 2019-2020 NBA season and their 2019-2020 salaries, a few different models where ran. The …

The Value Of Carbon Sequestration In The Developing World: Making The Economic Case For Tree Planting In Laos, Vongdalone Vongsikeo

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Tree plantations in developing countries are mostly driven by private sectors, mainly to increase forest cover and meet the timber demand. However, research studies on tree plantations in Laos, for instance, show that despite high profitability tree farmers and private companies face many challenges such as low timber quality, low timber selling price and slow plantation expansion. These challenges could be the result of slow policy improvement processes or the lack of basis on the justification of government intervention. This study uses a policy decision tool - a cost-benefit analysis to evaluate social costs and social benefits from private tree …

Zoning – Neighborhood Character And Historic Overlays In Lexington, Ky, Taylor S. Price

Dissertations and Theses

Zoning has a significant impact on our built environment. Overlay zoning, an additional form of restrictive zoning, is a tool that municipalities utilize to control development and changes to neighborhoods. This study analyzes the impact that historic district (H-1) and neighborhood character (ND-1) overlays have on home sale prices in Lexington, KY. Results suggests that overlays have a significant positive impact on home values. Results also suggest that that overlays exhibit spatial impacts that extend further than the homes included in the overlay.

Financial Development And Economic Growth, Chiau-Jiun Jiang

Dissertations and Theses

This paper purposes to discuss the relationship between the financial development and economic growth. In the past, most studies related to the influence of financial development on economic growth used cross-sectional analysis or time series analysis. However, the cross-sectional analysis cannot explain the long-term trend of the time series, and the time series is unable to explain the multiple samples of the cross-section. Based on Arellano and Bond (1991), and Arellano and Bover (1995), this paper utilizes the panel data model to discuss financial development and economic growth. The results point out that bank credit in total GDP and capitalization …

The Impact Of Production Budgets On Theatrical Vs. Non-Theatrical Revenues In The Movie Industry, Naveen Shastri

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis discusses the impact of movie production budgets on various revenue ratios. An OLS regression equation was created that compares the production budget of a movie to one of three movie revenue ratios. These ratios can be attributed to the relative elasticities of each revenue metric (domestic DVD sales, domestic box office revenues, and foreign box office revenues). Among other results, it seems that the elasticity for domestic DVD sales was relatively greater than the one representing domestic box office revenues. Also, foreign box office elasticities were relatively larger than either domestic revenue variable. These results imply different trends …

Three Essays In Law And Economics, Daniel Bonneau

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This dissertation investigates three relevant topics in law and economics literature. The first chapter explores the effectiveness of a crime prevention policy in Detroit, Project Green Light. This initiative began in 2016 and was aimed at reducing crime around high-risk businesses. Reductions in crime can be found in the business block that housed the green light, with a potential diffusion of benefits to their immediate neighbors. Using calls for service produces mixed results and suggest that there may be an increase in proactive policing within these areas. Lastly, response times do appear to decrease significantly. The second chapter empirically evaluates …

A Theory Of Fire Service Provision: With An Empirical Analysis Of Response Time, Suppression Time, And Service Output, Hyong-Gu Hwang

Senior Independent Study Theses

We introduce a two-stage theoretical framework of fire services that justifies the status of response time as a factor input. In the first stage, the provincial government distributes a budget to its cities, resulting in varied numbers of firefighters and fire engines in each city. In the second stage, each city fire department places its fire stations at spatially optimal locations that minimize expected response times. When a fire occurs, the outputs from these two stages are actualized into dispatch level, response time, and suppression time. These intermediate outputs are then transformed into inputs for producing service output, which is …

The Economic Impact Of Gastronomic Tourism: The Ubud Food Festival, Sabrina Yuka Amilia

Chulalongkorn University Theses and Dissertations (Chula ETD)

The main objective of this paper is to assess the economic impact in Bali during the Covid-19 pandemic by proposing the case of Ubud Food Festival 2019 with input-output analysis. Due to the outbreak, most scheduled festivals in 2020 have been cancelled, including Ubud Food Festival 2020. Computing the festival impact generated by 54 sectors in Bali's economy, this study constructs regional output, value-added, and income multipliers. The result figured that among the gastronomic tourism-related sector, the food and beverage service industry has the largest number on regional output multiplier, recreational and sporting activities have the largest number on value-added …

All Pay Quality-Bids In Score Procurement Auctions, Dan Kovenock, Jingfeng Lu

ESI Working Papers

In this paper, we study score procurement auctions with all-pay quality bids. A supplier’s score is the difference between his quality and price bids. The supplier with the highest score wins and gets paid his own price bid. The procurer’s payoff is the difference between the winner’s quality and the procurer’s payments to the suppliers. Equilibrium quality and price bids are solved without first obtaining the corresponding equilibrium scores. We find that quality bids, the suppliers’ payoffs and the procurer’s payoff do not depend on whether price bids are made contingent on quality bids. Compared to a benchmark of winner-pay …

Rationally Inattentive Savers And Monetary Policy Changes: A Laboratory Experiment, Andrea Civelli, Cary Deck, Antonella Tutino

ESI Working Papers

We study the response of consumption and saving decisions of rationally inattentive individuals to changes in monetary policy in the laboratory. First, we theoretically characterize the choices of a rationally inattentive agent processing information about the interest rate. Then, we design an experiment with induced inattention to test for the predictions of the model, contrasting them to the full information case. Consistent with the predictions, experimental subjects (a) increase attention when utility gains exceed cognitive costs of tracking the policy rate and decrease savings when their perceived economic outlook deteriorates; (b) respond to Delphic, but not Odyssean, forms of forward …

Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough

ESI Working Papers

The ability of markets to aggregate dispersed information is a cornerstone of economics and finance. In a seminal experiment, Plott and Sunder (1988) offer support for the rational expectations hypothesis. However, recent laboratory experiments have called into question the robustness of those initial results. In this paper, we offer the first attempt to directly replicate key findings of the original study. Failing to replicate their results, the post-study probability that market performance is better described by rational expectations than the prior information (Walrasian) model is low. Given this result, we introduce a new treatment that implements a market structure consistent …

An Experimental Comparison Of News Vending And Price Gouging, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova

ESI Working Papers

The newsvendor problem is a workhorse model in operation management research. We introduce a related game that operates in the price dimension rather than the inventory dimension: the price gouging game. Using controlled laboratory experiments, we compare news vending and price gouging behavior. We replicate the standard pull-to-center effect for news vending and find that the equivalent pattern occurs with price gouging. Further, we find that the pull-to-center is asymmetric both for newsvendors and price gougers. More broadly, the experimental results reveal that choices are similar across the theoretically isomorphic games, suggesting that observed behavior in newsvendor experiments is representative …

Reference Dependent Prices In Bargaining: An Experimental Examination Of Precise First Offers, Erik O. Kimbrough, David Porter, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

Evidence from psychology and marketing suggests that those who make a "precise" first offer in bargaining get a better deal than those who make a "round" first offer. We report on a series of experiments designed to test for and improve our understanding of the "precise first offer" (PFO) effect in bargaining and whether it likely reflects rational optimizing or equilibrium behavior. Our experimental treatments vary whether decisions are incentivized and whether the PFO effect can emerge as an equilibrium of a cheap-talk signaling game. We find evidence of a PFO effect when subjects read a vignette and make unincentivized …

The Doors Of Perception, Gary Charness, Alessandro Sontuoso

ESI Working Papers

We investigate how a player’s strategic behavior is affected by the set of notions she uses in thinking about the game, i.e., the “frame”. To do so, we consider matching games where two players are presented with a set of objects, from which each player must privately choose one (with the goal of matching the counterpart’s choice). We propose a novel theory positing that different player types are aware of different attributes of the strategy options, hence different frames; we then rationalize why differences in players’ frames may lead to differences in choice behavior. Unlike previous theories of framing, our …

Consumers Support A Slowing Economy, Eric Thompson

Business in Nebraska

Nebraska will record moderate economic growth during the forecast period but will lag U.S. growth. Like the national economy, growth Nebraska’s goods producing sector will struggle. Farm incomes will be flat from 2020 to 2022 after improving this year. Manufacturing employment also is expected to drop. However, most other sectors will expand, including services, finance and construction. Projected growth rates for 2020 to 2022 are presented in Table 1.

Employment will grow by 0.6% to 0.8% per year, below the national rate. Non-farm income will grow between 3.7% and 3.8% each year. This growth readily exceeds inflation and population growth, …

Genetically Modified Organisms In The United States Crop Market, Toluwani V. Ogunbayode

Quest

Economic Analysis

Research in progress for ECON 2302: Principles of Microeconomics

Faculty Mentors: Millie D. Black, Ph.D., and Michael Latham, Ph.D.

The following paper represents research begun by students in Honors Principles of Microeconomics. The honors course introduced students to numerous economic models and methods of analysis. Students were asked to identify an economic issue or controversy related to topics studied in class and to provide a literature review relevant to their topic. Students were also asked to provide an economic analysis, discuss opposing viewpoints, present an economic evaluation of various policy options, and make a recommendation regarding the preferred …

Using Behavior Economic Nudges To Facilitate Client Follow-Through In Financial Coaching, Charlene Hurst

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

While benevolence-based programs have been a large part of meeting immediate financial needs of the poor, they lack the relational aspect needed to facilitate long-term behavior change. Recently many social service organizations have adopted financial coaching as a promising replacement for benevolence programming. The field of coaching has dealt with its own challenges. Most coaching practitioners surveyed in 2016 and 2019 acknowledged lack of client follow-through as their number one challenge. Behavior economics offered nudges as a solution. Nudges are cues placed within the physical environment to prod clients toward behavior change. A quantitative field study was conducted to evaluate …

Harnessing The Power Of Social Incentives To Curb Shirking In Teams, Brice Corgnet, Brian C. Gunia, Roberto Hernán González

ESI Working Papers

We study several solutions to shirking in teams that trigger social incentives by reshaping the workplace social context. Using an experimental design, we manipulate social pressure at work by varying the type of workplace monitoring and the extent to which employees engage in social interaction. This design allows us to assess the effectiveness as well as the popularity of each solution. Despite similar effectiveness in boosting productivity across solutions, only organizational systems involving social interaction (via chat) were at least as popular as a baseline treatment. This suggests that any solution based on promoting social interaction is more likely to …

News-Driven Expectations And Volatility Clustering, Sabiou M. Inoua

ESI Working Papers

Financial volatility obeys two well-established empirical properties: it is fat-tailed (power-law distributed) and it tends to be clustered in time. Many interesting models have been proposed to account for these regularities, notably agent-based computational models, which typically invoke complicated mechanisms, however. It can be shown that trend-following speculation generates the power law in an intrinsic way. But this model cannot exaplain clustered volatility. This paper extends the model and offers a simple explanation for clustered volatility: the impact of exogenous news on traders’ expectations. Owing to the famous no-trade results, rational expectations, the dominant model of news-driven expectations, is hard …

Price Signaling And Bargain Hunting In Markets With Partially Informed Populations, Mark Schneider, Daniel Graydon Stephenson

ESI Working Papers

Classical studies of asymmetric information focus on situations where only one side of a market is informed. This study experimentally investigates a more general case where some sellers are informed and some buyers are informed. We establish the existence of semiseparating perfect Bayesian equilibria where prices serve as informative signals of quality to uninformed buyers, while informed buyers can often leverage their informational advantage by purchasing high quality items from uninformed sellers at bargain prices. These models provide a rational foundation for the co-existence of bargains, price signaling, and Pareto efficiency in markets with asymmetric information. We test these theoretical …

Cross-Country Evidence Of Corruption Spillovers To Formal And Informal Entrepreneurship, Aziz N. Berdiev, James Saunoris

Economics Faculty Journal Articles

Using cross‐country data this paper examines the spillovers of corruption to formal and informal entrepreneurship in neighboring countries. Whereas research has shown that entrepreneurs move underground to escape corruption, we argue that entrepreneurs may also seek refuge in neighboring countries. Indeed, the empirical results show that in response to a ceteris paribus increase in corruption in neighboring countries formal entrepreneurship increases in the home country with no effect on informal entrepreneurship. This is consistent with entrepreneurs circumventing corrupt public officials by immigrating to countries with presumably less corruption. These results withstand a battery of robustness checks. (JEL D73, L26)

Identity And The Self-Reinforcing Effects Of Norm Compliance, Mark A. Pickup, Erik O. Kimbrough, Eline A. Rooij

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

When making political and economic decisions (e.g., voting, donating money to a cause), individuals consider the expectations of groups with which they identify. These expectations are injunctive norms, shared beliefs about appropriate behavior for identity group members, and individuals' choices reflect trade‐offs between adherence to these norms and other preferences. We show that when those who identify moderately/strongly with the group pay a cost as a consequence of avoiding a norm violation, they subsequently view the norms as stronger than those that paid no cost. This is evident in their greater willingness to pay an additional cost to punish/reward other …

Do Appeals To Donor Benefits Raise More Money Than Appeals To Recipient Benefits? Evidence From A Natural Field Experiment With Pick.Click.Give., John A. List, James J. Murphy, Michael K. Price, Alexander G. James

ESI Working Papers

We partnered with Alaska’s Pick.Click.Give. Charitable Contributions Program to implement a statewide natural field experiment with 540,000 Alaskans designed to explore whether targeted appeals emphasizing donor benefits through warm glow impact donations. Results highlight the relative import of appeals to self. Individuals who received such an appeal were 4.5 percent more likely to give and gave 20 percent more than counterparts in the control group. Yet, a message that instead appealed to recipient benefits had no effect on average donations relative to the control group. We also find evidence of long-run effects of warm glow appeals in the subsequent year.

A Class Of N-Player Colonel Blotto Games With Multidimensional Private Information, Christian Ewerhart, Dan Kovenock

ESI Working Papers

We consider a class of incomplete-information Colonel Blotto games in which N ≥ 2 agents are engaged in (N + 1) battlefields. An agent’s vector of battlefield valuations is drawn from a generalized sphere in L_p-space. We identify a Bayes-Nash equilibrium in which any agent’s resource allocation to a given battlefield is strictly monotone in the agent’s valuation of that battlefield. In contrast to the single-unit case, however, agents never enjoy any information rent. We also outline an extension to networks of Blotto games.

Cooperation In Indefinitely Repeated Helping Games: Existence And Characterization, Gabriele Camera, Alessandro Gioffré

ESI Working Papers

Experiments that investigate the spontaneous emergence of money in laboratory societies rely on indefinitely repeated helping games with random matching (Camera et al., 2013; Camera and Casari, 2014). An important open issue is the lack of a general proof of existence of an equilibrium capable of supporting the efficient allocation under private monitoring, without money. Here, we fill this gap by offering a general proof, as well as by characterizing the efficient non-monetary equilibrium. This technique can be extended to study games with simultaneous actions.

Breaking Up: Experimental Insights Into Economic (Dis)Integration, Gabriele Camera, Lukas Hohl, Rolf Weder

ESI Working Papers

Standard international economic theory suggests that people should embrace economic integration because it promises large gains. But recent events such as Brexit indicate a desire for economic disintegration. Here we report results of an experiment, based on a strategic analytical framework, of how size and distribution of potential gains from integration influence outcomes and individuals’ inclination to embrace integration. We find that cross-country inequality in potential gains acts as a friction to realize those gains. This suggests that to better understand recent phenomena, international economic theory should account for distributional considerations and behavioral aspects it currently ignores.

Introduction To The Special Issue On The Blue Economy Of Bangladesh, Pawan G. Patil, Pierre Failler, Khurshed Alam

Journal of Ocean and Coastal Economics

Introduction to the Special Edition on the Blue Economy of Bangladesh by the Editors of the Special Edition.

Make It Too Difficult And I’Ll Give-Up; Let Me Succeed And I’Ll Excel: The Interaction Between Assigned And Personal Goals, James Fan, Joaquin Gomez-Minambres, Samuel Smithers

ESI Working Papers

We examine the motivational effects of setting both assigned and personal non-binding goals on a real effort laboratory experiment. In order to derive conjectures for our experiment, we develop a model with goal-dependent preferences. In line with previous studies, we find that goal setting leads to a higher performance. We also find that goal-setting is most effective if subjects were able to achieve previous goals. Therefore, in goal setting, “success breeds success”. In particular, we observe that when subjects are initially allowed to attain assigned goals, they are better at self-motivating in the future when performing under personal goals.

Investment Choice Architecture In Trust Games: When “All-In” Is Not Enough, Joaquin Gómez-Miñambres, Eric Schniter, Timothy W. Shields

ESI Working Papers

While many economic interactions feature “All-or-Nothing” options nudging investors towards going “all-in”, such designs may unintentionally affect reciprocity. We manipulate the investor’s action space in two versions of the “trust game”. In one version investors can invest either “all” their endowment or “nothing”. In the other version, they can invest any amount of the endowment. Consistent with our intentions-based model, we show that "all-or-nothing” designs coax more investment but limit investors’ demonstrability of intended trust. As a result, “all-in” investors are less generously reciprocated than when they can invest any amount, where full investments are a clearer signal of trustworthiness.