Other Economics Commons^™

Do Economic Inequalities Affect Long-Run Cooperation & Prosperity?, Gabriele Camera, Cary Deck, David Porter

ESI Working Papers

We explore if fairness and inequality motivations affect cooperation in indefinitely repeated games. Each round, we randomly divided experimental participants into donor-recipient pairs. Donors could make a gift to recipients, and ex-ante earnings are highest when all donors give. Roles were randomly reassigned every period, which induced inequality in ex-post earnings. Theoretically, income-maximizing players do not have to condition on this inequality because it is payoff-irrelevant. Empirically, payoff-irrelevant inequality affected participants’ ability to coordinate on efficient play: donors conditioned gifts on their own past roles and, with inequalities made visible, discriminated against those who were better off.

Updated Tables And Figures For Ec 844 Nebraska Wheat Prices And Basis Patterns, Jessica J. Groskopf, Cory Walters

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

No abstract provided.

Updated Tables And Figures For Ec 846 Nebraska Cash Corn Prices And Basis Patterns, Jessica J. Groskopf, Cory Walters

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

No abstract provided.

Updated Tables And Charts For Ec 845 Nebraska Cash Soybean Prices And Basis Patterns, Jessica J. Groskopf, Cory Walters

Extension Farm and Ranch Management News

No abstract provided.

1st Place Contest Entry: Countering The Current: The Function Of Cinematic Waves In Communist Vs. Capitalist Societies, Maddie Gwinn

Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize

This is Maddie Gwinn's submission for the 2019 Kevin and Tam Ross Undergraduate Research Prize, which won first place. It contains her essay on using library resources, a three-page sample of her research project on how the Czech New Wave and New Hollywood cinema are defined by their agency in preserving and prescribing cultural meaning across their societies while being bound to their economic systems, and her works cited list.

Maddie is a senior at Chapman University, majoring in Film Production. Her faculty mentor is Dr. Carmichael Peters.

Reconsidering Rational Expectations And The Aggregation Of Diverse Information In Laboratory Security Markets, Brice Corgnet, Cary Deck, Mark Desantis, Kyle Hampton, Erik O. Kimbrough

ESI Working Papers

The ability of markets to aggregate diverse information is a cornerstone of economics and finance, and empirical evidence for such aggregation has been demonstrated in previous laboratory experiments. Most notably Plott and Sunder (1988) find clear support for the rational expectations hypothesis in their Series B and C markets. However, recent studies have called into question the robustness of these findings. In this paper, we report the result of a direct replication of the key information aggregation results presented in Plott and Sunder. We do not find the same strong evidence in support of rational expectations that Plott and Sunder …

The Fairness Of Fair Trade: An Analysis Of The Economics Of Fair Trade, Duke C. Schillaci, Julia R. Norgaard

Seaver College Research And Scholarly Achievement Symposium

In 2015, a study done by Cone Communications found that millennials are "universally more engaged in corporate social responsibility." In fact, 87% of millennials are willing to purchase a product with social or environmental benefits. Enter, the fair trade label. The fair trade label, which is attached to products which meet the previously mentioned consumer demands, has emerged over the last three decades. Products like organic produce, textiles, and natural commodities have entered into global retailers and supermarkets through these non-traditional distribution channels, supported by increased consumption as well as changing consumer preferences. In order to uncover the underlying economic …

Ecological Determinants Of Respiratory Health: Examining Associations Between Asthma Emergency Department Visits, Diesel Particulate Matter, And Public Parks And Open Space In Los Angeles, California, Jason A. Douglas, Reginald S. Archer, Serena E. Alexander

Health Sciences and Kinesiology Faculty Articles

Los Angeles County (LAC) low-income communities of color experience uneven asthma rates, evidenced by asthma emergency department visits (AEDV). This has partly been attributed to inequitable exposure to diesel particulate matter (DPM). Promisingly, public parks and open space (PPOS) contribute to DPM mitigation. However, low-income communities of color with limited access to PPOS may be deprived of associated public health benefits. Therefore, this novel study investigates the AEDV, DPM, PPOS nexus to address this public health dilemma and inform public policy in at-risk communities. Optimized Hotspot Analysis was used to examine geographic clustering of AEDVs, DPM, and PPOS at the …

The Political Economy Of Foreign Aid And Growth: Theory And Evidence, Sultan Mehmood, Avner Seror

ESI Working Papers

In this paper, we demonstrate that even when foreign aid is used to fund patronage, it may still have a positive - and significant - effect on economic growth in developing countries. First, we present a theory that formalizes the effect of aid on economic growth and patronage. Next, we provide evidence from Pakistan consistent with the predictions of the model that foreign aid increases economic growth, despite being used for patronage. The identification strategy we propose allows us to provide causal evidence for the predictions of the model.

Designing Call Auction Institutions To Eliminate Price Bubbles: Is English Dutch The Best?, Cary Deck, Maroš Servátka, Steven Tucker

ESI Working Papers

The bubble and burst pattern in asset market experiments is among the most replicable results in experimental economics. Numerous studies have searched for means to reduce this mispricing. Using controlled laboratory experiments, we compare mispricing in standard double auction markets to prices in two clock auctions. The double Dutch auction, shown to be more efficient than the double auction in commodity market experiments, does not eliminate bubbles. However, the English Dutch auction does yield prices reflective of underlying fundamentals and succeeds in taming bubbles even with inexperienced traders in the common declining fundamental value environment.

Methodological Differences Cannot Explain Associations Between Health, Anthropometrics, And Excess Resting Metabolic Rate, Michael Gurven, Benjamin Trumble, Jonathan Stieglitz, Dan Cummings, Hillard Kaplan, Aaron D. Blackwell, Gandhi Yetish, Herman Pontzer

ESI Publications

"We appreciate Ocobock's interest in methodological rigor. We largely agree with her commentary, which suggests that departures from standard protocols might have contributed to the high resting metabolic rate (RMR) measured for Tsimane. Indeed, our paper acknowledges many of the key departures from gold-standard indirect calorimetry methods of RMR assessment and attempts to adjust for several of these (Gurven et al., 2016). Bringing standard clinical methods into remote field settings often involves certain compromises, especially in our case, where RMR measurement was just one component of a large-scale health and aging project (Gurven et al., 2017). RMR data collection was …

Salience And Social Choice, Mark Schneider, Jonathan W. Leland

ESI Working Papers

The axioms of expected utility and discounted utility theory have been tested extensively. In contrast, the axioms of social welfare functions have only been tested in a few questionnaire studies involving choices between hypothetical income distributions. In this note, we conduct a controlled experiment with 100 subjects in the role of social planners that tests five fundamental properties of social welfare functions to provide a basic test of cardinal social choice theory. We find that four properties of the standard social welfare functions tested are systematically violated, producing an Allais paradox, a common ratio effect, a framing effect, and a …

Producer Services: A Hub For Stem And An Engine For Job Growth, Eric Thompson, Uyen Tran

Business in Nebraska

The producer services sector, which includes professional and technical services such as accounting, engineering, computer programming, advertising and consulting, is the fastest growing, high-wage segment of the U.S. economy. Producer services employment grew by 15 percent nationwide from 2008 through 2017 but only by 5 percent in Nebraska. Nebraska growth lagged the nation in part because the state has smaller metropolitan areas. Producer service businesses tend to congregate in larger cities. To grasp more opportunities in this growing, high wage sector, Nebraska needs to train more workers in STEM occupations, encourage the development of small businesses in the sector, and …

A Time To Print, A Time To Reform, Lars Boerner, Jared Rubin, Battista Severgnini

ESI Working Papers

The public mechanical clock and movable type printing press were arguably the most important and complex technologies of the late medieval period. We posit that towns with clocks became upper-tail human capital hubs--clocks required extensive technical know-how and fine mechanical skill. This meant that clock towns were in position to adopt the printing press soon after its invention in 1450, as presses required a similar set of mechanical and technical skills to operate and repair. A two-stage analysis confirms this conjecture: we find that clock towns were 34-40 percentage points more likely to also have a press by 1500. The …

Linking Social Protection And Humanitarian Assistance In The Philippines, Fernando T. Aldaba

Economics Department Faculty Publications

This study is part of a multi-country collection of cases showing that humanitarian assistance and social protection programmes are not necessarily mutually exclusive. As will be shown in the next section, there is an increasing amount of literature discussing the integration of humanitarian assistance into social protection systems or the linkage of disaster risk responses with specific social safety net programmes. The nexus maybe seen through synergies via common frameworks, platforms and systems utilized in such programmes. The Philippines, a developing economy in Southeast Asia continues to tackle the problems of poverty and vulnerability among its 100 million population. It …

Counterparty Risk And The Establishment Of The New York Stock Exchange Clearinghouse, Asaf Bernstein, Eric Hughson, Marc Weidenmier

Business Faculty Articles and Research

We examine the effect of the establishment of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) clearinghouse in 1892 on counterparty risk using a novel historical experiment. During this period, the NYSE stocks were dual-listed on the Consolidated Stock Exchange (CSE), which already had a clearinghouse. Using identical securities on the CSE as a control, we find that the introduction of multilateral net settlement through a clearinghouse substantially reduced volatility of NYSE returns caused by settlement risk and increased asset values. Our results indicate that a clearinghouse can improve market stability and value through a reduction in network contagion and counterparty risk.

Endogenous Market Formation And Monetary Trade: An Experiment, Gabriele Camera, Dror Goldberg, Avi Weiss

ESI Working Papers

The theory of money assumes decentralized bilateral exchange and excludes centralized multilateral exchange. However, endogenizing the exchange process is critical for understanding the conditions that support the use of money. We develop a “travelling game” to study the emergence of decentralized and centralized exchange, theoretically and experimentally. Players located on separate islands can either trade locally, or pay a cost to trade elsewhere, so decentralized and centralized markets can both emerge in equilibrium. The former minimize trade costs through monetary exchange; the latter maximizes overall surplus through non-monetary exchange. Monetary trade emerges when coordination is problematic, while centralized trade emerges …

The Attack And Defense Games, Roman Sheremeta

ESI Working Papers

The attack and defense game is a game in which an attacker (a group of attackers) has an incentive to revise the status quo and a defender (a group of defenders) wants to protect it. The asymmetry in objectives creates incompatible interests and results in a mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium. However, this equilibrium could be heavily impacted by behavioral considerations.

On The Merit Of Equal Pay: Performance Manipulation And Incentive Setting, Brice Corgnet, Ludivine Martin, Peguy Ndodjang, Angela Sutan

ESI Publications

Work performance is often difficult to assess thus leaving room for manipulation of commonly-used metrics. We created a laboratory workplace in which we can precisely assess both work performance along with manipulation activities. Using two independent experiments we show that, whenever pay for performance is used, manipulation is pervasive leading to both a waste of organizational resources and a weakening of incentives. By contrast, paying organizational members equally effectively deters manipulation attempts leading to higher organizational production.

A Bias Aggregation Theorem, Mark Schneider

ESI Working Papers

In a market where some traders are rational (maximize expected utility) and others are systematically biased (deviate from expected utility due to some bias parameter, q), do equilibrium prices necessarily depend on q? In this note, focusing on the case where there is an aggregate and systematic bias in the population, we show that market prices can still be unbiased. Hence, we establish that systematically biased agents do not necessarily imply biased market prices. We show that the parametric model we use also predicts observed deviations from expected utility in laboratory and market environments.