Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Nebraska Business And Consumer Confidence Index: December 1, 2017, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

Consumer and business confidence surged in Nebraska during November. The Consumer Confidence Index – Nebraska (CCI-N) rose to 106.2 in November from 95.1 in October. The November value is well above the neutral level of 100.0. Likewise, the Business Confidence Index – Nebraska (BCI-N) rose from 102.7 in October to 114.1 in November, which is also well above the neutral value of 100.0. When asked about the most important issue facing their business, customer demand was mentioned by 32 percent of respondents. Nearly as many businesses mentioned workforce issues. In particular, the availability and quality of labor was mentioned as …

The Perceived Return On College Investment In Relation To Economic Expectations Of Students At The University Of Maryland, Joshua S. Roston

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper presents the results of a survey conducted in the spring semester of 2017 of University of Maryland students. The results illustrate how University of Maryland students weigh the decision to attend college in terms of their perceived current economic situation and future expectations as well as predicted return on investment. A body of economic literature on the perception of return on investment from attending college exists already and this study hopes to add to the discussion as its results are unexpected. The results imply that the current generation of college students feels uncertain over the worthwhileness of higher …

Nebraska Business And Consumer Confidence Indexes: November 3, 2017, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

Nebraska’s consumer confidence remained weak during October while business confidence remained strong. The Consumer Confidence Index – Nebraska (CCI-N) stood at 95.1 in October, below the neutral value of 100.0. By contrast, the Nebraska business confidence remained strong. The Business Confidence Index – Nebraska (BCI-N) stood at 102.7 in October, below the September level of 105.2 but above the neutral value of 100.0. When asked about the most important issue facing their business, customer demand was mentioned by 31 percent of business respondents. Businesses also faced growing competition in both the labor and product markets. The availability and quality of …

Does "America First" Help America? The Impact Of Country Image On Exports And Welfare, Pao-Li Chang, Tomoki Fujii, Wei Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper estimates the effects of bilateral and time-varying preference bias on trade flows and welfare. We use a unique dataset from the BBC World Opinion Poll that surveys (annually during 2005-2017 with some gaps) the populations from a wide array of countries on their views of whether an evaluated country is having a mainly positive or negative influence in the world. We identify the effects on bilateral preference parameters due to shifts in these country image perceptions, and quantify their general equilibrium effects on bilateral exports and welfare (each time for an evaluated exporting country, assuming that the exporting …

The Effectiveness And Effects Of Alcohol Regulation: Evidence From India, Dara Lee Luca, Emily Owens, Gunjan Sharma

WCBT Faculty Publications

We provide quasi-experimental evidence on the effects of alcohol regulation on alcohol consumption and associated public health outcomes using detailed individual level and aggregate data from India, where state level laws generate substantial variation in the availability of commercially produced alcohol across people of different ages. We find that despite significant law evasion, men who are legally allowed to drink are substantially more likely to consume alcohol. Further, men who are legally allowed to drink are significantly more likely to commit violence against their partners, suggesting a causal channel between alcohol consumption and domestic violence. We also examine the effects …

The Weekend Effect In Television Viewership And Prime-Time Scheduling, Jung Won Yeo

Research Collection School Of Economics

The observed drops in the ratings of television programs on Fridays and Saturdays are likely a result of two factors: intrinsic contraction in demand for television watching and endogenous scheduling. I decompose the observed weekend effect into the effects from these two factors. To this end, I estimate a viewer choice model that uses aggregate Nielsen ratings data for prime-time network television shows over 11 years. The long span of the data enables me to control for television series qualities. The estimation results reveal that the estimated weekend effect is dampened as the empirical model accounts for variation in the …

Mobile Banking As A Mechanism To Increase Access To Financial Services, Luisa Blanco, C. Andrew Bosque, Xizhu Wang

School of Public Policy Working Papers

We study the determinants of mobile banking adoption, with a special interest on how mobile banking can increase access to financial services among racial and ethnic minorities in the United States. In our analysis, we use survey data from two different sources: 1) Survey of Consumers' Use of Mobile Financial Services (SCUMFS) We conduct a regression analysis and Oaxaca Decomposition to determine the explanatory factors of racial and ethnic gaps in bank account ownership. We find that minorities are less likely to use mobile banking than Whites in the NSUUH, but more likely to adopt mobile banking according to SCUMFS, …

The Importance Of Transportation, Broadband, And Intellectual Infrastructure For Entrepreneurship, James E. Prieger, Heng Lu, Habi Zhang

School of Public Policy Working Papers

This empirical study uses a unique panel dataset to investigate the link between regional entrepreneurship and infrastructure. This topic is vital for understanding the factors that facilitate entrepreneurship, yet it receives scant scholarly attention. It is of particular value to policy makers because entrepreneurship is crucial for economic growth. We therefore examine how broadband infrastructure (internet connectivity), intellectual infrastructure (human capital), and transportation infrastructure (roads, bridges, and intermodal facilities) affect the establishment of new businesses in the United States. We primarily focus on broadband infrastructure, which is the least explored of these factors in the literature. We find that all …

Mobile Data Roaming And Incentives For Investment In Rural Broadband Infrastructure, James Prieger

School of Public Policy Working Papers

Mobile broadband Internet access is highly important to the American economy and millions of users. There were almost 200 million mobile broadband connections by the end of 2013 in the United States, far more than the number of fixed broadband connections (FCC, 2014a, Table 1). The economic activity created by the provision and usage of mobile broadband is sizeable, and has been documented at the national level (Gruber and Koutroumpis, 2011; Thompson and Garbacz, 2011; Katz, 2012) and specifically for rural areas (Whitacre, Gallardo, and Strover, 2014). The benefits of mobile broadband—and indeed the entire broadband ecosystem—depend on investment in …

Nebraska Business And Consumer Confidence Indexes: October 6, 2017, Eric Thompson

Leading Economic Indicator Reports

Nebraska’s consumer confidence tumbled during September while business confidence held steady. The Consumer Confidence Index – Nebraska (CCI-N) fell to 93.5 in September, well below the reading of 100.9 in August and the neutral value of 100.0. Consumer confidence is now weak in Nebraska. By contrast, the Nebraska business confidence remained strong. The Business Confidence Index – Nebraska (BCI-N) stood at 105.2 in September, slightly above the August value of 104.2, and well above the neutral value of 100.0. When asked about the most important issue facing their business, customer demand was mentioned by 37 percent of business respondents. Businesses …

Endowment Effects And Contribution Strategies In Public Good Experiments, John P. Weis, John J. Cadigan, Pamela Schmitt, Kurtis Swope

Economics Faculty Publications

We investigate behavior in a laboratory public good experiment with unique endowment schemes that allow a wider range of contribution strategies than in standard voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) experiments. A baseline treatment follows a standard VCM design (subjects receive 10 tokens in each of 10 rounds that may be allocated between a private account and a group account). In a new carry-over treatment, any tokens not allocated to the group account in the current period are made available for contributions in future periods. Under full endowment, subjects receive 100 tokens in round one (rather than 10 tokens per …

Random Mechanism Design On Multidimensional Domains, Shurojit Chatterji, Huaxia Zeng

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study random mechanism design in an environment where the set of alternatives has a Cartesian product structure. We first show that all generalized random dictatorships are strategy-proof on a minimally rich domain if and only if the domain is a top-separable domain. We next generalize the notion of connectedness (Monjardet, 2009) to establish a particular class of top-separable domains: connected domains, and show that in the class of minimally rich and connected domains, the multidimensional single-peakedness restriction is necessary and sufficient for the design of a flexible random social choice function that is unanimous and strategy-proof. Such a flexible …

Evaluating The Empirical Performance Of Dsge Models: What Is The Role Of Search And Matching Frictions In The Labor And Capital Markets?, Weng Sam Mok

Dissertations and Theses Collection

A major perspective in explaining involuntary unemployment is to recognize the existence of job market frictions, in particular, job market matching frictions. The workhorse model employed is the Diamond- Mortensen-Pissarides (DMP) model. Similar to the labor market, the market for physical capital markets exhibits the same characteristics with a pool of unsold inventory as well as used capital that is sold and reallocated to other terms. Nevertheless, past research has highlighted several issues of the DMP model in matching the characteristics of the labor market. In a model enriched with labor participation flows and job separation, I evaluate the model …

Cooperation And Reciprocity In Anonymous Interactions: Other-Regarding Preferences And Quasi-Magical Thinking, Gregory Klevans

Theses and Dissertations

In economic experiments, players often demonstrate concerns for the relative payoffs between themselves and other subjects, in addition to their own payoffs. In addition, they appear to do their parts to achieve efficient outcomes, particularly when they are ignorant of the opponent's decision. I present a parsimonious model of other-regarding preferences and quasi-magical thinking that explains such behavior, and I apply it to four games: the prisoner's dilemma, the traveler's dilemma, the ultimatum game, and the trust game.

Gender And Financial Risk Aversion, Efstathia Korkou

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The primary goal of this dissertation is the study and measurement of the effect of gender in the process of financial decision making and investment decision making in particular, under uncertainty. In terms of investment decisions, researchers have linked investors’ risk aversion to several individual characteristics of theirs, such as their age, their income or their financial knowledge. However, an investor’s characteristic, somehow overlooked or not properly investigated, has been the investor’s gender, and the latter’s bearing on investment decision making. Research from the 1990s suggested that once individuals are called to allocate their wealth and make investment decisions, women …

In Search Of Homo Sociologicus, Yunqi Xue

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The subject of this dissertation is to build an epistemic logic system that is able to show the spreading of knowledge and beliefs in a social network that contains multiple subgroups. Epistemic logic is the study of logical systems that express mathematical properties of knowledge and belief. In recent years, there have been increasing number of new epistemic logic systems that are focused on community properties such as knowledge and belief adoption among friends.

We are interested in revisable and actionable social knowledge/belief that leads to a large group action. Instead of centralized coordination, bottom-up approach is our focus. We …

The Efficacy Of Public Health Interventions Aimed At Curbing Gun Violence: An Integrative Review, Brian Cook

Grace Peterson Nursing Research Colloquium

Abstract

Background: Gun violence is a pressing public health issue in the United States. Homicide is the second-leading cause of death for 15 to 24 year-old Americans, and the third-leading cause of death for 25 to 34 year-old Americans, and 80% of these homicides are committed via firearm. In recent years, the field of criminology has studied the efficacy of a variety of policing, public health, and public policy interventions that aim to reduce the incidence of gun violence, but many of their findings have yet to be incorporated into the body of nursing literature.

Objective: This project’s objective was …

The Role Of Safety First Risk Preferences In Grain Marketing: A Laboratory Economic Experiment Using A Grain Marketing Simulation Game, Stamatina Kotsakou

Department of Agricultural Economics: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

In this study, the Marketing in a New Era (MINE) grain marketing simulation game is used to carry out a context-rich economic experiment to evaluate the role of risk preferences in grain marketing decisions. The model of risk preferences that we consider is an improved Safety First decision rule model proposed by Levy and Levy (2009). We experimentally test if Safety First decision rule describes individuals’ post-harvest marketing decisions. In our experiment, we incorporate real-world features which are usually omitted in marketing studies such as: multiple storage decisions, storage cost, actual price series and multiple contract frequency. MINE plays a …

On Random Assignment Problems, Peng Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection

This dissertation studies the standard random assignment problem (Bogomolnaia and Moulin (2001)) and investigates the scope of designing a desirable random assignment rule. Specifically, I ask the following two questions:

1. Is there a reasonably restricted domain of preferences on which there exists an strategy-sd-efficient proof, sd-efficient and sd-envy-free or equal-treatment-of-equals rule?

2. Moreover, if the answer is in the affirmative, what is that rule?

As a starting point, attention is restricted to the connected domains (Monjardet (2009)). It is shown that if a connected domain admits a desirable random assignment rule, it is structured in a specific way: a …

Three Essays On The Effect Of Overconfidence On Economic Decision Making, Klajdi Bregu

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation uses experimental evidence to explore the effects of overconfidence on economic decision making. In Chapter 1 I provide experimental evidence of the effects of alcohol on overconfidence and several other important tasks. I also explore the relationship between overconfidence and the behavior in the other tasks. The data from this experiment show that an alcohol level of 0.08 does not have a systemic effect on behavior and more importantly it does not affect one’s level of overconfidence. I also show that overconfidence is not significantly correlated with risk preferences, math, strategic behavior, anchoring, altruism, and food choices. In …