Econometrics Commons^™

Ad Hoc Disaster And Crop Insurance Programs May Reduce The Use Of Risk-Reducing Conservation Tillage Practices, Karina Schoengold, Ya Ying, Russell Headlee

CAFIO: Policy Research Group Policy Pagers

There is growing concern that the risks facing agricultural producers are increasing due to several factors that include the predicted effects of climate change leading to more frequent floods, droughts, and higher temperatures as well greater use of agricultural outputs for nonfood energy products.

These risks are partially managed through federal agricultural programs. Ad hoc disaster payments have frequently been used to provide financial support.

The Minimum Wage And Teen Unemployment: A Study Of The Effect Of The Fair Minimum Wage Act Of 2007, Alexander Pino

Pepperdine Policy Review

The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 increased the national minimum wage from $5.15 per hour to $7.25 per hour. We attempt to evaluate the impact of this statute on low-skill labor. We do so by analyzing the effect of the law on the teen unemployment rate in the five states with no state minimum wages (Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Tennessee). Using the adult unemployment rate as a control in a difference-in-differences analysis we find that the 2007 minimum wage increase had a negative effect on teen employment in these states.

Skill Ontogeny Among Tsimane Forager-Horticulturalists, Eric Schniter, Michael Gurven, Hillard Kaplan, Nathaniel Wilcox, Paul Hooper

ESI Working Papers

No abstract provided.

Experimenting With Behavior Based Pricing, Zuzana Brokesova, Cary Deck, Jana Peliova

ESI Working Papers

Many purchases of differentiated goods are repeated, giving sellers the opportunity to engage in price discrimination based upon the shopper’s previous behavior by either offering loyalty discounts to repeat buyers or introductory rates to new customers. Recent theoretical work suggests that loyalty discounts are likely to be implemented when customer preferences are not stationary and sellers can pre-commit to prices for repeat buyers, but otherwise repeat buyers can be expected to pay the same or more than new buyers. This paper reports the results of a series of controlled laboratory experiments designed to empirically test the impact of these factors …

People Do Not Discount Heavily In Strategic Settings, But They Believe Others Do, Cary Deck, Salar Jahedi

ESI Working Papers

Several studies have shown that people greatly discount future bene ts and costs. However, most of the direct laboratory evidence of this phenomenon has focused on individual choice experiments. This paper investigates the degree to which the timing of payments a ects behavior in four commonly studies strategic settings: a Prisoner's Dilemma game, a Stag-Hunt game, a First Price Auction and a Second Price Auction. In all four settings, a two week delay in payo s has a comparable e ect to a 20% reduc- tion in current payo s. A follow-up study suggests that it is an individual's strategic …

Single- And Double-Elimination All-Pay Tournaments, Cary Deck, Erik O. Kimbrough

ESI Working Papers

Tournaments consisting of iterative matches are a common mechanism for determining how to allocate a prize. While participants are focused on their own outcomes, tournament organizers often have objectives such as maximizing the total investment or effort by the participants over the course of the tournament. For this reason it is important for organizers to understand the behavioral as well as the theoretical properties of different tournament structures. Given that laboratory experiments have consistently found high levels of overbidding in contests, one might suspect that double-elimination tournaments would generate substantially more total investment than single-elimination tournaments despite the two types …

Accounting Standards And Financial Market Stability: An Experimental Examination, Shengle Lin, Glenn Pfeiffer, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

We examine the effect on asset mispricing of different accounting methods in an experimental asset market characterized by bubbles and crashes. In particular, we study three alternative asset value reporting treatments: (1) Fair Value (also known as Mark-to-Market – M2M), (2) Historical Cost (HC) and (3) Marked to Fundamental Value (M2F). In addition, each of these treatments is replicated in two different financial leverage conditions. In the first condition (No Loan) traders must purchase assets from their available cash balances without the option of borrowing. In the second condition, (Loan), traders are given the option of taking out loans based …

Rust-Belt Recovery: The Cleveland Model As Economic Development In An Age Of Economic Stagnation And Climate Change, Ross Lenihan

Pepperdine Policy Review

The economic outlook of the United States is dire. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, poverty has not lessened even as U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has rebounded following the Great Recession. This paper explores the development potential of joint worker-community cooperative structures during the current economic downturn by analyzing the “Cleveland model,” a network of worker-owned cooperatives supported by local education/healthcare "anchor" institutions and financed and organized by a non-profit community development corporation. I find that while worker and community-owned enterprises hold significant promise for both workers and communities in times of economic stagnation and ecological danger, existing market …

A New Approach To Bayesian Hypothesis Testing, Yong Li, Tao Zeng, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper a new Bayesian approach is proposed to test a point null hypothesis based on the deviance in a decision-theoretical framework. The proposed test statistic may be regarded as the Bayesian version of the likelihood ratio test and appeals in practical applications with three desirable properties. First, it is immune to Jeffreys’ concern about the use of improper priors. Second, it avoids Jeffreys–Lindley’s paradox, Third, it is easy to compute and its threshold value is easily derived, facilitating the implementation in practice. The method is illustrated using some real examples in economics and finance. It is found that …

Nonparametric Testing For Anomaly Effects In Empirical Asset Pricing Models, Sainan Jin, Liangjun Su, Yonghui Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we propose a class of nonparametric tests for anomaly effects in empirical asset pricing models in the framework of nonparametric panel data models with interactive fixed effects. Our approach has two prominent features: one is the adoption of nonparametric component to capture the anomaly effects of some asset-specific characteristics, and the other is the flexible treatment of both observed/constructed and unobserved common factors. By estimating the unknown factors, betas, and nonparametric function simultaneously, our setup is robust to misspecification of functional form and common factors and avoids the well-known “error-in-variable” (EIV) problem associated with the commonly used …

Optimal Estimation Of Cointegrated Systems With Irrelevant Instruments, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

It has been known since Phillips and Hansen (1990) that cointegrated systems can be consistently estimated using stochastic trend instruments that are independent of the system variables. A similar phenomenon occurs with deterministically trending instruments. The present work shows that such "irrelevant" deterministic trend instruments may be systematically used to produce asymptotically efficient estimates of a cointegrated system. The approach is convenient in practice, involves only linear instrumental variables estimation, and is a straightforward one step procedure with no loss of degrees of freedom in estimation. Simulations reveal that the procedure works well in practice both in terms of point …

Specification Testing For Transformation Models, Arthur Lewbel, Xun Lu, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

Consider a nonseparable model Y=R(X,U) where Y and X are observed, while U is unobserved and conditionally independent of X. This paper provides the first nonparametric test of whether R takes the form of a transformation model, meaning that Y is monotonic in the sum of a function of X plus a function of U. Transformation models of this form are commonly assumed in economics, including, e.g., standard specifications of duration models and hedonic pricing models. Our test statistic is asymptotically normal under local alternatives and consistent against nonparametric alternatives. Monte Carlo experiments show that our test performs well in …

Measuring Benchmark Damages In Antitrust Litigation, Justin Mccrary, Daniel L. Rubinfeld

Faculty Scholarship

We compare the two dominant approaches to estimation of benchmark damages in antitrust litigation, the forecasting approach and the dummy variable approach. We give conditions under which the two approaches are equivalent and present the results of a small simulation study.

Mcmeasuring Diplomacy: Modeling Determinants Of International Public Opinion Toward The United States, Luke A. Petach

Student Scholarship - College of Business

This paper is concerned with modeling the extent to which external factors affect political attitudes toward the United States. The data is concerned with how economic, governance, and cultural factors impact attitudes regarding the favorability of the United States in the eyes of the world, and testing the empirical implications of Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.

The results suggest a strong negative relationship between a country being a Muslim majority country and the favorability of the United States in that country, a positive relationship between the perceived “Voice and Accountability” of a country and the favorability of …

Growth, Development, And The Natural Resource Curse: Understanding The Asymmetric Gains Of Trade, Low Iishan

Student Scholarship - College of Business

Trade is an essential component of a country’s economy. The flow of goods and services across national boundaries has become emblematic of the modern global economy. Yet, the effects of trade are not constant across countries. Instead, gains from trade have been observed to be asymmetric across the diverse landscape of political economies. Sharma and Morrissey (2005) for example, suggest that while trade liberalization is generally desirable, it does not guarantee growth. Instead, any impact of trade on an economy is conditional upon the initial economic structure and prevailing policy. This makes sense since countries often differ in terms of …

Don’T Judge The S&P 500 By Its Cover: When Expectations Meet Regression, Daniel Freitag

Student Scholarship - College of Business

This study aims to answer whether the health of the United States equities market is a representation of the well-being of the macro-economy. There are two primary goals in this study. The first is to model the determinants of fluctuating stock prices in the short-run. For this reason, data is collected in monthly units intended to represent short-term fluctuations in the S&P price over time. The second is to model the expected impact of recessionary pressures on the performance of equities.

Rhode Island Current Conditions Index -- December 2013, Leonard Lardaro

The Rhode Island Current Conditions Index

No abstract provided.

Identifying Latent Structures In Panel Data, Liangjun Su, Zhentao Shi, Peter C. B. Phillips

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper provides a novel mechanism for identifying and estimating latent group structures in panel data using penalized regression techniques. We focus on linear models where the slope parameters are heterogeneous across groups but homogenous within a group and the group membership is unknown. Two approaches are considered -- penalized least squares (PLS) for models without endogenous regressors, and penalized GMM (PGMM) for models with endogeneity. In both cases we develop a new variant of Lasso called classifier-Lasso (C-Lasso) that serves to shrink individual coefficients to the unknown group-specific coefficients. C-Lasso achieves simultaneous classification and consistent estimation in a single …

Quasi-Maximum Likelihood Estimation For Spatial Panel Data Regressions, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article considers quasi-maximum likelihood estimations (QMLE) for two spatial panel data regression models: mixed effects model with spatial errors and transformed mixed effects model (where response and covariates are transformed) with spatial errors. One aim of transformation is to normalize the data, thus the transformed models are more robust with respect to the normality assumption compared with the standard ones. QMLE method provides additional protection against violation of normality assumption. Asymptotic properties of the QMLEs are investigated. Numerical illustrations are provided.

A State Space Model Approach To Integrated Covariance Matrix Estimation With High Frequency Data, Cheng Liu, Cheng Yong Tang

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We consider a state space model approach forhigh frequency financial data analysis. An expectationmaximization(EM) algorithm is developed for estimatingthe integrated covariance matrix of the assets. The statespace model with the EM algorithm can handle noisy financialdata with correlated microstructure noises. Difficultydue to asynchronous and irregularly spaced trading data ofmultiple assets can be naturally overcome by consideringthe problem in a scenario with missing data. Since the statespace model approach requires no data synchronization, norecord in the financial data is deleted so that it efficientlyincorporates information from all observations. Empiricaldata analysis supports the general specification of the statespace model, and simulations confirm …