Macroeconomics Commons^™

A Markov Decision Process Approach To Optimal Control Of A Multi-Level Hierarchical Manpower System, Akaninyene U. Udom

CBN Journal of Applied Statistics (JAS)

A recurrent problem in manpower control is how to attain the desired structural configuration in an optimal way, since it is possible to reach a desired structural configuration using different control inputs. The major aim of this paper is to develop a Markov Decision Process for optimal control of a Multi-level Hierarchical Manpower System (MHMS) by promotion and interdepartmental transfers. This is examined under control by intervention and contraction cost Markov Decision Process.

Minimum Investment Requirement, Financial Integration And Economic (In)Stability: A Refinement To Matsuyama (2004), Haiping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

This note proposes a simple, more precise, necessary condition for symmetry breaking in Matsuyama (Financial Market Globalization, Symmetry-Breaking, and Endogenous Inequality of Nations, Econometrica, 2004 ), i.e., the positive interest rate response to income changes, which essentially arises from the assumptions of financial frictions and minimum investment size requirement of individual projects. This condition also holds under the more general settings. Thus, this note o ers an empirically testable hypothesis, i.e., Matsuyama's symmetry breaking is more likely, if the interest rate response to income changes is positive and sufficiently large.

Detecting Bubbles In Hong Kong Residential Property Market, Matthew S. Yiu, Jun Yu, Lu Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

This study uses a newly developed bubble detection method (Phillips, Shi, and Yu, 2011) to identify real estate bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market. Our empirical results reveal several positive bubbles in the Hong Kong residential property market, including one in 1995, a stronger one in 1997, yet another one in 2004, and a more recent one in 2008. In addition, the method identifies two negative bubbles in the data, one in 2000 and the other one in 2001. These empirical results continue to be valid for the mass segment and the luxury segment. However, this method has …

Do Major League Baseball Hitters Engage In Opportunistic Behavior?, Heather M. O'Neill

Business and Economics Faculty Publications

This study focuses on 256 Major League Baseball free agent hitters playing under the 2006–2011 collective bargaining agreement to determine whether players engage in opportunistic behavior in their contract year, i.e., the last year of their current guaranteed contracts. Past studies of professional baseball yield conflicting results depending on the econometric technique applied and choice of performance measure. When testing whether players’ offensive performances increase during their contract year, the omitted variable bias associated with OLS and pooled OLS estimation leads to contrary results compared to fixed effects modeling. Fixed effects regression results suggest players increase their offensive performance subject …

Macroeconomic And Political Determinants Of Foreign Direct Investment In The Middle East, Robin Barnaby Calver

Dissertations and Theses

This study argues that governments with sustained GDP growth, open markets, low country risk, high levels and low standard deviation of government performance, and few or no occurrences of war, will see larger levels of foreign direct investment (FDI) over time. Scholarship on the determinants of FDI variously argues the influence of GDP growth, the openness of a country's economy, a government's level of political capacity, the level of country risk, and the negative effects of inter-, intra- and extrastate conflict. These studies on the various effects on FDI, while providing insightful and substantial statistical results, fail to capture the …

Study Of Economic Development Of Pakistan Through Stock Market: Causal Relationship Of Stock Prices And Macroeconomic Indicators, Rizwan Raheem Ahmed, Yaseen Ahmed Meenai, Fazal Hussain

Business Review

The purpose of the research is to examine the causal relationship between stock prices and the variables representing the real sector of the economy for example real GDP, and real investment, in Pakistan. In this study, annual data is used (quarter-wise) from December 1980 to June 2007 and the correlation analysis has been applied, to investigate the relationship. For better understanding of the Market’s Behavior, data has been grouped in to Liberalization periods; Preliberalization and Post-Liberalization. The stock market in Pakistan provides an average quarterly return of 2.86%.The average annual growths in real variables are just lower than 1% for …

Policy Responses In An Unstable Globalized Economy: Multi-Stressed Low-Earning Families In Singapore, Irene Y. H. Ng, Kong Weng Ho

Research Collection School Of Economics

The Singapore government responded swiftly to the 2008 global recession, doling out a range of policies in aid of all levels of wage earners. This paper explores the impacts of economic trends and government policies on low-wage earners. Using a theoretical model and empirical data from a pilot study of recipients of a government Work Support Program, it demonstrates the effects of socioeconomic factors on multi-stressed low-earning families. It discusses the adequacy of current policies in addressing the multiple stressors experienced by low-wage earners.

Governance & Sustainability: Does Democracy Beggar Thy Future?, Nathanael D. Peach

Faculty Publications - College of Business

Findings:

An increase in political stability:

• Higher levels of natural resource depletion
• Higher levels of adjusted net savings (ANS) i.e. contributes positively to sustainable growth

Increase in democracy:

• Lower levels of natural resource depletion
• Impact on sustainability is conditional on the economic and political context

Transition To Full-Fledged Inflation Targeting: A Proposed Programme For Implementation By The Central Bank Of Nigeria, Michael O. Ojo

CBN Occasional Papers

This paper attempts to provide an input into addressing these issues, especially as regards resolving the technical, administrative and practical problems for a transition to inflation targeting as a framework for monetary policy in Nigeria. Specifically, the main purpose of this paper is to outline proposals that would permit the CBN transit successfully to full-fledged inflation targeting (FFIT) for its monetary policy operations. Following the introduction (Section 1), the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 examines the conceptual framework, focusing on the essential elements and modalities of different monetary policy frameworks. Section 3 contains an overview of the experiences …

An Analysis Of The Monetary Policy Transmission Mechanism And The Real Economy In Nigeria, Eddy C. Ndekwu

CBN Occasional Papers

The study is an empirical analysis which seeks to explain the monetary policy transmission mechanism to the real economy in Nigeria. It examines the process by which the interest rate policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria actually affects the structure of interest rates, credit, aggregate demand and output production and, hence, changes in inflation rate. In the analysis, we review the paradigm of the channels of monetary policy transmission mechanism by studying over two and-half dozen cases of empirical studies in the economic literature. By applying vector auto-regression (VAR) with dynamic logarithmic form and the ordinary least squares (OLS) …

The Disparate Neighborhood Impacts Of The Great Recession: Evidence From Chicago, Sonya Williams, George C. Galster, Nandita Verma

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

We advance scholarship about how macroeconomic forces differentially manifest themselves across local spaces by developing a holistic conceptual framework and empirical analyses involving multilevel change modeling. Unlike prior work, we examine differential rates of change in neighborhood indicators. We illustrate our approach with Chicago data measuring the crime, housing, and economic domains of neighborhood quality- of-life over the 2000-2009 period. We find that the local dynamic manifestations of macroeconomic cycles were far more nuanced than have been previously observed. Neighborhood indicators moved along distinct trajectories, sometimes but not necessarily tracking each other or the overall business cycle, and they changed …

Structural Change And Real Output Growth In Nigeria: A Cointegration Analysis, P. D. Golit

Economic and Financial Review

The study employed the Johansen (1988) and the Johansen and Juselius (1990) multivariate maximum likelihood method within a Vector Autoregressive framework to explore the impact of structural reforms on the level of real output in Nigeria. We fit the equation separately for two sub-samples, the pre-reform and the market-reform periods, to enable comparisons of the outcomes under alternative policy regimes. We further estimate the model using data that covered the entire sample period to evaluate the total effects and include a dummy variable to capture the impact of the policy shift. The Johansen cointegration test confirms the existence of long-run …

Cost-Effective Estimation Of The Population Mean Using Prediction Estimators, Tomoki Fujii, Roy Van Der Weide

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper considers the prediction estimator as an efficient estimator for the population mean. The study may be viewed as an earlier study that proved that the prediction estimator based on the iteratively weighted least squares estimator outperforms the sample mean. The analysis finds that a certain moment condition must hold in general for the prediction estimator based on a Generalized-Method-of-Moment estimator to be at least as efficient as the sample mean. In an application to cost-effective double sampling, the authors show how prediction estimators may be adopted to maximize statistical precision (minimize financial costs) under a budget constraint (statistical …

Inflation Targeting And Growth: The Role Of The Tradable Sector, Luis Monroy Gómez Franco

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper provides an analytical explanation to the empirical association between monetary policy conducted according to the inflation targeting (IT) framework and the appreciation of the exchange rate, relating it to the literature on the effects of the exchange rate on growth. A two sector small open economy model is developed in which the behavior of the non tradable inflation and the nominal exchange rate are analyzed. The results indicate that the response to inflation variance under the IT regime causes the appreciation trend. Since this trend is not reversed immediately, increasing returns in the tradable sector affect capital accumulation.

Can Neoclassical Trade Theory Explain Congressional Voting?, John Dellipriscoli

Master's Theses

The neoclassical trade model has notoriously been unable to empirically predict trade flows throughout the world, however there has been a notion that the same theories and predictions could also be applied to democratic voting on free trade legislation. Using roll-call votes on three 2011 United States bilateral trade agreements with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea, respectively, a simple empirical model based on the neoclassical concepts, specifically the Heckscher-Ohlin and Stolper-Samuelson corollary theorems, is outlined. After an analysis using a logit estimation method, it is revealed that there is conflicting evidence whether the voting on the 2011 free trade agreements …

The Changing Dynamics Of The Employment Gap And Its Macroeconomic Implications, William Brian Gowen

Honors Projects in Economics

There has been much discussion about the sluggish economic recovery out of the recent recession. However, the lag in employment growth is not unique to the most recent recovery. Jobless recoveries have plagued the U.S. economy over the last three business cycles. The reasons for this change have remained largely inconclusive, with several factors highlighted in the current literature. This paper uses Vector Autoregression (VAR) to analyze the employment gap in the United States over the past six decades. Unlike previous studies, it accounts for the most recent recession while also addressing alternative explanations - trade and globalization, government employment, …

Jobs Don’T Grow On Trees, Nicholas Johnson

Undergraduate Research Symposium 2013

Most contemporary macroeconomic models account for unemployment by making the simplifying assumptions that 1) there is an equilibrium level of unemployment and that 2) when the economy is not at that level it will tend towards equilibrium. Implicit in these models is also the assumption that the actual behavior of unemployment does not affect the equilibrium level. This paper joins a growing number of economists pointing out that such assumptions are false: the equilibrium does depend on past behavior, a trait called hysteresis. This paper considers the hysteresis hypothesis by using an iterated version of OLS to construct a series …

[Sabbatical Report], Claudia Strow

Sabbatical Reports

This document summarizes my sabbatical leave activities for spring semester, 2014. Below my accomplishments are discussed, and the value of the sabbatical leave to my teaching and research is assessed. The main activities I conducted during my sabbatical leave period included work on a new research project examining FMLA's impact on breastfeeding, the writing of a second edition of a textbook, substantial revisions for an accepted publication for the Journal of 'Markets and Morality, a revise and resubmit of a manuscript for the Journal of Applied Economics and Public Policy, an interview for Voice of America, the presentation of a …

Decomposing The Changes Of The Divisia Price Index: Application To Inflation In The Philippines, Tomoki Fujii

Research Collection School Of Economics

We decompose the logarithmic change in the Divisia price index into the pure price, substitution, and preference effects, although the latter two effects are hard to distinguish in practice. This decomposition allows us to identify the incidence and contributing factors of inflation. In the Philippines, we find that the preference effect is much smaller than the pure price effect in all provinces. We also find that rich deciles have experienced a higher inflation than poor deciles between 1988 and 2006. However, the gap in the standards of living has actually widened because poor deciles lagged behind in consumption growth.

The Macroeconomic Effect Of Currency Union Dissolution: Evidence From The Narrative, Marcus Josefsson

Honors Theses

In the face of the growing importance of alternative monetary arrangements throughout the world, the economics literature contains contradictory explanations for the impact of currency union dissolution. Some argue that dissolving a union removes limitations to growth, while others contend that the ensuing uncertainty drives weaker macroeconomic performance. In this paper, I present empirical analysis of the macroeconomic effect of dissolving currency unions. I utilize a narrative approach to address asymmetries in the underlying motivations for different dissolutions, and find that the absence of economic concerns driving dissolution leads to improved growth in the post dissolution period. Further, evidence for …