Economics Commons^™

Singapore Consumer’S Inflation Expectations And Creation Of Singapore Index Of Inflation Expectations, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The aim of this report is to highlight a broad spectrum of issues that brings about the measurement of the disagreement and the uncertainity and the formation of inflation expectations among economic agents in Singapore.

Uniform Asymptotic Normality In Stationary And Unit Root Autoregression, Chirok Han, Peter C. B. Phillips, Donggyu Sul

Research Collection School Of Economics

While differencing transformations can eliminate nonstationarity, they typically reduce signal strength and correspondingly reduce rates of convergence in unit root autoregressions. The present paper shows that aggregating moment conditions that are formulated in differences provides an orderly mechanism for preserving information and signal strength in autoregressions with some very desirable properties. In first order autoregression, a partially aggregated estimator based on moment conditions in differences is shown to have a limiting normal distribution that holds uniformly in the autoregressive coefficient rho, including stationary and unit root cases. The rate of convergence is root n when vertical bar rho vertical bar < 1 and the limit distribution is the same as the Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), but when rho = 1 the rate of convergence to the normal distribution is within a slowly varying factor of n. A fully aggregated estimator (FAE) is shown to have the same limit behavior in the stationary case and to have nonstandard limit distributions in unit root and near integrated cases, which reduce both the bias and the variance of the MLE. This result shows that it is possible to improve on the asymptotic behavior of the MLE without using an artificial shrinkage technique or otherwise accelerating convergence at unity at the cost of performance in the neighborhood of unity. Confidence intervals constructed from the FAE using local asymptotic theory around unity also lead to improvements over the MLE.

International Capital Flows With Limited Commitment And Incomplete Markets, Jürgen Von Hagen, Haiping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Economics

Recent literature has proposed two alternative types of financial frictions, i.e., limited commitment and incomplete markets, to explain the patterns of international capital flows between developed and developing countries observed in the past two decades. This paper integrates both types of frictions into a two-country overlapping-generations framework to facilitate a direct comparison of their effects. In our model, limited commitment distorts the investment made by agents with different productivity, which creates a wedge between the interest rates on equity capital vs. credit capital; while incomplete markets distort the investment among projects with different riskiness, which creates a wedge between the …

One Mandarin Benefits The Whole Clan: Hometown Infrastructure And Nepotism In An Autocracy, Kieu-Trang Nguyen, Quoc-Anh Do, Anh Tran

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper studies nepotism by government officials in an authoritarian regime. We collect a unique dataset of political promotions of officials in Vietnam and estimate their impact on public infrastructure in their hometowns. We find strong positive effects on several outcomes, some with lags, including roads to villages, marketplaces, clean water access, preschools, irrigation, and local radio broadcasters, as well as the hometown’s propensity to benefit from the State’s “poor commune support program”. Nepotism is not limited to only top-level officials, pervasive even among those without direct authority over hometown budgets, stronger when the hometown chairperson’s and promoted official’s ages …

Power Maximization And Size Control Of Heteroscedasticity And Autocorrelation Robust Tests With Exponentiated Kernels, Yixiao Sun, Peter C. B. Phillips, Sainan Jin

Research Collection School Of Economics

Using the power kernels of Phillips, Sun, and Jin (2006, 2007), we examine the large sample asymptotic properties of the t-test for different choices of power parameter (ρ). We show that the nonstandard fixed-ρ limit distributions of the t-statistic provide more accurate approximations to the finite sample distributions than the conventional large-ρ limit distribution. We prove that the second-order corrected critical value based on an asymptotic expansion of the nonstandard limit distribution is also second-order correct under the large-ρ asymptotics. As a further contribution, we propose a new practical procedure for selecting the test-optimal power parameter that addresses the central …

A Simple And Robust Method Of Inference For Spatial Lag Dependence, Zhenlin Yang, Yan Shen

Research Collection School Of Economics

A simple and reliable method of inference for the spatial parameter in spatial autoregressive models is introduced, based on a statistic obtained by centering and rescaling the numerator of the concentrated Gaussian score function. The resulted tests and confidence intervals are robust against the distributional misspecifications and are insensitive to the spatial layouts and the error standard deviation. In contrast, the standard methods based on Gaussian score and information matrix may lead to inconsistent inference when errors are non normal, and can be quite sensitive to the spatial layouts and the error standard deviation even when errors are normally distributed. …

The Marketplace Of Boston: Macrobotanical Remains From Faneuil Hall, Ciana Faye Meyers

Graduate Masters Theses

Residents of Boston in the eighteenth century utilized a wide range of botanical materials in their daily lives, navigating complex urban marketing systems and utilizing their own individual ingenuity to procure botanical resources. The one thousand eight hundred and eighty-three botanical remains recovered from a "community midden" underneath the present-day Faneuil Hall represents a diverse collection of taxa which encodes information not only about the localized dietary practices of colonial urban residents, but also helps to illuminate the more subtle ramifications of Boston's participation in the Atlantic economy on the lives of its residents. These botanical remains represent taxa from …

Including Jobs In Benefit-Cost Analysis, Timothy J. Bartik

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Public policies may affect employment by directly creating jobs, facilitating job creation, or augmenting labor supply. In labor markets with high unemployment, such employment changes may have significant net efficiency benefits, which should be included in benefit-cost analyses.
The research literature offers diverse recommendations on measuring employment benefits. Many of the recommendations rely on arbitrary assumptions. The resulting employment benefit estimates vary widely.
This paper reviews this literature, and offers recommendations on how to better measure employment benefits using estimable parameters. Guidance is provided on measuring policy-induced labor demand, estimating the demand shock’s impact on labor market outcomes, and translating …

State Economic Development Policies: What Works?, Timothy J. Bartik

Presentations

No abstract provided.

Policy-Performance Gap, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

The diagnostics of Pakistan’s worsening economic conditions are quite well known. The vital signs of the health of the economy i.e. growth, inflation, employment, fiscal balance, current account balance, indebtedness, etc appear worrisome.

The persistence of an ailing economy sapping the energies of the people raises a fundamental question: are the policy prescriptions to rectify the situation themselves deficient or is the dosage administered, i.e. the phasing, sequencing, mixture and timing of the policies, inadequate, or is ‘patient management’— the implementation of these policies — poor?

A dispassionate analysis would reveal that it is a combination of all three elements …

Finding Historic Indiana Documents In An Online Environment: Civil War Era And Later 19th Century, Bert Chapman

Libraries Research Publications

This presentation provides information on digitally accessing historic Indiana State and U.S. Government documents from the latter half of the 19th century. Examples of these resources include the periodical Indiana Farmer, Indiana Civil War Governor Oliver Morton's telegraph books, the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, Indiana Adjutant General Reports, and the Brevier Indiana Law Reports covering Indiana General Assembly proceedings. These collections have been digitized by various Indiana libraries including Purdue University, IUPUI, and Indiana University. Accessing these primary source materials will enable users to gain augmented understanding ot the economic, military, and political issues facing Indiana …

Happiness Around The World: The Paradox Of Happy Peasants And Miserable Millionaires, Carol Graham

Brookings Scholar Lecture Series

For centuries the pursuit of happiness was the preserve of philosophers. More recently there is a burgeoning interest in the study of happiness in the social sciences. Can we really answer the question what makes people happy? Is it grounded in credible methods and data? Is there consistency in the determinants of happiness across countries and cultures? Are happiness levels innate to individuals or can policy and the environment make a difference? How is happiness affected by poverty and by progress? This presentation introduces a line of research which is both an attempt to understand the determinants of happiness and …

The Science Of Public Health Delivery: Evidence, Uncertainties & Research Needs, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

Policy initiatives to reform the nation's health system increasingly recognize the need to incorporate public health and prevention strategies. The nation's delivery system for public health, however, varies widely across states and communities in its structure, authority, and capabilities. This session examines research from the growing field of public health services and systems research to identify directions for improving public health delivery.

Conflicts In The Licensing Process For Transcanada's Keystone Xl Pipeline, F. Gregory Hayden

Department of Economics: Faculty Publications

The purpose of this report is to investigate and explain conflicts involved in the ongoing licensing process whereby TransCanada is attempting to obtain permission from the U.S. Department of State to build a pipeline (named Keystone XL) from the tar sand oil fields of Alberta, Canada to the Gulf Coast. The economic concepts important in guiding this investigation are: (1) rules are important, (2) moral hazard, and (3) corporate strategic misinformation.

Economists emphasize the importance of rules for structuring and determining the working of economic institutions and the social institutions that support, regulate, and enforce the economic institutions. The kind …

Unify, Regionalize, Diversify: An Economic Development Agenda For Nevada, Mark Muro

Brookings Mountain West Publications

Nevada stands at a crossroads, yet it appears ready to remap its future.

Silver Staters sense that the current economic slump has not been just a temporary reversal but a challenge to the state’s traditional growth model—one that has revealed an economy over-dependent on consumption sectors, prone to booms and busts, and too little invested in innovation and economic diversification. And yet, for all that Nevadans have been early to recognize that the current slump will beget, in some places, innovation and renewal, and in other places erosion—and so requires action.

To that end, this report draws on an intense …

Consequences Of Elitism, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

In my book Pakistan: The Economy of an Elitist State, I presented the thesis that one per cent of Pakistan`s population the elitist class had contrived to rig the market and hijacked the state for their own benefit. This small minority was able to enjoy its unjust accumulation of wealth in the midst of widespread poverty. Little did I realise that this phenomenon would spread from Tunis to Sanaa and from Sydney to Seattle. The Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street movement may have originated for ostensibly different reasons but their root cause is the same growing disenchantment of the …

Mountains Of Injustice : Social And Environmental Justice In Appalachia, Michele Morrone, Geoffrey L. Buckley

Ohio University Press Open Access Books

Research in environmental justice reveals that low-income and minority neighborhoods in our nation’s cities are often the preferred sites for landfills, power plants, and polluting factories. Those who live in these sacrifice zones are forced to shoulder the burden of harmful environmental effects so that others can prosper. Mountains of Injustice broadens the discussion from the city to the country by focusing on the legacy of disproportionate environmental health impacts on communities in the Appalachian region, where the costs of cheap energy and cheap goods are actually quite high.

Through compelling stories and interviews with people who are fighting for …

Accommodation Or Deterrence In The Face Of Commercial Piracy: The Impact Of Intellectual Property Rights (Ipr) Protections, Yuanzhu Lu, Sougata Poddar

Economics Faculty Articles and Research

In this paper, we address the issue of illegal copying or counterfeiting of the original product and Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) protections. The original product developer makes costly investment to deter piracy in a given regime of IPR protection. In the presence of a commercial pirate, we find that it is profitable for the original producer to accommodate the pirate when there is weak IPR protection, and deter when the IPR protection is strong. However, in the comparative statics analysis, we find that there is a non-monotonic relationship between the optimal level of deterrence (chosen by the original producer) and …

Estimating The Value Of Public Health Services & Systems: Evidence, Uncertainties, And Research Needs, Glen P. Mays

Health Management and Policy Presentations

The Affordable Care Act authorized the largest expansion in federal funding for public health services and delivery systems in decades. These provisions, designed to support programs and services that promote health and prevent disease and injury on a population-wide basis, remain controversial because of uncertainties regarding their effectiveness in improving health and constraining medical cost growth. This session examines a series of recent studies to shed light on the health and economic value of spending on public health.

An Assessment Of The Bc Careers Employer Resource Network: Its Contributions To The Ern Model, Kevin Hollenbeck, George A. Erickcek, Bridget Timmeney

Reports

No abstract provided.