Economic Theory Commons^™

An Essay On Fiscal Policy Transmissions In Currency Union, Nikhil Damodaran

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The effect of changes in fiscal policy for open economies are distinct and different from their effects in closed economies. The main idea behiend this dissertation is to examine why and how these differences affect the choice of fiscal instrument designed to provide stimulative effects to an open economy in a currency union. In extending a two country model and adapting it to examine trade within a currency union, I provide a way to truncate rational expectations equilibrium involving two large countries with endogenous relative price determination in chapter three. Using this model, I show that a spending increase is …

Land Assembly With Taxes, Not Takings, Mark Desantis, Matthew W. Mccarter, Abel Winn

ESI Publications

We use a novel tax mechanism – ‘rejected offer reassessment’ (ROR) – in laboratory experiments to discourage seller holdout and facilitate land assembly. Under this mechanism, if a landowner rejects a developer’s offer, his taxable property value is reassessed to be equal to the rejected offer, increasing his taxes. We find that, relative to a control treatment, ROR discourages the magnitude of seller holdout (but not its frequency) and increases the rate of successful land assembly by almost 60%. It also increases the gains from trade by 22.1% relative to the control treatment, but the difference is not statistically significant.

An Economics Primer For Cyber Security Analysts, John T. Harvey

Military Cyber Affairs

One of the ingredients necessary to an understanding of the impact of cyber attacks is a reliable model of the economy. We face great challenges in trying to protect an already potentially unstable system from cyber aggression and operating with a flawed understanding of the determinants of output, employment, asset prices, et cetera, surely condemns us to failure. This is so not only because we need to know where points of leverage might exist for bad actors to disrupt and disable our system, but because policy recommendations may face significant push back from both selected scholars and powerful vested interests. …

Impact Of Protected Areas On The Incidence Of Infectious Diseases - June 2019, Rodrigo A. Arriagada

Forest Collaborative Research

Research objective: To estimate the impact of the Chilean National System of Protected Areas on the incidence of infectious diseases, considering socioeconomic, demographic, biophysical and land use factors.

Fair Division With Uncertain Needs, Jingyi Xue

Research Collection School Of Economics

Imagine agents having uncertain needs for a resource when the resource has to be divided before uncertainty resolves. In this situation, waste occurs when an agent's assignment turns out to exceed his realized need. How should the resource be divided in the face of possible waste? This is a question out of the scope of the existing rationing literature. Our main axiom to address the issue is no domination. It requires that no agent receive more of the resource than another while producing a larger expected waste, unless the other agent has been fully compensated. Together with conditional strict endowment …

Buddhist Economics: Problems And Possibilities, James Mark Shields

Faculty Contributions to Books

No abstract provided.

The Economic Impacts Of A U.S. Withdrawal From Nafta: A Cge Analysis, Jonathan Liu

Undergraduate Economic Review

The aim of this study is to examine the economic impacts of a U.S. withdrawal from the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) on Canada, Mexico and the United States. The shocks simulate scenarios in which the U.S instates penalizing tariff rates on NAFTA countries, a trade war between NAFTA members and a tariff reset to the WTO MFN rates. The effects of these tariff structures are analyzed under the framework of a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model with a focus on macroeconomic variables and welfare. The findings show that, in all iterations, Mexico’s economy takes a substantial hit, America’s …

Patriarchal Norms, Bargaining, And Gendered Attitudes On Intimate Partner Violence, Anna Eckenrode

Master's Theses

How do the underlying mechanisms of social norms and bargaining power relate to the acceptance of intimate partner violence within households? How do short run and long run determinants of gender norms affect attitudes toward IPV? This study begins to decompose the dynamics of the acceptance of IPV within couples using data from the Demographic Health Survey, as well as examine the relationship in the context of patriarchal societies using data from the Ethnographic Atlas. I find that females are more accepting than males of intimate partner violence, and females becoming more educated is associated with her being less accepting …

Karl Marx And Liberation Theology: Dialectical Materialism And Christian Spirituality In, Against, And Beyond Contemporary Capitalism, Peter Mclaren, Petar Jandrić

Education Faculty Articles and Research

This paper explores convergences and discrepancies between liberation theology and the works of Karl Marx through the dialogue between one of the key contemporary proponents of liberation theology, Peter McLaren, and the agnostic scholar in critical pedagogy, Petar Jandrić. The paper briefly outlines liberation theology and its main convergences with the works of Karl Marx. Exposing striking similarities between the two traditions in denouncing the false God of money, it explores differences in their views towards individualism and collectivism. It rejects shallow rhetorical homologies between Marx and the Bible often found in liberation theology, and suggests a change of focus …

A Portable Method Of Eliciting Respect For Social Norms, Erik O. Kimbrough, Alexander Vostroknutov

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

Recent models of prosociality suggest that cooperation in laboratory games may be better understood as resulting from concern for social norms than from prosocial preferences over outcomes. Underlying this interpretation is the idea that people exhibit heterogeneous respect for shared norms. We introduce a new, abstract task to elicit a proxy for individual norm-following propensity by asking subjects to choose from two actions, where one is costly. We instruct subjects that “the rule is” to take the costly action. Their willingness to incur such a cost reveals respect for norms. We show that choices in this task are similar across …

A Martin Luther King Jr. Amendment To The U.S. Constitution: Toward The Abolition Of Poverty, Theodore Walker

Perkins Faculty Research and Special Events

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. prescribed that we add an economic bill of rights to the U.S. Constitution. A King-Inspired bill of rights should include a constitutional amendment that enumerates a natural human right to be free from economic poverty, and appropriate enforcement legislation.

For the sake of abolishing slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment says:

(Section 1) Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

(Section 2) Congress shall have power to enforce this article by …

Are Prize-Linked Savings Accounts The Solution To Arkansas' Savings Problem?, Mckenzie Wages

Accounting Undergraduate Honors Theses

This research finds that access to prize-linked savings could improve the financial security of Arkansans. Prize-linked savings (PLS) accounts are nontraditional savings products that offer depositors the chance to win cash prizes instead of a typical interest rate return. Given the low median incomes, high liquid asset poverty rates, and high levels of underbanked and undereducated individuals in Arkansas, there is a need for an innovative savings solution like PLS in the state. PLS accounts capitalize on individuals’ propensity for lottery-like risk-taking to inspire the productive behavior of personal saving. A wide range of individuals, especially those who could stand …

Does Debt Matter?, Luhan Li

Applied Economics Theses

National debt is a popular topic, since people have a lot of different views on national debt. For example, many people think that there is a positive relationship between national debt and GDP per capita. In other words, the national debt has also increased with the growth of GDP per capita. However, some people feel that there is an inverse relationship between them, so much so that the topic has been discussed. Based on my interest in this topic, I decided to discuss this question. This paper will discuss their influence and importance by analyzing national debt, GDP per capita, …

Cryptocurrencies As An Alternative To Fiat Monetary Systems, David A. Georgeson

Applied Economics Theses

The recent popularity of cryptocurrencies is largely associated with a particular application referred to as Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency has a mix of properties that make it difficult to examine. These properties consist of being infinitely divisible, durable, transferable, fungible and can be controlled to be artificially scarce. Further, cryptocurrencies can act as a means of payment, a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a unit of account. This thesis will analyze the technical features underlying cryptocurrencies and find out whether or not they can function as an alternative to fiat money. Since Bitcoin is the most commonly understood application …

Global Economic Outlook: An Interview With The Global Chief Economist Of The Economist Intelligence Unit, Simon Baptist, Simon Baptist, Alvin Lee

Asian Management Insights

Global Chief Economist of The Economist Intelligence Unit, Simon Baptist, discusses trends that are likely to shape the future global economic outlook, in this interview with Alvin Lee.

Maskin Meets Abreu And Matsushima, Yi-Chun Chen, Takashi Kunimoto, Yifei Sun, Siyang Xiong

Research Collection School Of Economics

We study the classical Nash implementation problem due to Maskin (1999), but allow for the use of lottery and monetary transfer as in Abreu and Matsushima (1992, 1994). We therefore unify two well-established but somewhat orthogonal approaches of implementation theory. We first show that Maskin monotonicity is a necessary and sufficient condition for pure-strategy Nash implementation by a direct mechanism. Second, taking mixed strategies into consideration, we show that Maskin monotonicity is a necessary and sufficient condition for mixed-strategy Nash implementation by a finite (albeit indirect) mechanism. Third, we extend our analysis to implementation in rationalizable strategies. In contrast to …

Essays On Wealth Inequality And Asset Pricing, Georgios Koimisis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Economic and financial theories are often found to be in conflict with empirical evidence, suggesting revisions and elaborations of existing models. There are usually many revisions proposed in response to these "puzzles", but often the true resolution may be a factor not yet realized. This dissertation consists of three chapters and contributes to the explanation of a persistent and significant anomaly, the equity premium puzzle, by taking into account the implications of wealth inequality on consumer preferences and, consequently, on asset prices.

The first chapter examines how wealth inequality affects asset prices in a complete market setting. Wealth inequality is …

2008 Financial Crisis And The Deviation From The Taylor Rule, Uzoma H. Okoye

Honors College Theses

In this paper, we derive possible causes of the 2008 financial crisis, as well as provide evidence of a possible deviation from the Taylor rule by the Federal Reserve. This research draws up mostly primary sources such as published books and speeches by John B. Taylor himself, as well as articles from academic journals related to the topic. Other prior research tends to take a side on the argument as to whether the Federal Reserve deviated or not. This paper serves as a descriptive analysis of different sides of the argument to come up with suggestions regarding the Fed’s actions.

The Rise And Fall Of The Stock Market: A Look At Financial Professionals Suicide Ideation, Jefferson Mcclain

Undergraduate Honors Theses

On October 24, 1929, the United States stock market crashed. Will Rogers, a local newspaper writer, said of that experience, “When Wall Street took that tail spin, you had to stand in line to get a window to jump out of, and spectators were selling space for bodies in the East River” (Lowenthal 1987). Tales of ruined stockbrokers jumping from the windows of tall buildings ran across the country. These stories have prompted interest in the interaction between workplace environment and mental health. In this study, we looked at the relationship between stock market performance and suicide ideation for working …

Impulsive Behavior In Competition: Testing Theories Of Overbidding In Rent-Seeking Contests, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Contests are commonly used in the workplace to motivate workers, determine promotion, and assign bonuses. Although contests can be very effective at eliciting high effort, they can also lead to inefficient effort expenditure (overbidding). Researchers have proposed various theories to explain overbidding in contents, including mistakes, systematic biases, the utility of winning, and relative payoff maximization. Using an eight-part experiment, we test and find significant support for the existing theories. Also, we discover some new explanations based on cognitive ability and impulsive behavior. Out of all explanations examined, we find that impulsivity is the most important factor explaining overbidding in …