Other Economics Commons^™

Using Immersive Data Visualization To Highlight Changing Travel Patterns In Maine Due To Covid 19, Colleen Metcalf, Charlotte Aucoin

Thinking Matters Symposium

The impacts of COVID 19 are of top concern to tourism policy makers and stakeholders across Maine, as tourism plays a vital role in the state’s economy. This project shows the value of the Storymap to present, in an accessible and visually appealing way, the continuing research on how volunteered geographic information from social media can track changes in tourist’s movement and spending in Maine. The metadata from Flickr photos was used to examine where visitors spent time in the summer of 2020, revealing new patterns of tourism activity due to Covid-19 travel restrictions. In addition, we incorporate the results …

Mapping The Cash Waqf Literature Based On Web Of Science And Vosviewer: A Bibliometric And Visualization, Sri Yayu Ninglasari

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study aims to systematically explore and cluster by mapping and visualizing the cash waqf research literature to serve basis for future research. A system mapping research (SMS) was employed with bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer based on Web of Science data from 1979 to April 2021. This study visualized patterns of the co-occurrence of keywords, co-citation relationships, and citations of documents. We show the literature's influential aspects, such as the number of publications per year, countries, institutions, journals, authors, and topics. The review of cash waqf research comprises 46 publications by 107 authors affiliated with 32 organizations in 9 countries, …

A Comparative Analysis Of Bohemian And Irish Immigration During The Antebellum Period, Emily Suchan

Honors Projects

Compare and Contrast the immigration experience of an Irish and Bohemian (Czech) immigrant. This essay describes the history of both regions and analyzes the political and economic stressors for immigration during the second half of the nineteenth century. This essay specifically follows the Irish Famine immigrants and the Czechs who settled in Cleveland, OH

Legalized Same-Sex Marriage And Coming Out In America: Evidence From Catholic Seminaries, Avner Seror, Rohit Ticku

ESI Working Papers

We study the effect of legalization of same-sex marriage on coming out in the United States. We overcome data limitations by inferring coming out decisions through a revealed preference mechanism. We exploit data on enrollment in seminary studies for the Catholic priesthood, hypothesizing that Catholic priests' vow of celibacy may lead gay men to self-select as a way to avoid a heterosexual lifestyle. Using a differences-in-differences design that exploits variation in the timing of legalization across states, we find that city-level enrollment in priestly studies fell by about 15% exclusively in states adopting the reform. The celibacy norm appears to …

An Investigation Of Health Insurance Policy And Behavior In A Virtual Environment, J. Dustin Tracy, Kevin A. James, Hillard Kaplan, Stephen Rassenti

ESI Publications

We introduce a new experimental approach to measuring the effects of health insurance policy alternatives on behavior and health outcomes over the life course. In a virtual environment with multi-period lives, subjects earn virtual income and allocate spending, to maximize utility, which is converted into cash payment. We compare behavior across age, income and insurance plans—one priced according to an individual’s expected cost and the other uniformly priced through employer-implemented cost sharing. We find that 1) subjects in the employer-implemented plan purchased insurance at higher rates; 2) the employer-based plan reduced differences due to income and age; 3) subjects in …

Nebraska Recovers From The Pandemic Economy, Eric Thompson

Business in Nebraska

The COVID-19 Pandemic threw the United States economy into a severe and sharp recession during the first half of 2020. A combination of government “shutdown” restrictions and private actions led to a particularly severe decline in economic activity in late March and April. The lifting or reduction of government restrictions across the United States led to a fast recovery in subsequent months, especially as businesses and consumers learned to adapt to their new operating conditions. However, the rate of recovery has slowed recently as the spread of Covid-19 has accelerated and many businesses have curtailed travel, maintained “work from home” …

The Influence Of Food Recommendations: Evidence From A Randomized Field Experiment, Kamal Bookwala, Caleb Gallemore, Joaquín Gómez-Miñambres

ESI Working Papers

We report results from a randomized field experiment conducted at two food festivals. Our primary aim is to assess the impact of two types of recommendations commonly observed in food settings: most popular and chef’s choice. Subjects select a cupcake from a binary menu. The two options, offered by the same bakery, are the best seller in the bakery and the baker’s recommended cupcake. Our treatments manipulate whether the recommendation is disclosed in tandem with the cupcakes in the menu. We find that the most popular is the only recommendation that statistically significantly increased consumers’ demand relative to …

Very Low Prevalence And Incidence Of Atrial Fibrillation Among Bolivian Forager-Farmers, Christopher J. Rowan, Michael A. Eskander, Edmond Seabright, Daniel Eid Rodriguez, Edhitt Cortez Linares, Raul Quispe Gutierrez, Juan Copajira Adrian, Daniel Cummings, Bret Beheim, Kirsten Tolstrup, Abinash Achrekar, Thomas Kraft, David E. Michalik, Michael I. Miyamoto, Adel H. Allam, L. Samuel Wann, Jagat Narula, Benjamin C. Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Randall C. Thompson, Gregory S. Thomas, Hillard S. Kaplan, Michael D. Gurven

ESI Publications

Background: Atrial fibrillation is the most common arrhythmia in post-industrialized populations. Older age, hypertension, obesity, chronic inflammation, and diabetes are significant atrial fibrillation risk factors, suggesting that modern urban environments may promote atrial fibrillation.

Objective: Here we assess atrial fibrillation prevalence and incidence among tropical horticulturalists of the Bolivian Amazon with high levels of physical activity, a lean diet, and minimal coronary atherosclerosis, but also high infectious disease burden and associated inflammation.

Methods: Between 2005–2019, 1314 Tsimane aged 40–94 years (52% female) and 534 Moseten Amerindians aged 40–89 years (50% female) underwent resting 12-lead electrocardiograms to assess atrial fibrillation prevalence. …

Negative Shocks Predict Change In Cognitive Function And Preferences: Assessing The Negative Affect And Stress Hypothesis, Francesco Bogliacino, Cristiano Codagnone, Felipe Montealegre, Frans Folkvord, Camilo Gómez, Rafael Charris, Giovanni Liva, Francisco Lupiáñez-Villanueva, Giuseppe A. Veltri

ESI Publications

In the context of the current COVID-19 pandemic, households throughout the world have to cope with negative shocks. Previous research has shown that negative shocks impair cognitive function and change risk, time and social preferences. In this study, we analyze the results of a longitudinal multi-country survey conducted in Italy (N = 1652), Spain (N = 1660) and the United Kingdom (N = 1578). We measure cognitive function using the Cognitive Reflection Test and preferences traits (risk, time and social preferences) using an experimentally validated set of questions to assess the differences between people exposed to a shock compared to …

Measuring Heterogeneous Preferences For Residential Amenities, Arthur J. Caplan, Sherzod B. Akhundjanov, Kristopher Toll

Applied Economics Faculty Publications

This study reports on estimates of heterogeneous preferences for residential amenities among households in the Mountain West region of the US. The estimates are derived from a choice experiment funded by the Utah Department of Transportation and Utah Transit Authority—an experiment based upon large samples of both homeowners and renters who participated in a larger, statewide transportation study. The choice experiment and transportation study allow us to control for a rich set of household-level demographic and lifestyle characteristics, which in turn permits identification of a host of factors contributing to heterogeneity in residential preferences. We leverage a percentage-change housing cost …

Nebraska Corn Basis Response To Economic Shutdown, Austin Harthoorn, Cory Walters, Jessica J. Groskopf

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

The objective of this article is to evaluate how Nebraska corn basis evolved through this past year’s economic events. We hope growers update their commodity price marketing decision framework as this past year exposed levels prices can reach — an important factor to consider when farm survival is on the line.

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

ESI Working Papers

In this paper, we study N-player Colonel Blotto games with incomplete information about battlefield valuations. Such games arise in job markets, research and development, electoral competition, security analysis, and conflict resolution. For M ≥ N + 1 battlefields, we identify a Bayes-Nash equilibrium in which the resource allocation to a given battlefield is strictly monotone in the valuation of that battlefield. We also explore extensions such as heterogeneous budgets, the case M ≤ N, full-support type distributions, and network games.

Economics Students: Self-Selected In Preferences And Indoctrinated In Beliefs, Antonio M. Espín, Manuel Correa, Alberto Ruiz-Villaverde

ESI Working Papers

There is much debate as to why economics students display more self-interested behavior than other students: whether homo economicus self-select into economics or students are instead “indoctrinated” by economics learning, and whether these effects impact on preferences or beliefs about others’ behavior. Using a classroom survey (n>500) with novel behavioral questions we show that, compared to students in other majors, econ students report being: (i) more self-interested (in particular, less compassionate or averse to advantageous inequality) already in the first year and the difference remains among more senior students; (ii) more likely to think that people will be unwilling …

Institutions And Opportunistic Behavior: Experimental Evidence, Antonio Cabrales, Irma Clots-Figueras, Roberto Hernán-González, Praveen Kujal

ESI Working Papers

Risk mitigating institutions have long been used by societies to protect against opportunistic behavior. We know little about how they are demanded, who demands them or how they impact subsequent behavior. To study these questions, we run a large-scale online experiment where insurance can be purchased to safeguard against opportunistic behavior. We compare two different selection mechanisms for risk mitigation, the individual and the collective (voting). We find that, whether individual or collective, there is demand for riskmitigating institutions amongst high-opportunism individuals, while low-opportunism individuals demand lesser levels of insurance. However, high-opportunism individuals strategically demand lower insurance institutions when they …

In-Group Versus Out-Group Preferences In Intergroup Conflict: An Experiment, Subhashish M. Chowdhury, Anwesha Mukherjee, Roman M. Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

Individuals participating in a group conflict have different preferences, e.g., maximizing their own payoff, maximizing the group’s payoff, or defeating the rivals. When such preferences are present simultaneously, it is difficult to distinctly identify the impact of those preferences on conflict. In order to separate in-group and out-group preferences, we conduct an experiment in which human in-group or out-group players are removed while keeping the game strategically similar. Our design allows us to study (i) how effort in a group conflict vary due to in-group and out-group preferences, and (ii) how the impact of these preferences vary when the two …

Identifying Bedrest Using Waist-Worn Triaxial Accelerometers In Preschool Children, J. Dustin Tracy, Thomas Donnelly, Evan C. Sommer, William J. Heerman, Shari L. Barkin, Maciej S. Buchowski

ESI Publications

Purpose

To adapt and validate a previously developed decision tree for youth to identify bedrest for use in preschool children.

Methods

Parents of healthy preschool (3-6-year-old) children (n = 610; 294 males) were asked to help them to wear an accelerometer for 7 to 10 days and 24 hours/day on their waist. Children with ≥3 nights of valid recordings were randomly allocated to the development (n = 200) and validation (n = 200) groups. Wear periods from accelerometer recordings were identified minute-by-minute as bedrest or wake using visual identification by two independent raters. To automate visual identification, chosen decision tree …

Gambling With Debt: The English Premier League, Edward Robinson

Undergraduate Economic Review

This paper aims to investigate the impact of debt on financial performance in the English Premier League from the 2000/01 season to the 2017/18 season. Panel model estimations concluded debt has a significant inverse relationship with financial performance. This relationship may potentially be stronger in larger clubs and could be present through human capital investment’s significant direct relationship with financial performance. This further emphasised usages of intangible assets as a player human capital investment indicator, rather than using wage costs like previous studies. Furthermore, filling a gap regarding how capital structures may be used to impact financial performance within’ football.

Do Truth-Telling Oaths Improve Honesty In Crowd-Working?, Nicolas Jacquemet, Alexander G. James, Stéphane Luchini, James J. Murphy, Jason F. Shogren

ESI Publications

This study explores whether an oath to honesty can reduce both shirking and lying among crowd-sourced internet workers. Using a classic coin-flip experiment, we first confirm that a substantial majority of Mechanical Turk workers both shirk and lie when reporting the number of heads flipped. We then demonstrate that lying can be reduced by first asking each worker to swear voluntarily on his or her honor to tell the truth in subsequent economic decisions. Even in this online, purely anonymous environment, the oath significantly reduced the percent of subjects telling “big” lies (by roughly 27%), but did not affect shirking. …

Monetization Of Fiscal Deficits And Covid-19: A Primer, Aidan Lawson, Greg Feldberg

Journal of Financial Crises

Monetization—also known as “money-financed fiscal programs” or “money-printing”—occurs when a government finances itself by issuing currency or other non-interest-bearing liabilities, such as bank reserves. It poses real risks—potentially excessive inflation and encroachment on central-bank independence—and some paint it as a relic of a bygone era. The onset of the COVID-19 crisis, however, forced governments to spend heavily to combat the considerable economic and public health impacts. As government deficits climbed, monetization re-entered the conversation as a way to avoid the massive debt burdens that some nations may face. This paper describes how monetization works, provides key historical examples, and examines …

Will Seasonality Patterns For Beef Export Sales And Commitments Hold In 2021?, Elliott James Dennis

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

First two paragraphs:

Trade occurs when price differences between the two locations are large enough after accounting for transportation cost, exchange rates, tariffs, etc. Exports vary throughout the year since prices reflect current and future supply and demand situations. Seasonality in cattle production, meat demand, and market disruptions are some examples of why wholesale beef prices increase and decrease within a year.

The inability to market cattle in the second quarter of 2020 and increased demand for retail beef products due to government gathering restrictions in restaurants caused wholesale beef prices to rise to historical levels. Beef wholesalers can choose …