Faculty Research

Authors: Lewis Davis and Nabamita Dutta

Does the Fraser Institute's Economic Freedom Index (EFI) constitute, as its proponents claim, a coherent measure of a classically liberal approach to economic governance? Noting the central role of individualism to liberalism, we provide evidence on this claim by investigating the empirical relationship between individualism and the EFI. Our findings suggest that there is a strong, positive relationship between individualism and the EFI. This relationship is robust to the use of alternative measures of individualism, to controls for a wide range of historical, cultural and institutional variables, and to the use of instrumental variable methods to address measurement and endogeneity issues. We also find evidence of a strong positive, causal relationship between individualism and four of the five components of the EFI. While these findings broadly support the claim that the EFI provides a measure of a classically liberal approach to economic governance, they also present challenges the empirical literature on the EFI. In particular, it is unclear whether liberal economic policies or the individualist values that underlie these policies are responsible for the positive relationship between the EFI and measures of social welfare.

Article Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.70028

Authors: Erika Rodriguez and Zachary Rodriguez

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dallas County, Texas implemented a 52-day shelter-in-place order, forcing residents to remain at home. Using daily crime reports and animal shelter intake data, we study the effect of household pet outflows on in-home violence. We find that the shelter-in-place order is associated with increased in-home assaults, particularly against women. The way pets exit households matters, as we find fostering pets mitigates in-home violence, while owner surrenders are associated with increased assaults during the order. These results highlight pets as a previously understudied factor in domestic violence dynamics and suggest that coordinated policies integrating animal shelters, women's shelters, and law enforcement could improve safety. By facilitating safe pet placement, such interventions may allow victims to leave abusive households more freely, reducing family violence and protecting both humans and animals.

Article Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ajes.70031

Author: Dong Cheng, Mario J. Crucini, Hyunseung Oh, and Hakan Yilmazkuday

Abstract: This paper curates historical data on the quantity and unit value of automobiles exported from the United States to 23 destination countries along with natural and official barriers relevant to automobiles to account for the 46:1 automobile adoption gap between the US and the median country by 1929. For the median destination country, the export markup, tariff, and shipping cost are each roughly 20% ad-valorem-equivalent distortions, the retail distribution wedge is about 30%, and the foreign user cost wedge (based on gasoline taxes) is above 100%. Eliminating these price wedges and income differences relative to the US is shown to account for over 80% of the adoption gap. The estimated reduced-form adoption model accounts for much of the time series variation with relative price declines and income growth driving US and global adoption upward over time and the Great Depression reversing some of these gains at roughly constant relative.

Article Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S00221

Authors: Dong Cheng, Michael A. Klein, and Fuat Şener

Abstract: Using comprehensive microdata from the Chinese Patent Survey, we examine the appropriation strategies that firms use to capture value from their innovations and assess the motivations underpinning these strategies. Although Chinese firms exhibit a robust overall preference for patents, we find that firms often use patents for reasons other than directly protecting intellectual assets from competitors. In particular, our results suggest that firms utilize patents to secure external financing and negotiate third-party production contracts, while relying on secrecy and/or first mover advantage to protect against competitor imitation. Furthermore, we find that firms pursuing the most expensive R&D projects exhibit a relative preference for secrecy over patents, consistent with theories that predict the use of secrecy to protect a firm's most valuable intellectual assets. Our results provide novel insights into China's recent patenting surge and help inform policy efforts to encourage domestic innovation in developing economies.

Article Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jems.12636

Author: Younghwan Song

Abstract: Although the COVID-19 pandemic has affected everyone’s life in the United States, the experience of the pandemic differed considerably by age: the risk of hospitalization and death from COVID-19 increases exponentially with age. Using data from the 2013 and 2021 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Modules, this paper examines how various measures of subjective well-being have changed during the COVID-19 pandemic among two age groups in the United States: individuals aged 15–44 and those aged 45–85. The measures of subjective well-being analyzed include activity-level subjective well-being measures, such as happiness, pain, sadness, stress, tiredness, and meaningfulness, as well as overall life evaluation based on the Cantril ladder. The regression results indicate that younger people felt less happy, more stressed, and less tired during the COVID-19 pandemic because their time use patterns, such as activity types, timing, and with whom, changed. However, there was no change in the life evaluation of the younger group due to the pandemic. The older group, in contrast, felt more pain, sadder, and less meaningful during the COVID-19 pandemic, even after controlling for their health status and time use patterns, perhaps because they had lost many family members and friends to COVID-19. Their life evaluation increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, maybe because they began to better appreciate their life after the deaths of many people around them.

Article Link: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-025-00911-6

Author: Lewis Davis

I forward and empirically support a cultural theory of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights. Individualism supports values of personal autonomy, the right to a private life, and acceptance of non-conforming behavior. In keeping with these values, I propose that individualism reduces homophobia and increases LGBT rights. I document a strong, negative relationship between individualism and homophobia using individual-level data from the Integrated Values Survey. At the country level, I document a strong, positive relationship between individualism and a broad index of LGBT rights. In the baseline model, a one-standard deviation increase in individualism is associated with three-quarters of a standard deviation increase in the LGBT rights index. This relationship is robust to a wide variety of controls related to other dimensions of culture, women’s empowerment, and national institutions. The relationship between individualism and LGBT rights is stronger in common law countries. I use climatic and linguistic instruments to address concerns regarding the endogeneity and measurement of individualism. This study identifies LGBT rights as part of a nexus of individual rights supported by Enlightenment values.

Article Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0167268125003026

Authors: Lewis Davis and Claudia Williamson Kramer

This study examines how individualism influences patriarchal gender norms across 93 countries, using data from the Integrated Values Surveys. We hypothesize that individualism, emphasizing personal autonomy and egalitarian values, reduces patriarchal attitudes directly and indirectly through formal institutions. Our findings reveal a robust negative association between individualism and patriarchal attitudes, with a one-standard deviation increase in individualism linked to a 0.78 standard deviation decrease in patriarchal attitudes. This association holds across various controls and instrumental variable techniques addressing endogeneity. Mediation analysis shows that institutions, particularly liberal democracy and legal gender parity, mediate 5% to 37% of this association. These results underscore individualism’s role in promoting egalitarian gender norms and suggest that culturally aligned institutional reforms, such as strengthening women’s economic rights or democratic participation, can amplify these effects.

Article Link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/individualism-institutions-and-patriarchal-attitudes/4905E10538E8637389E2905F206145C1

Authors: Lewis Davis and Claudia Williamson Kramer

Countries with individualist cultures tend to adopt fewer business regulations. In this paper, we investigate how individualism affects regulation by incorporating the role of legal institutions. We hypothesize that a common law legal tradition is more responsive to cultural preferences than a civil law tradition. Consequently, we anticipate that individualism and common law interact as complements, reducing the intensity of regulating businesses. Using data from the Integrated Values Surveys for individualism and the World Bank's Doing Business Project for regulation, we find that the impact of culture on regulation is significantly amplified in common law countries, decreasing regulation in individualist countries but increasing it in collectivist ones. This holds across types of regulations and is robust to various controls and instrumental variable analysis. Additional tests show the interaction is stronger in court-involved regulations and mediated by judicial review, supporting common law's relative adaptability. These findings align with the theoretical proposition that culture shapes regulatory preferences, while legal institutions determine the extent to which these preferences translate into policy outcomes. Furthermore, our findings refine legal origins theory, emphasizing common law's cultural sensitivity rather than inherent superiority.

Article Link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/soej.70005

Authors: Prateek Arora, Dongwan Choo, and Chenyue Hu

This paper investigates how bilateral economic linkages influence consumption synchronization across economies in response to idiosyncratic shocks. Using the US state-level data, we find the degree of bilateral consumption smoothing to decrease with geographic distance. To explain this fact, we develop an open economy DSGE model that incorporates trade, migration, and finance as channels of risk sharing subject to bilateral frictions that potentially covary with distance. Calibrated to the US data, this structural model enables us to examine interactions of different channels in general equilibrium and quantify their impacts on states’ consumption. Through counterfactual exercises, we find that turning off the three channels weakens consumption correlations across states in general, while trade is more effective than migration and financial channels in stabilizing consumption fluctuations.

Article Link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0014292125002132

Author: Cardazzi, Alexander, and Zachary Rodriguez. "Demand for offense: designated hitters and MLB attendance." Applied Economics (2024): 1-14.

Abstract: In 2022, Major League Baseball changed its rules to include the designated hitter position in both the American and National Leagues. Up until that year, designated hitters were only used by American League teams. This rule change creates an environment where half of a major sports league is given a shock to offensive production. We analyse the demand for offence by investigating how the designated hitter affects attendance and offensive production for National League teams. Our results contribute to a rich literature that analyzes how offence affects fan participation, as we provide the first evidence using causal inference that offence increases fan attendance. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we show that the offence created by a designated hitter increases attendance by about 3.5–7.9% at National League home games as a result of the rule change. Given a point estimate increase in total offence of about 4.85%, we find evidence that attendance is elastic with respect to total offence.

Article:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00036846.2024.2302929

Dong Cheng & Xunpeng Shi, "The Power Crunch and Firms’ Anticipatory Investment: Evidence from Manufacturing SMEs in China." The Energy Journal - May 2024

Abstract: Using manufacturing survey data from China, we study the relationship between firms’ anticipatory investment (or in other words, willingness to invest) in the short-run future and their perception of the current power crunch for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Our findings reveal a robust and significant negative association, suggesting a sizable persistent negative impact of the power crunch on firms’ investment lingering over at least a couple of months. The dynamic impacts are very different at the industry level, with electricity-dependent industries appearing to take more hits. However, we find no statistically significant evidence to support the channel of electricity dependence in comparison with the channel of capacity utilization. Moreover, we show that firms of smaller size suffer disproportionately larger damage in future investment, which highlights the importance of caring about SMEs, relative to big firms.

Article link: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.5547/01956574.45.3.dche

Davis, Lewis and Zachary Rodriguez “Do Religious Beliefs Matter for Economic Values?” Journal of Institutional Economics 20, e34, Oct. 2024, 1-20.

Abstract: Economic studies of religion tend to focus on religious affiliation and attendance at religious services to the exclusion of other dimensions of religion, including religious belief. We address this lacuna, using data from the World Values Survey to construct an index of religious beliefs based on whether an individual believes in God, heaven, hell, an immortal soul, and the afterlife. Following the approach in a seminal article, we compare the roles of religious beliefs and attendance in determining economic values related to cooperation, patriarchy, institutional trust, lawfulness, thrift, markets, and market fairness. Controlling for denominational, country and period fixed effects and a set of individual-level characteristics, we find that religious beliefs matter for six of these seven values, relative to five for attendance. In addition, beliefs are more important than attendance for promarket and patriarchal values and less important for thrift, market fairness, lawfulness, and institutional trust. We also consider the relationships between beliefs, attendance, and economic values for eight religious’ affiliations: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, other religions, and non-religious. Taken together, beliefs and attendance are most important for patriarchal values, promarket attitudes, lawfulness, and institutional trust. Relative to attendance, beliefs matter most for patriarchal attitudes and least for institutional trust. Our results suggest that religious beliefs constitute an important dimension of religious life. An exclusive focus on attendance may understate the role of religion in economic values.

Article link: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-institutional-economics/article/do-religious-beliefs-matter-for-economic-values/35697E21BCCA3ADC31B8FBA10F0479DB

Davis, Lewis, Astghik Mavisakalyan, and Clas Weber, “Gendered Language and Gendered Violence,” Journal of Comparative Economics, forthcoming, August 12, 2024.

Abstract: This study establishes the influence of sex-based grammatical gender on gendered violence. We demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between speaking a gendered language and the incidence of intimate partner violence in a cross-section of countries. Motivated by this evidence, we conduct an individual-level analysis of the effect of speaking a gendered language on beliefs about the justifiability of intimate partner violence, controlling for a wide variety of individual level socioeconomic characteristics as well as country, religion, language family and ethnicity fixed effects. Speaking a gendered language is associated with the belief that intimate partner violence is justifiable. Our results are consistent with complementarity between the cultural and cognitive effects of language on the attitudes to intimate partner violence.

Article link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014759672400057X

Davis, Lewis “Patriarchy, Development, and the Divergence of Women’s Empowerment,” Kyklos 77(4), November, 2024, 895-921.

Abstract: How do culture and development interact to determine women's empowerment? I develop a simple model of women's labor supply in which economic development simultaneously reduces the stigma against women working and relaxes the consumption constraint that often forces poor women to work. The model predicts that women's labor supply will follow a U-shaped relationship, falling and then rising as development proceeds. In addition, in countries with more patriarchal values, women's labor supply will be lower, fall over a greater income range, and then rise more slowly on the upward sloping portion of the curve. I investigate and confirm these predictions in a broad sample of countries employing six different measures of historical patriarchy as well as a composite measure of patriarchal history. These findings indicate that as economic development proceeds, women's labor supply will diverge across countries as differences in the intensity of patriarchal values play an ever larger role in the allocation of women's labor.

Article link: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/kykl.12398

Davis, Lewis and Astghik Mavisakalyan, “Individualism and the Legal Status of Prostitution,” Journal of Comparative Economics 52(3), September, 2024, 714-732.

Abstract: We know very little about why the legal status of prostitution varies across countries. Drawing on central arguments in the normative literature on the legal status of prostitution, in which a central argument concerns the sexual and bodily autonomy of women, we ask whether a country's position on the individualism-collectivism affects the legal status of prostitution. We investigate this question using a panel of 61 countries, finding a robust positive relationship between individualism and the legality of prostitution. In the baseline model, a one-standard deviation increase in individualism is associated with a ten percentage point increase in the likelihood that prostitution is legal. This relationship is robust to controls for institutional structure, other dimensions of culture, and measures of women's economic status and historical patriarchy. It is also robust to the use of instrumental variable analysis to address issues of endogeneity and measurement error. Our results also shed light on two additional aspects of the normative debate over legal prostitution. In particular, we find that prostitution is more likely to be legal in countries in which women enjoy greater economic status, but we fail to find a consistent empirical relationship between historical patriarchy and legal prostitution.

Article link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0147596724000416#:~:text=Individualism%20is%20associated%20with%20the,argument%20that%20prostitution%20is%20work

• Author: Ana Espinola-Arredondo, Felix Munoz-Garcia, & Dolores Garrido
• Abstract: We examine an environmental policy which may be revisited by a new administration. We allow for pollution to be persistent over time and for uncertainty in next period's environmental policy. When pollution is non-persistent, we show that regulatory uncertainty is inconsequential for output, pollution, or emission fees. However, when pollution is persistent, we find that a more likely reelection of a stringent administration has the unintended (positive) consequence of reducing current pollution. We also measure the inefficiencies stemming from ignoring pollution persistence and from policy uncertainty, identifying in which contexts they are severe or negligible.
• Article: "Measuring regulatory errors from environmental policy uncertainty"

• Author: Prateek Arora, Nirvikar Singh & Abhijit Visaria
• Abstract: In this paper, we study the factors that influence the choice of healthcare providers in the rural areas of a highly developed Indian state, Punjab. In particular, we examine the choice between government and private providers, and between medical professionals and informal providers. We also examine the joint choice of provider type and distance travelled, and possible factors influencing reported satisfaction with the quality of care received. We use data from a household survey of 489 households from 10 villages around the town of Nabha. We construct a measure of anticipated treatment cost in order to account for the endogeneity of actual costs in healthcare choices. Our results indicate that respondents who identified costs as a primary factor in their choice of provider were more likely to choose a nearby government provider and less likely to choose a distant private provider. Additionally, higher anticipated treatment costs were associated with a greater likelihood of choosing a government provider compared to a private provider and choosing a professional versus non-professional provider. Overall, cost sensitivity was negatively associated with patient satisfaction. Our results have important implications for understanding household decisions in the choice of government and private healthcare providers.
• Article: "Healthcare Costs, Choice of Providers and Patient Satisfaction: Survey Evidence from India"

• Author: Alexander Cardazzi, Joshua C. Martin, & Zachary Rodriguez
• Abstract: We present evidence that Earvin “Magic” Johnson's announcement that he contracted HIV served as a public-health catalyst for rapidly correcting the public's understanding of who was at risk of infection. Using a novel identification strategy, we present evidence that there was a large but temporary increase in the number of AIDS diagnoses for heterosexual men following the announcement. This effect was concentrated in areas with greater prior exposure to Johnson. We show that these men were both more likely to have been diagnosed via a formal blood test and less likely to die within 1 decade of their initial diagnosis—suggesting that Johnson's announcement caused an intertemporal substitution in testing which prolonged patients' lifespans as a result of earlier access to medical care. We estimate that Johnson's announcement caused approximately 800 additional heterosexual males in the United States in metropolitan statistical areas with National Basketball Association franchises men to discover their underlying AIDS diagnosis and, of whom, were more likely to live at least 1 decade beyond their initial diagnosis date.
• Article: "Information shocks and celebrity exposure: The effect of “Magic” Johnson on AIDS diagnoses and mortality in the U.S."

• Author: Lewis Davis, Stephen J. Schmidt, Sophia Zacher
• Abstract: We provide an empirical analysis of the determinants of cumulative COVID infection rates at 1069 U.S. colleges and universities during the 2020–21 academic year. We propose that financially constrained educational institutions faced a trade-off between the reduction of COVID infection risks and an institution's educational, social, reputational, and financial goals. We find that cumulative infection rates are higher at wealthier institutions, measured by higher endowments per student or higher tuition rates. Institutions with lower enrollment yields in admissions also have higher COVID infection rates, perhaps reflecting the greater influence of student preferences on decision making at these institutions. Economies of scale in COVID mitigation emerge gradually over the course of the year. Finally, COVID infection rates do not differ significantly for otherwise similar public and private institutions in states with Democratic governors, but they are significantly higher for public institutions in states with Republican governors.
• Article: "COVID on campus: An empirical analysis of COVID infection rates at U.S. colleges and universities"

• Author: Lewis Davis & Justin Esposito
• Abstract: According to Putnam (2000) and Bourdieu (1986), social disparities may result in the formation of narrow social bonds that exacerbate existing social cleavages and impede collective action. Motivated by this insight, we examine the relationship between social disparities and social distancing during the pre-vaccine Covid pandemic in the US. Using a panel of weekly, county-level observations, we find that income, educational and racial disparities are associated with a statistically significant decrease in the social distancing. This result is robust to controls for a wide variety of socioeconomic variables, the Covid infection rate, and a measure of social capital.
• Article: "Social Disparities and Social Distancing During the Covid Pandemic"

• Author: Zachary Rodriguez
• Abstract: Planning the goals you wish to achieve in your future can be overwhelming. You may have a general idea of what you want the future to look like regarding your career, family, and retirement, but you may be uncertain on how to save for this future. Visiting a financial planner at your local bank was what families used to do to when mapping out their future. Yet, as banks grew in size and as corruption within the banking industry has been made public for the past 40 years, households now question whether or not they can trust their local bankers. Do banks look out for their client's welfare or are they a self-interested firm? Can you trust bankers who likely gave up big profits at bigger institutions to work locally? Maybe bankers cannot control themselves regardless of location, and financial planners in small banks unconsciously enable the types of decisions that benefit their banks but put your wealth at risk? If you have these feelings of mistrust toward the banking system in the U.S., then Filipe Maia's Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Financialized Capitalism is a useful reference for you, as Maia articulates the institutional ideology within the banking industry that affects our ability to conceptualize the future.
• Article: "Trading Futures: A Theological Critique of Finanicalized Capitalism"

• Author: Lewis Davis, Dolores Garrido, Carolina Missura
• Abstract: Environmental-quality and environmental-protection actions vary worldwide. Investing in environmental quality often involves intertemporal trade-offs, with present costs and future rewards. A growing body of literature finds that patience, a measure of time preference, is positively associated with pro-environmental policies, attitudes, and behaviors. However, much of this work relies on contemporaneous measures of patience that may be jointly determined with environmental attitudes, and thus may give rise to spurious correlations, calling the validity of these results into question. This paper contributes to the discussion on the determinants of environmental quality by addressing this methodological concern. We propose an individual measure of patience in the form of inherited cultural values, which is derived from information on the countries of origin of an individual’s parents. We argue that this inherited-patience measure is plausibly an exogenous event in an individual’s life. Using this measure, we find a strong, positive relationship between inherited patience and concern for the environment. Our results are robust to the inclusion of variables reflecting an individual’s demographic and socioeconomic status, religious identity, trust, political ideology, and location, as well as period and country fixed effects.
• Article: "Inherited Patience and the Taste for Environmental Quality"

• Author: Younghwan Song & Jia Gao
• Abstract: Using data drawn from 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Modules, this paper examines the existence of son preference among fathers in the U.S. by estimating the effect of child gender on the fathers’ subjective well-being. A wide range of subjective well-being measures, including happiness, pain, sadness, stress, tiredness, and meaningfulness, is analyzed, and fixed-effects models are adopted to control for unobserved individual heterogeneity. The results from the full sample show that fathers feel less sad and tired when interacting with both sons and daughters versus with daughters only. In families with only one child, fathers report no difference in subjective well-being when spending time with a son versus with a daughter. By further stratifying this sample of fathers by child’s age of three, we continue to find no difference in paternal subjective well-being between being with a son and with a daughter when the child is younger than three. However, when the child is three or older, we find that fathers feel less stressed and more meaningful being with a son versus with a daughter. The results from Asian fathers in the U.S., in contrast, show a tremendous reduction in stress in activities with sons only than with daughters only. These results indicate no evidence of son preference in the general U.S. population. If there is any, it only exists among Asian fathers in the U.S.
• Article: "Do fathers have son preference in the United States? Evidence from paternal subjective well-being"

• Authors: Kaywana Raeburn, Sonia Laszlo & Jim Warnick
• Abstract: Incomplete information is a commonly cited barrier to the adoption of new innovations. We present a decision-making experiment, conducted with farmers in the field, that explores the extent to which information which reduces ambiguity may be provided as a public good. In the experiment, participants make a series of decisions between a risky gamble and an ambiguous gamble. An initial private decision is followed by second choice in which participants know that their chosen gambles and outcomes will be publicly but anonymously revealed. Selection of the ambiguous option in this decision thus provide public good information which can be used to update beliefs about the ambiguous gamble. After the public revelation, participants make one final choice between the two options which we use to assess learning. We also test communication as a mechanism to increase provision of the public good. We find evidence that people with preference to avoid ambiguity contribute to public good information while risk averse people free ride. Communication does not affect the overall public good provision, either in a positive or negative direction. Finally, we find that people draw appropriate inference from the information that the public good provides. We relate our findings to the issue of new technology adoption in agriculture which is of particular importance for our participants.
• Article: "Resolving ambiguity as a public good: experimental evidence from Guyana"

• Authors: Younghwan Song, J. P. Sevilla, Jessica M. Klusty, Mark J. Russo, Christin A. Thompson, Xiayu Jiao, Seth J. Clancy, and David E. Bloom
• Abstract: We evaluated the availability of transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) to determine its value across all severe symptomatic aortic stenosis (SSAS) patients, especially those untreated because of concerns regarding invasive surgical AVR (SAVR) and its impact on active aging. We performed payer perspective cost-utility analysis (CUA) and societal perspective cost-benefit analysis (CBA). The CBA’s benefit measure is active time: salaried labor, unpaid work, and active leisure. The study population is a cohort of US elderly SSAS patients. We compared a “TAVR available” scenario in which SSAS patients distribute themselves across TAVR, SAVR, and medical management (MM); and a “TAVR not available” scenario with only SAVR and MM. We structured each scenario with a decision-tree model of SSAS patient treatment allocation. We measured the association between health and active time in the US Health and Retirement Study and used this association to impute active time to SSAS patients given their health. The incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) and rate of return (RoR) of TAVR availability were $8,533 and 395%, respectively. CUA net monetary benefits (NMB) were $212,199 per patient and $43.4 billion population-wide. CBA NMB were $50,530 per patient and $10.3 billion population-wide. Among study limitations were scarcity of evidence regarding key parameters and the lack of long-term survival, health utility, and treatment cost data. Our analysis did not account for TAVR durability, retreatments, and valve-in-valve treatments. Across risk-, age-, and treatment-eligibility groups, TAVR is the economically optimal treatment choice. It represents strong value-for-money per patient and population-wide. The vast majority of TAVR value involves raising treatment uptake among the untreated.
• Article: "Cost-utility and cost-benefit analysis of TAVR availability in the US severe symptomatic aortic stenosis patient population"

• Authors: Alicia Dang and Robert Samaniego
• Abstract: An issue with estimating the impact of industrial support is that the firms that receive support may be politically connected, introducing omitted variable bias. Applying fixed-effects regressions on Vietnamese panel data containing several proxies for political connectedness to correct this bias, we find that firms that receive industrial support in the form of tax holidays experience more rapid productivity growth, particularly in R&D-intensive industries, and less so among politically connected firms. These findings do not appear to be due to the presence of financing constraints. We then develop a second-generation Schumpeterian growth model with many industries, and show that tax holidays disproportionately raise productivity growth in R&D-intensive industries. These results are significant and important for governments, especially those in transition and developing countries, in better targeting their industrial policy to facilitate higher productivity growth.
• Article: "R&D, Industrial Policy and Growth"

• Authors: Zachary Rodriguez, Alexander Cardazzi, Bryan C McCannon, and Brad R Humphreys
• Abstract: Domestic violence generates long-term effects on offenders, victims, and other household members. While coercive behavior explains some family violence, aggression can also be reactive, triggered by emotional stimulus. Insight into triggers of family violence can inform policy and mitigate abusive behavior. Card, D. and G. B. Dahl. (2011). “Family Violence and Football: The Effect of Unexpected Emotional Cues on Violent Behavior,” 126 The Quarterly Journal of Economics 103–43 undertook a novel analysis of family violence triggers using unexpected losses by American professional football teams. We extend research on this trigger using data from National Basketball Association (NBA) games. Our results show that unexpected NBA losses lead to increased in-home violence. Heterogeneity analyses show that these effects are larger for weekend games, when referees are fatigued, and closer to the playoff season. (JEL J44, K42, Z22).
• Article: "Emotional Cues and Violent Behavior: Unexpected Basketball Losses Increase Incidents of Family Violence"

• Authors: Lewis Davis and Claudia Williamson
• Abstract: Individualism is associated with an emphasis on personal liberty and self-determination, values that reduce support for patriarchal norms and increase gender equality. Here, we investigate whether individualism affects women's economics rights, a key institutional determinant of the economic opportunities available to women. We provide evidence of an economically and statistically significant association between individualism and the de facto level of women's economic rights. This result is robust to a variety of controls, including per capita income, women's educational attainment, oil production, historical determinants of patriarchal culture, and the quality of legal and political institutions. In addition, we present evidence that this association is causal, drawing on instruments motivated by roles of climate and disease in cultural evolution. Finally, we show that individualism's influence on women's economic rights is magnified in democratic and common law countries, suggesting that democracies and common law systems channel cultural preferences into legal outcomes.
• Article: "Individualism and women's economic rights"

• Authors: Mehmet Fuat Sener and Michael A. Klein
• Abstract: We develop a model of Schumpeterian growth featuring a stochastic diffusion process where the rate of commercial success of product innovations is endogenously determined by advertising intensity. We consider both informative advertising, which young technological leaders use to increase the probability of diffusion, and defensive advertising, which incumbents use to prevent the diffusion of competing products. Economic growth depends positively on the arrival rate of product innovations and the diffusion rate of innovations into the mainstream market. We show that R&D subsidies shift relative investment incentives towards innovation and away from diffusion. This creates an inverted U-shaped relationship between R&D subsidies and both economic growth and welfare as innovations arrive more frequently, but fewer commercialize successfully. We find that advertising subsidies increase diffusion, growth, and welfare when advertising is purely informative. In the presence of defensive advertising, advertising subsidies lead to socially wasteful increases in resources devoted to advertising without large increases in diffusion, reducing growth and welfare.
• Article: "Product innovation, diffusion and endogenous growth"

• Authors: Dolores Garrido and Rosa Karina Gallardo
• Abstract: We use choice experiments to investigate heterogeneity in preferences for a refrigerated ready-to-heat meal with an extended shelf life and the processing technology (i.e., microwave-assisted pasteurization) that provides that longevity. On average, an extra day of shelf life decreases the utility associated with purchasing and eating the meal. A segmentation analysis reveals the presence of convenience consumers, who are willing to pay a premium for a more convenient meal (with an extended shelf life), but the interaction effect of shelf life with technology reverts their willingness to pay for an extra day of shelf life, suggesting a negative reaction to the new technology. (EconLit Citations: Q13, Q16, Q19).
• Article: "Are improvements in convenience good enough for consumers to prefer new food processing technologies?"

• Authors: Dong Cheng & Alyssa Trebino (Class of 2020)
• Abstract: We investigate the contribution of automobile adoption to state-level real income in the United States using hand-collected historical data of the early twentieth century when the adoption was remarkably rapid. To achieve identification, we construct a Bartik-type instrumental variable for automobile adoption. We find an elasticity of income with respect to automobile adoption between 0.5 and 1. Furthermore, we reveal that the elasticity is significantly larger in high-income and automobile producing states.
• Article: "Early twentieth century American exceptionalism on wheels: the role of rapid automobile adoption in economic development"

• Authors: Maria Laura Montero, Dolores Garrido, R. Karina Gallardo, Juming Tang & Carolyn F. Ross
• Abstract: A home-use test (HUT) is one method that provides a measure of ecological validity as the product is consumed in home under common daily use circumstances. One product that benefits from being evaluated in-home are ready-to-eat (RTE) meals. This study determined consumer acceptance of microwave-thermally-pasteurized jambalaya, a multi-meat and vegetable dish from American Cajun cuisine, and a control (cooked frozen jambalaya) through an on-line home-use test (HUT) over a 12-week storage period. Paralleling the HUT, an online auction determined consumers’ willingness to pay. The study also explored how the social environment may impact the liking of the meals when a partner of the participants joined the sensory evaluation of the meals. Consumers (n = 50) evaluated microwave-processed jambalaya stored at 2 °C and a control (cooked frozen jambalaya stored at −31 °C) after 2, 8 and 12 weeks of storage. Consumer liking of different sensory attributes was measured. Participants could choose to share the meals with a partner as a way to enhance ecological validity. The responses from 21 partners to the sensory-related questions were collected. After the sensory evaluation, the participants bid on the meal they had just sampled. Results showed that processing method (microwave vs. control) did not significantly influence the measured sensory attributes. Only flavor liking decreased over storage time (p < 0.05). The inclusion of partners significantly increased (p = 0.04) the liking of the appearance of the meals. The mean values of the bids for the meals ranged from $3.33–3.74, matching prices of commercially available jambalaya meals. This study found suggests that the shelf- life of microwave-processed meals could be extended up to 12 weeks without changing its overall liking. The study also shows the importance of exploring HUT methodology for the evaluation of consumers’ acceptance of microwave-processed jambalaya and how including a partner could contribute to enhance ecological validity.
• Article: "Consumer Acceptance of a Ready-to-Eat Meal during Storage as Evaluated with a Home-Use Test"

• Authors: Dolores Garrido, R. Karina Gallardo, Carolyn F. Ross, Maria Laura Montero & Juming Tang
• Abstract: In this study, we estimate consumers’ willingness to pay (WTP) for ready meals preserved using microwave assisted pasteurization systems (MAPS)—a novel pasteurization technology, compared to frozen, ready meals. We conducted a laboratory multi-round experimental auction for two samples of ready meal jambalaya in which appearance and sensory evaluation along with extrinsic information was sequentially disclosed to panelists. Our results suggest that when participants tasted the meals and formed an opinion from the meal itself, the liking of appearance and sensory attributes were the most impactful factors for participants’ WTP regardless of other available extrinsic (name of the preservation technology and environmental impacts of each technology) attributes. The words “microwave” and “pasteurization” did not negatively impact the WTP. The order in which intrinsic and extrinsic attributes were evaluated and presented did not impact absolute WTP values, but the order did impact the weight of each attribute type on the WTP.
• Article: "Does the order of presentation of extrinsic and intrinsic quality attributes matter when eliciting willingness to pay?"

• Authors: Dolores Garrido, R. Karina Gallardo, Carolyn F. Ross, Maria Laura Montero & Juming Tang
• Abstract: A sensory evaluation using a home-use-test (HUT) setting and experimental online auctions at three storage times, were used to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for two samples of ready meals with extended shelf life, one using microwave assisted pasteurization system (MAPS) and the other using freezing. The effect of the information on the name of a new technology and the environmental impacts associated with each technology was also measured. We found that sensory characteristics of the ready meal are the key drivers for subjects' WTP. Considering the specific context of this study, we did not find evidence that the name of the technology and the information on the environmental impacts associated with each technology impacted participants' WTP.
• Article: "The effect of intrinsic and extrinsic quality on the willingness to pay for a convenient meal: A combination of home-use-test with online auctions"

• Authors: Stephen J. Schmidt
• Abstract: This paper studies one college's policy requiring minimum grades in core courses for completion of the economics major. The policy reduced majors by approximately 6 percent. Grades of C- and D (requiring students to retake the course) dropped substantially, while grades of C (the minimum acceptable grade) did not change, and grades from C+ to B rose. Difference-in-difference analysis suggests that the policy caused the grade shift. Because C grades did not change and grades as high as B increased, I conclude that the policy caused increased effort by students who were below and somewhat above the performance standard.
• Article: "Minimum Grade Requirements for Economics Majors: Effects on Enrollments and Student Learning"

• Authors: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: In this paper, I advance and empirically support the indigenous religious values hypothesis, which holds that religions espouse values indigenous to the countries in which they developed. To identify the indigenous values of a religion’s homeland, I rely on the negative relationship between individualism and rainfall variation. I find strong empirical support for the hypothesis that contemporary individualism depends on rainfall variation in the homelands of religions to which a country’s population adheres. Indeed, this relationship explains over a quarter of the international variation in individualism. This effect is robust to controls for the role of religion in institutional and technological transfers and the confluence of conversion and colonisation. In keeping with the explicitly religious nature of the mechanism proposed here, I also find that rainfall variation in religion homelands plays a greater role in explaining the values of countries with greater religious freedom and the values of individuals who are more religious or members of religious minorities.
• Article: "On the Origin of Religious Values: Does Italian Weather Affect Individualism in Bolivia?"

• Authors: Dong Cheng, Zhongzhong Hu & Yong Tan
• Abstract: This paper investigates the heterogeneous effects of finance on firm exports through the lens of differential exporting modes. China's WTO accession leads to an export deregulation, which empowers private domestic firms with low registered capital to export directly. This quasinatural experiment encourages firms switching from indirect to direct exporting, and thus provides an ideal setting to explore the heterogeneous effects of finance on exports among switchers and non-switchers. Applying the difference-in-differences (DID) approach to a comprehensive survey data on Chinese manufacturing firms, we find that finance improves exports more for firms switching from indirect to direct exporting, relative to continuous indirect exporters. Our mechanism analysis shows that finance manifests a more pronounced encouraging effect on firm-level operation efficiency and productivity among switchers. Moreover, we show that the heterogeneous effects of finance on exports among switchers and non-switchers are more pronounced in the post-WTO accession period. The time-varying heterogeneous impacts suggest an economic loss caused by the export distortion before China's WTO accession because it prevents productive yet financially constrained private domestic firms from direct exporting.
• Article: "Heterogeneous Impacts of Finance on Firm Exports: Evidence from Export Deregulation in A Large Developing Country"

• Authors: Dong Cheng
• Abstract: We study the response of non-housing consumption to housing price movements in urban China, which has been witnessing a real estate boom ever since 2003. Using Urban Household Survey data, we estimate an elasticity of consumption with respect to housing price of 0.06–0.07 for homeowners. Moreover, we find that the average marginal propensity to consume out of housing wealth is 0.025–0.03. We employ a novel instrumental variable associated with higher-education expansion to ensure that these estimates are causal effects. As for renters, we show that their consumption response to housing shocks is insignificant. We further reveal that the marginal propensity to consume is larger for homeowners who are more credit constrained.
• Article: "Housing boom and non-housing consumption: evidence from urban households in China"

• Authors: Dong Cheng, Xunpeng Shi & Jian Yu
• Abstract: Despite the dominant role of hydropower in the global power generation mix and the popularity of studying the productivity impact of infrastructure investment, there is a lack of research regarding the impact of hydropower projects on firm productivity. Such a positive impact can promote a more ambitious action plan for mitigating carbon emissions. This study investigates whether and how China’s Three Gorges Project (TGP), the world’s largest hydropower project, may affect the productivity of manufacturing firms in the province where the project is located. The empirical results reveal a statistically and economically significant positive impact of the TGP on manufacturing firms’ productivity, and various robustness checks confirm the soundness of our findings. We also verify three channels, the capital deepening effect, the scale effect, and the competition effect, robustly. This productivity impact suggests that hydropower projects have an economic benefit in addition to the other well-known ones, such as flood control and improvement of the shipping capacity. The findings imply that policy makers need to consider the broad benefits of green energy beyond the conventional cost-benefit tradeoff, which can help justify some marginal green energy projects and technologies.
• Article: "The Impact of Green Energy Infrastructure on Firm Productivity: Evidence From the Three Gorges Project in China"

• Authors: Zachary Rodriguez
• Abstract: In many countries, women do not share the same decision-making power as the men around them. This preexisting discrimination suggests an imbalance in decision-making power in the household, which makes empowering the role of women a necessity for the health and development of our communities. Studies have noted how income growth across genders can shift decision-making power in the household. To investigate income growth and its effect on women empowerment, I analyze the Mahatmas Gandhi Employment Guarantee Act of 2005, which offers guaranteed employment to rural households throughout India. Its gradual implementation in three phases over a two year period allows for the use of a difference-in-differences analysis regarding the effects of guaranteed employment by men and women across districts. I analyze two outcomes variables related to women empowerment beginning in 2002 to 2017, including the demand for microfinance and violence against women. Results show that as women take up employment in a district, the demand for credit and savings increases and violence against women decreases. Each result aligns with a broad literature that identifies how income growth and employment empowers the health, social, and economic of status of women.
• Article: "The power of employment: Effects of India’s employment guarantee on women empowerment"

• Authors: Younghwan Song, Jia Gao
• Abstract: With the expansion of high-speed internet during the recent decades, a growing number of people are working from home. Yet there is no consensus on how working from home affects workers’ well-being in the literature. Using data from the 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Modules, this paper examines how subjective well-being varies among wage/salary workers between working at home and working in the workplace using individual fixed-effects models. We find that compared to working in the workplace, bringing work home on weekdays is associated with less happiness, and telework on weekdays or weekends/holidays is associated with more stress. The effect of working at home on subjective well-being also varies by parental status and gender. Parents, especially fathers, report a lower level of subjective well-being when working at home on weekdays but a higher level of subjective well-being when working at home on weekends/holidays. Non-parents’ subjective well-being does not vary much by where they work on weekdays, but on weekends/holidays childless males feel less painful whereas childless females feel more stressed when teleworking instead of working in the workplace. This paper provides new evidence on the impact of working at home and sheds lights for policy makers and employers to re-evaluate the benefits of telework.
• Article: "Does Telework Stress Employees Out? A Study on Working at Home and Subjective Well-Being for Wage/Salary Workers"

• Authors: Dong Cheng, Jian Yu, Hanyuan Zhang
• Abstract: We investigate the relationship between firm exporting and energy consumption using newly matched manufacturing data from China. We reconfirm that exporting is negatively correlated with electricity consumption. Moreover, we document novel evidence that foreign exporters consume more electricity than domestic exporters, which supports the pollution haven hypothesis.
• Article: "Exporting and Electricity Consumption: New Microeconomic Evidence from Manufacturing Firms in China"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Stephen Wu
• Abstract: This paper provides the first comparative analysis of the preference for social status across countries. We develop and provide support for two hypotheses: the cultural foundations hypothesis, which claims that individuals’ preferences for status are rooted in persistent cultural values, and the standard of living hypothesis, which states that in more developed economies, relative income matters more and absolute income matters less to individual utility. To investigate these hypotheses, we propose a theoretically grounded measure of the taste for status, the marginal rate of substitution of relative for absolute income. We find empirical support both of these hypotheses. Specifically, we find that the taste for status is positively associated with individualism, egalitarianism and per capita income. We also identify and provide evidence regarding two threshold values of the taste for status, which are associated with the onset of status preferences and with the emergence of an hedonic treadmill. Our estimates indicate that most countries fall between these two thresholds, and thus experience a positive taste for social status. Only the poorest and most hierarchical and collectivist countries fall below the threshold for a taste for status, and only the richest and most individualist and egalitarian countries experience an hedonic treadmill.
• Article: "The Taste For Status In International Comparison."

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Sumit Deole
• Abstract: Applied to immigration, Blalock’s (Toward a Theory of Minority-Group Relations. A Capricorn Giant, 1967) salience hypothesis predicts that contact with immigrants will tend to highlight the role of nationality in the identities of natives and thereby increase opposition to immigration. Drawing on group threat and cultural perspectives hypotheses, we consider the roles of macroeconomic conditions and national culture in salience effects. Our results indicate that economic concerns over immigration are more sensitive to the immigrant population share during difficult economic times and in countries with less religious diversity and more collectivist cultures. In contrast, cultural concerns over immigration are not sensitive to the macroeconomic and cultural variables we examine. Thus, the attitudinal response to immigration differs significantly across countries, a finding that is relevant to attempts to manage the social and political consequences of large immigration inflows.
• Article: "Refining the Salience Hypothesis: Does the Response to Immigration Differ Across Countries?"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Claudia Williamson
• Abstract: We forward the hypothesis and empirically establish that variations in the strength of family ties are rooted in culture. In particular, we show that individualism is associated with looser family ties. We exploit the associations between contemporary individualism and historical climatic and disease environments to establish a causal relationship. At both the individual- and country-levels, we find strong support that individualism reduces family ties. The estimated effects are economically large and robust to a wide variety of potentially confounding variables.
• Article: "Cultural Roots of Family Ties"

• Authors: Dong Cheng, Jian Yu, Dayong Zhang, Wenping Zheng
• Abstract: This paper contributes to the existing literature on estimating firm-level production functions. Using Chinese manufacturing survey data, we employ the firm-level heterogeneous capital depreciation rate to measure firms’ investment and assess its role using Olley and Pakes (1996) (OP) production function estimation technique. Although there is some ongoing debate on the econometric soundness of the OP technique, we argue quantitatively that the heterogeneous depreciation rate muffles the measurement error associated with the key input demand investment. In our sample, it significantly narrows the gap of total factor productivity (TFP) estimates between the OP technique and a state-of-the-art estimation method that works without investment. We further reveal that the improved performance primarily originates from the dynamic evolution in the distribution of the capital depreciation rate.
• Article: "Is Heterogeneous Capital Depreciation Important for Estimating Firm-Level Productivity? Evidence from Chinese Manufacturing Firms"

• Authors: Dolores Garrido, Ana Espínola-Arredondo, Felix Munoz-Garcia
• Abstract: This paper examines how positive or negative perceptions about innovation affect firms' strategic behavior when certifying their products. In particular, we consider two types of firm (innovative and noninnovative) which choose between three signals: (a) certified claim, (b) uncertified claim, and (c) no claim. The consumer, either exhibiting positive or negative perceptions, is uninformed about the firm's type and only observes the firm's claim. We find that a separating equilibrium arises in which information about the innovation is revealed to consumers. We also identify a pooling equilibrium in which both types of firm choose the same claim, concealing information from consumers. We show that regulation requiring mandatory certification can hinder information transmission. Our results also indicate that changes in product perceptions do not necessarily facilitate information transmission.
• Article: "Can mandatory certification promote greenwashing? A signaling approach"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Jia Gao
• Abstract: Religious women work less than their non-religious counterparts. Is this because they want to work less or because patriarchal social norms limit their choices? To address this question, we estimate the employment happiness premium, which we define as the happiness gain associated with being employed, for men and women belonging to six world religions and for the non-religious. Our results indicate that the employment happiness premium is higher for men than for women for every world religion and that the gender gap in the employment happiness premium varies significantly across religions. Next, we ask whether the gender gap in the employment happiness premium can explain the gender gap in employment. That is, is it plausible that preferences explain employment patterns across religions and genders? We find that preferences plausibly explain the gender employment gap for Buddhists, Orthodox Christians, and the non-religious. In contrast, they explain less than half the observed gender employment gap for Hindus, Muslims, Catholics and Protestants. Our findings are consistent with a significant role for patriarchal social norms in constraining female employment in these religious traditions.
• Article: "Preferences or Patriarchy: Why Do Religious Women Work Less?"

• Authors: Dong Cheng, Yong Tan, Jian Yu
• Abstract: This paper examines the effect of credit rationing on export performance by small and medium‐sized firms in China. We use a detailed firm‐level data provided by the Small and Medium‐sized Enterprises Dynamic Survey (SMEDS) during 2015–16 to conduct this analysis. The SMEDS provides firm‐specific measures of credit rationing based directly on firm‐level responses to the survey rather than indirect ones, based on firm‐level financial statements. We find that, at the extensive margin, weak and strong credit rationing reduces export probability of small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) by 15.1% and 39.6%, respectively. At the intensive margin, they decrease SMEs' export values by more than 20.0% and over 28.8%, respectively. Different than existing literature, we construct valid firm‐level instruments, firm‐level housing stock, for credit rationing rather than using province‐level instruments. We also employ county‐industry‐level instruments and obtain consistent estimates. In addition, credit rationing exhibits heterogeneous impacts on firms with different liquidity ratios, product portfolios, external collateral and capital utilization rates.
• Article: "Credit Rationing and Firm Exports: Microeconomic Evidence from Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in China"

Authors: Lewis Davis, K.R. White

Abstract: Are federal prosecutors influenced by partisan political concerns? We examine that question by analyzing 40 years of federal corruption convictions at the state and federal district levels. Our key finding is that state-level federal corruption convictions fall by roughly 9% in years when a state’s governor belongs to the same party as the president who appointed local US Attorneys, a measure of state-federal political alignment. The result is robust to controls for the state political environment, election cycles, party tenure in the executive branch, public sector employment, federal aid to states, a state’s electoral importance, and the changes in Honest Services law, the statutory basis for many federal corruption cases. Our results are consistent with a significant level of partisan prosecutorial bias on the part of US Attorneys. In a placebo test, we find no evidence that state-federal political alignment affects the total number of federal criminal convictions. That finding provides support for the mechanism that we propose, namely the partisan exercise of prosecutorial discretion, rather than the partisan allocation of prosecutorial resources across federal districts.

Article: "Is Justice Blind? Evidence From Federal Corruption Convictions."

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Claudia Williamson
• Abstract: We argue that individualism promotes gender equality. Individualist values of autonomy and self-determination transcend gender identities and serve to legitimize women’s goals and choices. In contrast, collectivist values may subordinate women’s personal goals to their social obligations, generating greater acceptance of gender inequality. Using individual level data from World Values Surveys, we find that individualism is significantly associated with support for gender equal attitudes regarding employment, income, education, and political leadership. Individualism is also associated with greater levels of female employment and educational attainment, and lower levels of fertility. These results are robust to controlling for income, education, religion, historical plough use, gendered language, and country-time fixed effects. Our within country analysis allows us to isolate the impact of individualism from other confounding effects. Using historical rainfall variation as an instrument for individualism, we find that the exogenous portion of individualism reduces support for patriarchal attitudes and fertility, and it increases female employment and educational attainment. These effects are economically large. We address concerns over instrumental validity by controlling for a variety of factors, including historical plough use, religious affiliation, religiosity, social trust, average rainfall levels, distance from the equator, cool-water conditions, agricultural suitability, historical political and economic development, and the presence of large animals. This paper contributes to a mounting body of evidence suggesting a key role for highly persistent cultural norms and values in determining gender inequality, the gender division of labor, and economic and social outcomes for women.
• Article: "Does Individualism Promote Gender Equality?"

• Authors: Dong Cheng, Xuepeng Shi, Jian Yu, Dayong Zhang
• Abstract: This paper investigates the dynamic impacts of uncertainty in international crude oil prices on the Chinese economy. We use two measures, sample standard deviation and conditional standard deviation estimated from a GARCH (1,1) model, to calculate uncertainty in oil prices. We find that an increase in volatility in oil prices tends to reduce the real gross domestic product (GDP) and investment, which in turn encourages the Chinese government to stabilize the economy through expansionary fiscal and monetary policy. Furthermore, when we differentiate the impacts of increases and decreases in oil price uncertainty, we obtain a symmetric result. An increase in oil price uncertainty reduces real GDP and investment, while a decrease boosts the macroeconomy. We attribute the effect of decreasing uncertainty to the combined factor of falling uncertainty and an expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. A cross-sectional check related to economic geography indicates that uncertainty shocks to oil prices has a significantly greater negative impact on real GDP and investment in eastern China, where the economy is more industrialized and depends more heavily on oil than other regions.
• Article: "How Does the Chinese Economy React to Uncertainty in International Crude Oil Prices?"

• Authors: Dong Cheng, Mario Crucini, Hyunseung Oh, Hakan Yilmazkuday
• Abstract: The beginning of the twentieth century provides a unique opportunity to explore the interaction of rapid technological progress and trade barriers in shaping the worldwide diffusion of a new, highly traded good: the automobile. We scrape historical data on the quantity and value of passenger vehicles exported from the United States to other destination countries, annually from 1913 to 1940. We model the rise of US automobile from global obscurity toward a level dependent upon the extent of long-run pass-through of US prices into destination markets and destination GDP per capita. The results based on a diffusion model with CES preferences and non-unitary income elasticity shows that 62% of the gap in diffusion levels between the U.S. and the rest of the world is due to price frictions such as markups, tariffs, and trade costs, while the remaining 38% is due to income effects.
• Article: "Early 20th Century American Exceptionalism: Production, Trade and Diffusion of the Automobile"

• Authors: Tomas Dvorak, Simon Halliday, Michael O'Hara, Aaron Swoboda
• Abstract: The increasing importance of empirical analysis in economics highlights the need for efficient ways to bring these skills to the classroom. R Markdown is a new technology that provides a solution by integrating writing, statistical work and computation into a single document. R Markdown benefits students and instructors by streamlining teaching, research, and collaboration. The authors report on their use of R Markdown in undergraduate teaching, including core courses, electives, and senior theses. They discuss the costs and benefits of adoption, and explain the advantages of R Markdown in teaching reproducibility of empirical work, avoiding time-consuming and error-prone “cut and paste,” and facilitating a one-stop solution for importing, cleaning, manipulating, visualizing, and communicating with data.
• "Efficient Empiricism: Streamlining Teaching, Research, and Learning in Empirical Courses"

• Authors: Zachary Rodriguez, Bryan C McCannon
• Abstract: Microfinance is an important component of the fight against poverty. We ask whether access to microfinance loans by the poor relates to their prosocial behaviors. A lab-in-the-field study in southern, rural Uganda is done. A public-good game is used to measure subjects' willingness to free-ride. We document higher levels of contributions by those who have previously received a microloan. We explore potential explanations such as differing social-norm assessments, measurable income effects, or sample selection bias. Receiving a microloan continues to have an independent effect on prosociality. The results suggest that exposure to microfinance correlates with social preferences.
• "Microfinance and Prosocial Behaviors: Experimental Evidence of Public-Good Contributions in Uganda"

• Author: Stephen Schmidt
• Abstract: Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion argues, against intuition, that for any world A, another world Z with higher population and minimal well-being is better. That intuition is incorrect because the argument has not considered resources that support well-being. Z must have many more resources supporting well-being than A does. Z is repugnant because it spreads those resources among too many people; another world with Z's resources and fewer people, if available, would be far superior. But Z is still better than A; it is worth accepting its very large population to get the resources needed to support their well-being.
• Article: "Resources and the Acceptability of the Repugnant Conclusion"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: Hirschman and Rothschild’s (Q J Econ 87(4):544–566, 1973) tunnel effect refers to the propensity for individuals to be pleased by the success of others if they believe this signals an improvement in their own prospects. According to the current literature, tunnel effects may offset the utility losses from increases in peer income levels and income inequality. I develop a simple model of tunnel effects to evaluate these two channels of influence. The analysis confirms that tunnel effects create a positive link between happiness and economic growth. In contrast, rising income inequality generates a tunnel effect that increases the happiness of the rich but decreases happiness among the poor. The analysis confirms Hirschman and Rothschild’s informal analysis indicating that tunnel effects may increase the happiness of the poor in the case of uneven development that involves both growth and rising income inequality. The model also highlights the differential impact of tunnel effects across age and income groups within the population. I close by discussing the model’s implications for empirical investigations of tunnel effects.
• Article: "Growth, Inequality and Tunnel Effects: A Formal Mode"

• Author: Zachary Rodriguez and Bryan C. McCannon
• Abstract: Disease and violence escalates the prevalence of orphanhood. We investigate whether individuals who were orphaned as a child suffer long-term consequences on their pro-sociality. We conduct a lab-in-the-field experiment in rural Uganda where, among other contributing factors, the HIV/AIDS pandemic hit hardest. Subjects made decisions to contribute to a public good. Results indicate that adults who were orphaned as a child contribute less. We provide evidence that an important channel through which the mechanism operates is through social norms. Subjects orphaned tend to have lower expectations regarding typical behaviour of others. A strong interaction effect is identified where those with the lowest expectations who were also orphaned contribute the least to the public good. Thus, we document orphanhood's long-term consequences to a community.
• Article: "Orphans and Pro-social Behaviour: Evidence from Uganda"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: Using matched cross-sectional data drawn from the 2010 and 2012 Displaced Workers Supplements of the Current Population Surveys and the 2010, 2012, and 2013 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Modules, this paper examines the relationship between job displacement and various measures of subjective well-being by sex. Displaced men report lower levels of life evaluation than nondisplaced men due to the differences in employment, marital status and income, whereas displaced women report lower levels of net affect and happiness and increased pain, sadness, and stress than nondisplaced women, but no difference in their life evaluation. Among men, those displaced by layoffs, not by plant closings, express lower levels of life evaluation than those not displaced, but there is no such difference by cause of displacement among women. The negative relationship between job displacement and subjective well-being decreases over time for both men and women.
• Article: "Job Displacement and Subjective Well-Being: Findings From the American Time Use Survey Well-Being Models"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Claudia Williamson
• Abstract: While an extensive literature examines the regulation of entry by domestic firms, the causes and consequences of the regulation of entry by foreign firms have not been previously considered. First, we analyze the roles of culture, legal origin, democracy, and geographic openness as determinants of regulation of foreign entry. Our findings also show that cultural values matter more in countries with common law traditions. In contrast, the association between democracy and the regulation or foreign entry is fragile. Next, we examine the consequences from foreign entry regulation. Evidence suggests a strong, negative, and economically significant association between the regulation of foreign entry and inward foreign direct investment (FDI). The regulation of domestic entry, however, is positively associated with FDI inflows. This result is robust to controlling for a variety of economic, cultural, and institutional variables.
• Article: "Open Borders for Business? Causes and Consequences of the Regulation of Foreign Entry"

• Authors: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: This paper investigates the political economy of growth when individuals prefer high levels of relative consumption. A pivotal voter determines the equilibrium tax on capital, the revenues from which fund the provision of productive public goods. The taste for status and the distributions of wealth and political power interact to generate stylized versions of oligarchies, middle-class democracies and populist democracies. A rise in the taste for status increases the role of distributional concerns in policy preferences, lowering growth in an oligarchy or populist democracy, but increasing it in a middle-class democracy. In addition, the egalitarian redistribution of wealth or political power causes growth to first rise and then fall as the equilibrium tax rate approaches and then exceeds its growth-maximizing level, generating inverse U-shaped relationships between democracy and growth and inequality and growth.
• Article: "Political Economy of Growth With a Taste for Status"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Megan Reynolds
• Abstract: Languages differ in the degree to which they employ gender distinctions for nouns and pronouns. Speaking a gendered language may highlight gender roles. We find that speaking a gendered language is associated with a greater gender gap in educational attainment.
• Article: "Gendered Language and the Educational Gender Gap"

• Authors: Jack Mara, Lewis Davis, Stephen Schmidt
• Abstract: We exploit changes in the residential and social environment on campus to identify the economic and academic consequences of fraternity membership at a small North-eastern college. Our estimates suggest that these consequences are large, with fraternity membership lowering student grade point average by approximately 0.25 points on the traditional 4-point scale, but raising future income by approximately 36%, for those students whose decision about membership is affected by changes in the environment. These results suggest that fraternity membership causally produces large gains in social capital, which more than outweigh its negative effects on human capital for potential members. Alcohol-related behavior does not explain much of the effects of fraternity membership on either the human capital or social capital effects. These findings suggest that college administrators face significant trade-offs when crafting policies related to Greek life on campus.
• Article: "Social Animal House: The Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: This paper examined whether the sample rotation scheme of the Current Population Survey (CPS) results in an underestimation of current smoking prevalence in the Tobacco Use Supplement to the Current Population Survey (TUS-CPS). The TUS-CPS has been administered as part of the CPS, which has eight rotation groups of households in each month that are repeatedly interviewed based on a sample rotation scheme. Previous research has found that even though all eight rotation groups in the CPS are independent random samples of the population, some estimates, such as unemployment rates, tend to be significantly higher in the first rotation group than among other rotation groups. The probit regression results of this paper showed that although current smokers are more likely to attrite than nonsmokers in all years of the TUS-CPS, for the six waves of TUS-CPS before 2003 there is no evidence that current smoking prevalence estimates were significantly affected by the rotation scheme of the CPS. For the three waves of TUS-CPS since 2003, however, the results showed that current smoking prevalence has been underestimated likely due to panel attrition. It appears that rotation group bias in these waves was caused by the substantially increased number of additional questions smokers had to answer.
• Article: "Rotation Group Bias in Current Smoking Prevalence Estimates Using TUS-CPS"

• Authors: Mehmet Sener, Wolf-Heimo Grieben
• Abstract: We construct a North-South product-cycle model of trade with fully-endogenous growth and union wage bargaining. Economic growth is driven by Northern entrepreneurs who conduct R&D to innovate higher quality products. Northern production technologies can leak to the South upon successful imitation. The North has two sectors: a tradable industrial goods sector (manufacturing) where wages are determined via a bargaining process and a non-tradable sector (services) where wages are flexible. The South has only a tradable industrial goods sector where wages are flexible. We find that unilateral Northern trade liberalization, in the form of lower Northern tariffs on industrial goods, increases the rate of innovation but decreases both the bargained wage in the industrial sector and the flexible wage in the service sector. The wage effects are relative to the Southern wage rate. We also consider a variant of the model with Northern unemployment, driven by a binding minimum wage in the non-tradable service sector. In this case, Northern tariff cuts decrease the innovation rate and the bargained wage rate. In addition, the Northern unemployment rate increases. The model thus highlights the role of labor market institutions in determining the growth and labor market effects of tariff reductions. We also study the effects of unilateral Southern trade liberalization.
• Article: "Wage Bargaining, Trade and Growth"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: Using data drawn from the 2010 American Time Use Survey Well-Being Module, this study examines the relationship between three measures of subjective wellbeing based on time-use data and an objective measure of wellbeing. Whereas the measures of affect—net affect and the U-index—are uncorrelated with the objective quality-of-life ranking of the 50 states in the United States, the measure of meaningfulness shows a significant correlation with objective ranking. The reason for the significant correlation between the measure of meaningfulness and the objective measure of wellbeing is because, when engaged in similar activities, people living in states with better quality of life felt, after controlling for their individual characteristics, their lives to be more meaningful than those living in states with poor amenities, not because time use varies substantially by state.
• Article: "A Cross-State Comparison of Measures of Selective Wellbeing"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Farangis Abdurazokzoda
• Abstract: Kashima and Kashima's (1998) linguistic dataset has played a prominent role in the economics of culture, providing the instrumental variables used in two seminal works to identify the causal effect of culture on institutional quality. However, for economists, this dataset has a number of weaknesses, including poor overlap with a key cultural dataset and reliance on sources of linguistic information of uneven quality. We address these issues by constructing a new linguistic dataset based on an authoritative source of linguistic information, the World Atlas of Language Structures. The resulting dataset has greater overlap with key sources of cultural information, is arguably less subject to selection bias, and provides more refined information regarding key dimensions of linguistic variation. We show that the variables in this dataset are significantly correlated with commonly used measures of individualism and egalitarianism. In addition, we reexamine the key results from the literature on culture and institutions, showing the causal relationship between culture and institutions is robust to the use of the new linguistic instruments.
• Article: "Language, Culture and Institutions: Evidence From a New Linguistic Dataset"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: This paper estimates the effect of individual responsibility on economic development using an instrument derived from rainfall data. I argue that a taste for collective responsibility was adaptive in preindustrial societies that were exposed to high levels of agricultural risk, and that these attitudes continue to influence contemporary social norms and economic outcomes. The link between agricultural risk and collective responsibility is formalized in a model of optimal parental socialization effort. Empirically, I find a robust negative correlation between rainfall variation, a measure of exogenous agricultural risk, and a measure of individual responsibility. Using rainfall variation as an instrument, I find that individual responsibility has a large positive effect on economic development. The relationships between rainfall variation, individual responsibility and economic development are robust to the inclusion of variables related to climate and agricultural and institutional development.
• Article: "Individual Responsibility and Economic Development: Evidence from Rainfall Data"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Claudia Williamson
• Abstract: Does culture affect the manner in which a society regulates the entry of new firms? Our results suggest it does. We find more individualistic countries regulate entry more lightly. We investigate how culture matters presenting evidence of significant interactions between individualism and formal legal and political institutions. Individualism has a greater impact on entry regulation in societies with democratic political institutions or a common law tradition. This outcome is consistent with the idea that culture influences social preference for regulation, and political and legal institutions determine the degree to which those preferences are expressed as policy outcomes.
• Article: "Culture and the Regulation of Entry"

• Authors: Stephen Schmidt, Manuel Pardo
• Abstract: Studying abroad may allow students to form human capital in ways not possible at home and may enable them to earn higher incomes. On the other hand, study abroad has been criticized as insufficiently rigorous. Little is known about how study abroad affects skills and earnings in the long term. Using a data set of 3,155 students over a range of 43 years from a single college, we investigated the effects of study abroad and found it has no net effect on earnings compared with study at home. The advantages and disadvantages of study abroad are approximately balanced; human capital formed by study abroad is not more or less than that formed in residence. Colleges need not emphasize study abroad more than study on campus, but they also need not worry that study abroad is unproductive. Study abroad and study at home appear equally effective at forming human capital.
• Article: "The Contribution of Study Abroad to Human Capital Formation"

• Author: Stephen Schmidt
• Abstract: Introductory textbooks teach a simple normative story about the importance of maximizing economic surplus that supports common policy claims. There is little defense of the claim that maximizing surplus is normatively important, which is not obvious to non-economists. Difficulties with the claim that society should maximize surplus are generally not addressed. Economists are thus frequently criticized by non-economists for having a poor moral foundation for our normative claims. We should tell a more sophisticated normative story that justifies the moral importance of surplus, but acknowledges that other moral values may conflict with generating surplus and that distribution is not always separable from efficiency. This would allow students to make more compelling arguments in favor of normative positions they accept, regardless of the values they hold.
• Article: "A Proposal for More Sophisticated Normative Principles in Introductory Economics"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Article: "Perspective on ‘‘Flexibility at a Cost—Should Governments Stimulate Tertiary Education for Adults?”

• Authors: Tomas Dvorak, Miaoqing Jia
• Abstract: This study analyzes the relationship between students’ online work habits and academic performance. We utilize data from logs recorded by a course management system (CMS) in two courses at a small liberal arts college in the U.S. Both courses required the completion of a large number of online assignments. We measure three aspects of students’ online work habits: timeliness, regularity, and intensity. We find that students with high prior GPAs and high grades in the course work on assignments early and more regularly. We also find that the regularity of work habits during the first half of the term predicts grade in the course, even while controlling for the prior GPA. Overall, however, the marginal predictive power of CMS data is rather limited. Still, the fact that high achieving students show vastly different work habits from low achieving students supports interventions aimed at improving time-management skills.
• Article: “Do the Timeliness, Regularity and Intensity of Online Work Habits Predict Academic Performance?”

• Author: Stephen Schmidt
• Abstract: In this article, the author presents an asymmetric version of the familiar public goods classroom experiment, in which some players are given more tokens to invest than others, and players collectively decide whether to divide the return to the group investment asymmetrically as well. The asymmetry between players raises normative issues about fairness, rights, and equality that are not present in the symmetric game, where efficiency is the major relevant normative concept. Playing the game in class requires students to confront the distributional question and shows how issues of efficiency can become entangled with other moral issues when solving economic policy problems. The game allows instructors to incorporate theories of distributive justice into economic reasoning in the classroom, as has been widely suggested recently.
• Article: "Examining Theories of Distributive Justice with an Asymmetric Public Goods Game"

• Author: Tomas Dvorak
• Abstract: Sponsors of defined contribution plans often hire financial advisors to help them design and monitor their plans. I find that advisors have a significant impact on the menu of investment options of their clients’ plans. Clients of the same advisor tend to hold the same funds and fund families. They also tend to delete and add the same funds. Advisors’ plans are similar to their clients’ plans in that they tend to hold identical funds, use the same fund families, and fund categories. Thus, to a large extent, advisors take their own advice. However, funds that are in clients’ plans but not in their advisors’ plans have higher expense ratios than the funds held by advisors. Since advisors’ compensation is often tied to the expense ratio of their clients’ funds, this pattern is consistent with misaligned incentives on the part of advisors and their clients.
• Article: "Do 401k Plan Advisors Take Their Own Advice?"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: In this article, the author considers the merits of two classes of profit maximization problems: those involving perfectly competitive firms with quadratic and cubic cost functions. While relatively easy to develop and solve, problems based on quadratic cost functions are too simple to address a number of important issues, such as the use of second-order conditions and the short-run shutdown condition. Problems based on cubic cost functions are mathematically richer but often involve messy arithmetic; furthermore, many are not plausible representations of a firm's costs. Finding cubic functions that do not suffer from these drawbacks can be a time-consuming process. The author addresses this issue by providing a procedure to generate profit maximization problems that are theoretically interesting, economically plausible, and computationally simple.
• Article: "How to Generate Good Profit Maximization Problems"

• Authors: Claudia Canals, Mehment Sener
• Abstract: This paper empirically assesses the responsiveness of US offshoring to intellectual property rights (IPR) reforms in 16 countries. We construct a measure of US offshoring at the industry level based on trade in intermediate goods, covering 23 industries for the period 1973–2006. For each industry, we differentiate between broad offshoring and intra-industry offshoring activities. We conduct a difference-in-difference analysis using the IPR reform years proposed in Branstetter et al. (2006, Quarterly Journal of Economics). We find that following IPR reform, neither broad nor intra-industry offshoring intensities change for the typical US industry at conventional levels of significance. However, high-tech (patent-sensitive) industries substantially expand their intra-industry offshoring activities, whereas low-tech (patent-insensitive) industries do not change their intra-industry offshoring activities in a statistically significant way. In addition, high-tech industries increase their broad offshoring relative to low-tech industries, but the effects are smaller and less robust than those estimated for intra-industry offshoring.
• Article: "Offshoring and Intellectual Property Rights Reform"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Stephen Wu
• Abstract: This paper explores the role of within group social comparisons on the life satisfaction of different racial and ethnic groups in the US. For Whites, we find that higher group income levels are associated with lower levels of life satisfaction, a result that is consistent with a preference for within group status. In contrast, life satisfaction is increasing in group income for Blacks. This result is consistent with the existence of social norms that emphasize Black solidarity. It is also consistent with an information effect in which Blacks rely on peer income levels to form expectations regarding their future prospects. We introduce a theoretical framework to help to distinguish between solidarity and information effects. Our empirical results provide strong support for the hypothesis that solidarity rather than information accounts for the positive relationship between average Black income and the subjective wellbeing of US Blacks. Finally, we consider two theories of social solidarity and find support for social salience but not social density in determining the strength of solidarity effects.
• Article: "Social Comparisons and Life Satisfaction Across Racial and Ethnic Groups: The Effects of Status, Information and Solidarity"

• Authors: Dolores Garrido, E. Ramos
• Abstract: Recent literature analyses the role of territorial specificities, as the core of territorial rural development strategies based on differentiation. Unfortunately, the proliferation of quality assurance schemes is provoking a “labyrinth of labels” which diffuses the local efforts for capitalizing rural specificities. A second-generation of labels is currently being developed to simplify the territorial differentiation message. A number of territories in Southern Europe are basing their rural development strategies joining the so-called EuropeanTerritorial Quality Mark (ETQM) Project. This paper proposes an original methodology, designed and developed by authors, for the evaluation of some of these second-generation labels. This methodology has been validated in 15 rural territories as the pioneers of the ETQM in Spain.
• Article: "Towards a “2nd Generation” of Quality Labels: A Proposal for the Evaluation of Territorial Quality Marks."

• Authors: Younghwan Song, Sabrina Pabilonia
• Abstract: Previous research has shown that time preference affects individuals’ market time allocation and own human capital investments. This paper uses data from the CPS Tobacco Use Supplements, the American Time Use Survey, and the PSID-Child Development Supplement to examine how time preference, as measured by smoking behavior, affects mothers’ time investments in their children under age 13 and children’s future test scores. Results indicate that single mothers who smoke spend significantly less time with their children in educational activities, such as reading and homework, and sharing meals with their children than non-smokers. Their children also have lower reading test scores.
• Article: "Single Mothers' Time Preference, Smoking, and Enriching Childcare: Evidence from Time Diaries"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Matthew Knauss
• Abstract: In The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Benjamin Friedman argues that growth reduces the strength of interpersonal income comparisons, and thereby tends to increases the desire for pro-social legislation, a position he supports by drawing on the historical records of the US and several Western European countries. We test this hypothesis using a variable from the World Values Survey that measures an individual's taste for government responsibility, which we interpret as a measure of the demand for egalitarian social policy. Our results provide support for a modified version of Friedman's hypothesis. In particular, we find that the taste for government responsibility is positively related to the recent change in the growth rate and negatively related to the change in income inequality. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for attempts to further the egalitarian social goals.
• Article: "The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth: An Empirical Investigation"

• Authors: Tomas Dvorak, Jigme Norbu
• Abstract: The authors find that mutual fund companies offer mostly their own mutual funds in the 401(k) plans for their own employees. However, there are systematic differences between companies that rely on their own funds and companies that include outside funds. The companies that include outside funds tend to operate funds with high expense ratios. Outside funds in the 401(k) plans of mutual fund companies have significantly lower expense ratios and better governance scores than company’s own funds. This evidence supports the claim that the interests of mutual fund companies are not perfectly aligned with the interests of their funds’ shareholders. The authors also find that among the company’s own funds, the funds selected for the company’s 401(k) plan are almost indistinguishable from the rest of the funds offered by the mutual fund companies. Thus, it is not the case that, within their own funds, mutual fund companies favor their inexpensive funds. In fact, within the companies’ own funds, participants (mutual fund company employees) gravitate towards higher-cost and more actively managed funds. Thus, in one context (choosing to use outside funds) mutual fund companies favor cheap and better governed funds, in another context (choosing among its own funds) mutual fund companies favor actively managed, expensive funds.
• Article: "Do Mutual Fund Companies Eat Their Own Cooking?"

• Authors: Tomas Dvorak, Shayna Toubman
• Abstract: The explicit hierarchy of recognition in alumni giving offers a useful context in which to examine the nature of gender differences regarding charitable giving. Using 31 years of alumni-giving records at a small liberal arts college, we find that women are more likely to be donors. Among donors, women tend to give more frequently but generally make smaller donations than men. These results hold even after controlling for age, income, and participation in Greek organizations. The results are consistent with the hypotheses that the drive for recognition of charitable giving is stronger in men than women, and that women are more reciprocal than men.
• Article: "Are Women More Generous than Men? Evidence from Alumni Donations"

• Authors: Allison Frederick, Stephen Schmidt, Lewis Davis
• Abstract: We estimate the impact of increases in Federal student aid and higher education funding, such as the recently proposed American Graduation Initiative (AGI), on the outcomes of community colleges, including enrollments, list and average tuitions, and educational quality. We develop a reduced form model of state-level education policy in which state policy makers, who have objectives that differ from those of Federal policy makers, respond to changes in Federal policies. Our empirical specification treats state and institutional variables as endogenous; we interpret the coefficients as measuring the responses of state and institution officials to changes in Federal policies. We simulate the effects of AGI and find little evidence that states recapture Federal education resources. AGI would have a significant effect on educational quality but a limited effect on enrollments. An equivalent increase in Federal student aid would have greater impact on access and enrollments, but decrease educational quality.
• Article: "Federal Policies, State Responses, and Community College Outcomes: Testing an Augmented Bennett Hypothesis"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: We develop a Schumpeterian growth model with privately optimal intellectual property rights (IPRs) enforcement and investigate the implications for intellectual property and R&D policies. In our setting, successful innovators undertake costly rent protection activities (RPAs) to enforce their patents. RPAs deter innovators who seek to discover higher quality products and thereby replace the patent holder. RPAs also deter imitators who seek to capture a portion of the monopoly market by imitating the patent holder's product. We investigate the role of private IPR protection by considering the impact of subsidies to RPAs on economic growth and welfare. We find that a larger RPA subsidy raises the innovation rate if and only if the ease of imitation is above a certain level. With regards to welfare, we find that depending on the parameters it may be optimal to tax or subsidize RPAs. Thus a prohibitively high taxation of RPAs is not necessarily optimal. We also show that the presence of imitation strengthens the case for subsidizing R&D.
• Article: "Private Patent Protection in the Theory of Schumpeterian Growth"

• Author: Tomas Dvorak
• Abstract: This paper examines the impact of the timing of contributions to defined benefit (DB) and defined contribution (DC) plans on investment returns. I show that net contributions to DB plans are counter-cyclical, while net contributions to DC plans are uncorrelated with the business cycle. Given the past mean reversion in equity prices, the counter-cyclicality of net contributions to DB plans means that dollar-weighted returns on DB plans are higher than the geometric average of annual returns. Therefore, using dollar-weighted returns as a measure of investment performance, the advantage of DB plans over DC plans is greater than using geometric average returns. Overall, I find that dollar-weighted returns on DB plans are more than one percentage point higher than that on DC plans.
• Article: "Timing of Retirement Retirement Plan Contributions and Investment Returns: The Case of Defined Benefit versus Defined Contribution”

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: We consider intellectual property rights (IPRs) in a Schumpeterian growth model in which patent holders face the threats of profit loss due to imitation and complete valuation loss due to outside innovation. We disaggregate IPR policies by distinguishing between the quality of the IPR regime and the intensity of IPR enforcement. An increase in the quality of the IPR regime unambiguously promotes growth. However, the relationship between IPR enforcement intensity and growth follows an inverted U-shaped curve. The growth-maximizing intensity of IPR enforcement is decreasing in institutional quality. We also investigate the model's welfare implications and examine the economy under a no-growth equilibrium.
• Article: "Intellectual Property Rights, Institutional Quality and Economic Growth"

• Authors: Scott Morlando, Stephen Schmidt, Kathleen LoGuidice
• Abstract: Habitat restoration is costly and it is often necessary to justify the costs with evidence of benefits to society. These benefits are difficult to quantify because they are measured in terms of ecosystem services rather than currency. This paper introduces a somewhat novel restoration‐related ecosystem service, a reduction in the risk of tick‐borne disease, and incorporates it into a cost/benefit analysis of the restoration of a rare habitat. We use a cost‐of‐illness study to calculate the costs averted by preventing Lyme disease (LD), and a contingent‐valuation survey to estimate the benefit of biodiversity protection. The restoration, removal of an invasive tree, reduced the risk of LD by approximately 98%. Cost‐of‐illness studies show that the restoration would be financially justifiable if it averted 75 cases of LD per year. Given the local LD rate and the visitation rate to the preserve, the habitat restoration can plausibly be justified solely on the benefit of LD cases averted. However, as we do not know how many cases of LD are contracted in the preserve, we also establish the perceived value of protecting biodiversity in a contingent‐valuation survey. Results show that residents were willing to pay a significant fraction of the net cost of restoration to protect biodiversity. When these benefits are taken into account, the number of cases of disease that must be averted to justify remediation is reduced. This exercise spotlights an underappreciated ecosystem service that, when appropriate, can help establish the cost effectiveness of restoration.
• Article: "Reduction in Lyme Disease Risk as an Economic Benefit of Habitat Restoration"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: Using matched data from the Tobacco Use Supplements to the Current Population Surveys and the American Time Use Surveys, this paper examines how differences in time preference, as measured by smoking status, affect time spent on various non‐market activities in a day. Even after controlling for a host of variables, the results show that individuals with a higher rate of time preference — current smokers — spend more time on non‐market activities that provide immediate gratification, such as watching television, but less time on non‐market activities that provide long‐term returns, such as exercising and education, compared with those who never smoked.
• Article: "Time Preference and Time Use: Do Smokers Exercise Less?"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Mark Hopkins
• Abstract: After a decade of research, the effect of inequality on long-run economic growth remains unresolved, in part because researchers have treated omitted variable bias as an estimation problem rather than a deeper question of causality. In this article we argue that the key omitted variable is the quality of economic institutions. Using both cross-country and panel data specifications, we find no direct effect of inequality on growth in the long-run. Rather, the protection of property rights simultaneously raises growth rates and reduces income inequality. We interpret these findings as evidence that insecure property rights disproportionately disadvantage the poor.
• Article: "The Institutional Foundations of Inequality and Growth"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: Using individual data drawn from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe, this paper analyzes how having fewer children affects early retirement of the elderly in eleven European countries. To examine the endogeneity of the number of children, I use information on the number of siblings of the respondent as instruments. The estimates indicate that having fewer children increases the probability of early retirement among older workers in Europe. The reasons vary by sex. For men, it is because having fewer children reduces the likelihood of having young children who need financial support from them in later life. For women, it is because women with fewer children are less likely to have employment interruptions during their reproductive phase and thus become vested in pensions earlier than women with more children.
• Article: "The Effect of Children on Early Retirement Behavior in Europe"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Emily LaCroix
• Abstract: We extend the empirical literature on the environmental Kuznets curve (EKC) by showing the legal origin matters for the evolution of environmental quality. Using observations of ambient sulfur dioxide levels, we find that the EKC for French and British legal origin countries diverge as incomes rise, with the EKC for French legal origin countries lying significantly below that for countries of British legal origin. This finding is robust to the inclusion of proxies for democracy and corruption, the institutional variables emphasized in the current EKC literature. Our results are consistent with the idea that the British common law tradition places a greater emphasis on private relative to collective property rights.
• Article: "Legal Origin and the Evolution of Environmental Quality"

• Authors: Tomas Dvorak, Henry Hanley
• Abstract: We design and administer a financial literacy test tailored to a specific defined contribution plan. We find that participants show fairly good knowledge of the basic mechanics of the plan, but are unable to differentiate among various investment options. Knowledge is particularly low among women, low income and low education employees. We also find some evidence that personal contributions lead to more knowledge. These results support plan designs that have few investment options and encourage personal contributions.
• Article: "Financial Literacy and the Design of Retirement Plans"

• Authors: Stephanie Curcuru, Tomas Dvorak, Frank Warnock
• Abstract: We decompose the returns differential between U.S. portfolio claims and liabilities into the composition, return, and timing effects. Our most striking and robust finding is that foreigners exhibit poor timing when reallocating between bonds and equities within their U.S. portfolios. The poor timing of foreign investors–caused primarily by deliberate trading, not a lack of portfolio rebalancing–contributes positively to the U.S. external returns differential. We find no evidence that the poor timing is driven by mechanical reserve accumulation by emerging market countries; rather, it is driven almost entirely by the poor timing of rich, developed (mainly European) countries. Finally, while poor foreign timing appears to be persistent across subsamples, other terms in our decomposition (the composition and return effects and U.S. timing abroad), as well as the overall differential, are sometimes negative, sometimes positive, and usually indistinguishable from zero.
• Article: “Decomposing the U.S. External Returns Differential"

• Authors: Ann Owen, Julio Videras, Lewis Davis
• Abstract: We estimate finite-mixture models in which countries are sorted into groups based on the similarity of the conditional distributions of their growth rates. We observe countries growth experiences over the 1970–2000 period and find evidence for a model in which there are two classes of countries, each with its own distinct growth regime. Group membership does not conform to the usual categories used to address parameter heterogeneity such as region or income. We find strong evidence that the quality of institutions and specifically, the degree of law and order, helps to sort countries into different regimes. Once we control for institutional features of the economy, we find no evidence that geographic features such as latitude and being landlocked play a role in determining the country groupings.
• Article: "Do all Countries Follow the Same Growth Process?"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: This paper develops a formal model to investigate the relationship between institutional quality – the current set of property rights – and institutional flexibility – the ability to develop new institutions – and relate these aspects of institutional structure to dynamic economic performance. The model is used to analyze two types of institutional reform. An increase in institutional quality lowers market transaction costs, producing an immediate but short lived increase in the rate of economic growth. In contrast, an increase in institutional flexibility results in a delayed but permanent increase in economic growth. The analysis suggests that the current work on institutions places too much emphasis on property rights and too little on the determinants of institutional change.
• Article: "Institutional Flexibility and Economic Growth"

• Authors: Wolf-Heimo Grieben, Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: We construct a two-country North–South Product-cycle model of trade with endogenous growth and trade barriers. We remove the scale effects on growth by incorporating rent protection activities by Northern incumbents. We examine the effects of two forms of globalization – an expansion of the relative size of the South and unilateral trade liberalization by either country. We find that the location of rent protection institutions and the sectoral trade structure determine whether or not globalization raises steady-state economic growth. We demonstrate that for accelerating worldwide economic growth, contrary to conventional wisdom, unilateral Northern trade liberalization is preferable to bilateral trade liberalization.
• Article: "Globalization, Rent Protection Institutions, and Going Alone in Freeing Trade"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: By matching industry/occupation data on training to displaced worker data from the Current Population Surveys, this paper analyzes why many older workers were displaced by technological changes in the 1990s, and why these workers incurred large earnings losses. When technological changes depreciate the existing stock of firm-specific human capital, older workers who receive higher wages from the sharing arrangement of the returns to investment in firm-specific human capital are dismissed as firms find it unprofitable to retain them. These displaced workers have higher predisplacement wages with steeper wage–tenure profiles, and hence incur larger earnings losses after displacement than other displaced workers.
• Article: "Training, Technological Changes, and Displacement"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: A substantial number of people take work home without a formal payment arrangement. Using the Work Schedules and Work at Home Supplement to the May 2001 Current Population Survey, this paper investigates the determinants of unpaid work at home. Education, lack of overtime rates, being a team leader, efficiency wages, and larger earnings inequality in an occupation are positively related to the prevalence of unpaid work at home. Unpaid work at home appears to be a form of investment made in expectation of a return in the long run.
• Article: "Unpaid Work at Home"

• Authors: David Cotter, Younghwan Song
• Abstract: This article assesses the degree to which couples’ joint employment patterns affect their religious participation, examining in particular the social status and time scarcity hypotheses. The social status hypothesis views religious participation as linked with position in the community and as a form of “conspicuous consumption” (Veblen 1899) or status display (Demerath 1961; Hertel 1988). This social status hypothesis suggests that individuals with higher status have greater involvement in religious activities, thus higher income and higher education predict higher participation.
• Article: "The Religious Time Bind: U.S. Work Hours and Religion"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: This paper describes a course I developed on the Economics of Sin that integrates ethical and economic material. My hope is that this paper will be useful to economists interested in exploring economic phenomena and to philosophers who are interested in the ethical implications of economic markets and policies. In keeping with this agenda, I proceed by discussing a framework for relating economic outcomes to economic criteria. This is followed by two examples from the course, one involving policy in the market for heroin and the other addressing the economics and ethics of paired kidney exchange. These examples are intended to illustrate the potential for combining ethical and economic approaches to understanding ethically complex economic transactions. I conclude with a few practical remarks regarding the challenge of developing an interdisciplinary course.
• Article: "Teaching the Economics of Sin"

• Authors: Mehmet Sener, Laixun Zhao
• Abstract: This paper constructs a dynamic scale-free North–South model of trade with endogenous innovation. In the North a local-sourcing-targeted race and an outsourcing-targeted R&D race take place simultaneously within each industry. The former results in the winner firm manufacturing in the North, while the latter culminates in the winner firm's immediate outsourcing to the South, generating the iPod cycle. We study three aspects of globalization: reductions in the resource-requirement in outsourcing-targeted R&D, increased subsidies to outsourced production, and reduced Southern imitation due to TRIPs. Each event boosts outsourcing-targeted R&D and increases the frequency of iPod cycles. The aggregate innovation rate rises despite a possible fall in local-sourcing-targeted R&D, and the North–South relative wage decreases.
• Article: "Globalization, R&D and the iPod Cycle"

• Author: Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: This paper constructs a scale-free endogenous growth model and studies the determinants of optimal R&D policy. The model combines two of the main approaches to removal of scale effects: the rent protection approach and the diminishing technological opportunities approach. The steady-state rate of innovation is a function of all of the model's parameters including the R&D subsidy/tax rate. Thus, growth is fully endogenous. Numerical simulations imply that it is optimal to tax R&D when innovations are of very small and very large magnitudes, and to subsidize R&D when innovations are of medium size. Under a wide range of empirically relevant calibrations, the subsidy rate turns out to be positive and fluctuates between 5% and 25%.
• Article: "R&D Policies, Endogenous Growth and Scale Effects"

• Authors: Stephanie Curcuru, Tomas Dvorak, Frank Warnock
• Abstract: Using a monthly data set on the foreign equity and bond portfolios of U.S. investors and the U.S. equity and bond portfolios of foreign investors, we find that the returns differential for portfolio securities is far smaller than previously reported. Examining all U.S. claims and liabilities, we find that previous estimates of large differentials are biased upward. The bias owes to computing implied returns from an internally inconsistent data set of revised data; original data produce a much smaller differential. We also attempt to reconcile our findings with observed patterns of cumulated current account deficits, the net international investment position, and the net income balance. Overall, we find no evidence that the United States can count on earning substantially more on its claims than it pays on its liabilities.
• Article: "Cross-Border Returns Differentials"

• Authors: Stephen Schmidt, Therese McCarty
• Abstract: We use a twenty-one year panel of data to examine the role of past income and aid, and expectations of future income, in regressions explaining state and local education spending. We show that simple estimates of the elasticity of spending with respect to financial resources are not robust to specification changes because the variables are non-stationary over time, causing inconsistent estimation of model parameters. Estimation in first differences (or equivalently, in growth rates) solves the time-series problems and produces robust estimates of the model's parameters. We then show that current spending by states responds to changes in expected future income. This explains why using fixed effects in simpler models reduces estimated income elasticities; fixed effects partially capture permanent income effects on spending. Estimates of lagged income are significant when used in models that do not explicitly model the expectations process, but present and past aid both have no effect on education spending. Models with structural assumptions about expected income produce estimates very similar to simpler models which include lagged information on income as a control variable. We conclude with recommendations for estimating models when only cross-section data or only short panels are available.
• Article: "Estimating Permanent and Transitory Income Elasticities of Education Spending from Panel Data"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: Reliance on a Dixit–Stiglitz production function leads the growth literature naïvely to associate economic scale with the size of a country's population. I develop an alternative approach in which market size is endogenous, reflecting a trade-off between the gains to exploiting non-rival skills and market transaction costs. Transaction costs reflect a country's institutional framework. The model supports scale effects in transitional growth rates and steady state income levels, suggesting scale effects may be important for developing countries. In this framework effective market size depends on a country's institutions. It is independent of population size and other macroeconomic variables.
• Article: "Scale Effects in Growth: A Role for Institutions"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: Using data drawn from the Current Population Surveys, this paper provides a consistent explanation for why the presence of a working wife reduces the husband’s wage among managers, but increases the husband’s wage among non-managers. It is not husband’s occupation per se but rather the distribution of husbands’ wage levels that underlies the working spouse penalty or premium. Positive correlations in earnings between married couples that arise from assortative mating make the cross-wage effects of the husbands’ wages on the wives’ hours of work first positive, then negative in cross-sectional data. The phenomenon of a working spouse penalty/premium is simply the flip side of this relationship.
• Article: "The Working Spouse Penalty / Premium and Married Women's Labor Supply"

• Author: Younghwan Song
• Abstract: This paper examines how the extent of recall bias in the Displaced Workers Surveys affects the often-cited empirical results found by Gibbons and Katz [Gibbons, R., Katz, L.F., 1991. Layoffs and lemons. Journal of Labor Economics 9 (4), 351−380] for the lemons effect of layoffs. Their finding that workers displaced by layoffs experience larger wage losses than do those displaced by plant closings is not due to the stigma attached to the layoff events. Rather it partly stems from recall bias in the 1984 and 1986 DWS, but mostly reflects the fact that workers displaced by layoffs have significantly higher predisplacement wage-tenure profiles than do those displaced by plant closings, while there is no such difference in postdisplacement wage-tenure profiles. A similar analysis using the 2000 and 2002 DWS shows that predisplacement wage losses are not different between workers displaced by layoffs and those displaced by plant closings.
• Article: "Recall Bias in the Displaced Workers Survey: Are Layoffs Really Lemons?"

• Authors: Elias Dinopoulos, Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: Schumpeterian growth is a particular type of economic growth that is based on the endogenous introduction of new products and/or processes and is governed by the process of creative destruction described by Joseph Schumpeter (1942). This paper provides an exposition of the scale-effects property in the context of Schumpeterian growth models. In particular, the paper outlines the three distinct solutions to the scale effects problem, discusses their implications and offers an assessment of scale-invariant Schumpeterian growth models.
• Article: "New Directions in Schumpeterian Growth Theory"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: This paper presents a unified theory of growth involving human capital accumulation, labour specialization, market expansion and falling fertility rates. The model suggests that these processes, often analyzed separately, are intimately linked. The accumulation of specialized human capital increases the gains to labour specialization, leading agents to increase their participation in markets and reduce time spent at home. This raises the opportunity cost of child raising, lowering fertility rates. The model suggests a central role for market transaction costs in determining the timing and rate of fertility declines linked to rising income.
• Article: "Market Transaction Costs in Industrialization and Demographic Transition"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: This paper constructs a simple model that can account for both the negative relationship between growth and income inequality observed in the cross-country data and the positive relationship observed within countries over time. The model employs a dual-economy structure with formal and informal sectors. Growth is driven by formal sector human capital spillovers. Restrictive institutions impose barriers to formality that reduce the growth rate and increase inequality. Redistributive taxation lowers inequality but blunts the incentive to accumulate, lowering growth. Institutional structures vary more across than within countries. Consequently, variations in institutional barriers to formality may account for the negative relationship between growth and inequality found in the cross-country data. Variations in the intensity of redistribution may account for the positive relationship observed within countries over time.
• Article: "Explaining the Evidence on Inequality and Growth: Informality and Redistribution"

• Author: Tomas Dvorak
• Abstract: During the last four years, the eight Eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004 have made significant strides toward financial integration with the EU. Several pieces of evidence support this finding. First, yields on long‐term sovereign bonds in accession countries have converged towards EU levels. This is true for both bonds denominated in local currency and bonds denominated in euro. Secondly, while the issuance of euro‐denominated corporate bonds from accession countries is limited, yields on existing corporate bonds are in line with those in the old EU countries. Thirdly, margins in the banking sector have narrowed, which is consistent with the integration of banking markets. Finally, while country effects still play a more important role in explaining stock returns than industry effects, the continuing stock market rally in the region is consistent with financial integration into the EU.
• Article: "Are the New and Old EU Countries Financially Integrated?"

• Authors: David Bloom, David Canning, Michael Moore, Younghwan Song
• Abstract: We explore the proposition that expected longevity affects retirement decisions and accumulated wealth using micro data drawn from the Health and Retirement Study for the United States. We use data on a person's subjective probability of survival to age 75 as a proxy for their prospective lifespan. In order to control for the presence of measurement error and focal points in responses, as well as reverse causality, we instrument subjective survival probabilities using information on current age, or age at death, of the respondent's parents. Our estimates indicate that increased subjective probabilities of survival result in increased household wealth among couples, with no effect on the length of the working life. These findings are consistent with the view that retirement decisions are driven by institutional constraints and incentives and that a longer expected lifespan leads to increased wealth accumulation.
• Article: "The Effect of Subjective Survival Probabilities on Retirement and Wealth in the United States"

• Authors: Stephen Schmidt, Karen Scott
• Abstract: In 1997, Vermont passed Act 60, which reformed its education finance system to achieve greater equality of spending. The reform encouraged wealthy towns to reduce spending; it was politically unpopular and was replaced, in 2004, by Act 68. We analyze the spending incentives created by the two acts and estimate the effects the change will have on spending inequality. Act 68 reduces tax prices for education spending in all towns, but reduces them disproportionately for wealthy towns. It increases education spending in Vermont but also increases inequality of spending. Because spending is inelastic with respect to tax prices, the increase in inequality is small relative to existing inequality. Our findings demonstrate that understanding the way towns respond to financial incentives, economically and politically, is critical in designing successful reforms. They suggest that it is difficult to maintain finance systems that give wealthy towns strong incentives to spend less or subsidize poorer towns. Using state revenues to subsidize schools achieves nearly as much equality as more explicit attempts to force wealthy districts to share resources.
• Article: "Reforming Reforms: Changing Incentives in Education Finance in Vermont"

• Author: Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: This paper constructs a North-South product cycle model of trade and explores the global effects of strengthening Southern Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) protection. Northern entrepreneurs undertake innovation, and Southern entrepreneurs undertake imitation. Successful innovators in the North are engaged in rent protection activities to deter the innovation and imitation efforts of their rivals. Endogenously determined rent protection activities remove the scale effects from the growth structure. I find that a stronger Southern IPR regime reduces the rates of innovation and imitation while leading to a larger North-South wage gap. With regards to multinationalization, I find that a stronger Southern IPR regime raises both the fraction of Multinational industries and the share of production shifted to the South within each Multinational firm.
• Article: "Intellectual Property Rights and Rent Protection in a North-South Product-Cycle Model"

• Authors: Tomas Dvorak, Richard Podpiera
• Abstract: The announcement of the European Union enlargement coincided with a dramatic rise in stock prices in accession countries. This paper investigates the hypothesis that the rise in stock prices was a result of the repricing of systematic risk due to the integration of accession countries into the world market. We found that firm-level stock price changes are positively related to the difference between a firm's local and world market betas. This result is robust to controlling for changes in expected earnings, country effects and other controls, although the magnitude of the effect is not very large. The differences between local and world betas explain nearly 22% of the stock price increase.
• Article: “European Union Enlargement and Equity Markets in Candidate Countries”

• Author: Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: This paper constructs a dynamic model of trade between two countries, one with flexible wages (America) and another with a rigid wage for less-skilled workers (Europe). The model incorporates global R&D races that generate random switches in trade patterns. Furthermore, rigid wages in Europe give rise to unemployment in that region. Using the model, I study the role of international trade and labor market institutions in mediating local and global shocks. I also investigate the factors behind the stylized trends in Europe and the US: rising European unemployment, rising wage inequality (especially for the US), skill upgrading, and rising R&D intensities. I find that technology shocks coupled with institutional response from the European labor markets can generate results consistent with the trends.
• Article: "Labour Market Rigidities and R&D-Based Growth in the Global Economy"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: In this paper, we model the co-evolution of the division of labor and informal institutions based on three assumptions. First, informal institutions lower coordination costs among specialists, which increases the equilibrium division of labor. Second, advances in the division of labor increase the size of interpersonal trading groups and thereby undermine the game theoretic basis of informal institutions. Finally, the collective nature of informal institutions implies that they are undervalued in private decision making. Together these assumptions imply that the equilibrium division of labor is too high from a social perspective. Consequently, the economy has greater than optimal complexity and grows at a higher than optimal rate of growth.
• Article: "Growing Apart: The Division of Labor and the Breakdown of Informal Institutions"

• Authors: Selin Sayek, Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: This paper constructs a dynamic North–South trade model with outsourcing and endogenous innovation. Production of high quality goods is first performed in the North (Northern phase), then split between the North and the South (Outsourcing phase), and finally shifted to the South (Southern phase). This cycle is reignited whenever a Northern firm innovates a higher quality product. We find that an increase in the fraction of outsourced production raises the Northern skill premium unambiguously, while raising the Southern skill premium if and only if the skill intensity of outsourced production is higher than that of local Southern production.
• Article: "Outsourcing and Wage Inequality in a Dynamic Product Cycle Model"

• Author: Tomas Dvorak
• Abstract: Using transaction data from Indonesia, this paper shows that domestic investors have higher profits than foreign investors. In addition, clients of global brokerages have higher long‐term and smaller medium (intramonth) and short (intraday) term profits than clients of local brokerages. This suggests that clients of local brokerages have a short‐lived information advantage, but that clients of global brokerages are better at picking long‐term winners. Finally, domestic clients of global brokerages have higher profits than foreign clients of global brokerages, suggesting that the combination of local information and global expertise leads to higher profits.
• Article: "Do Domestic Investors Have a Information Advantage?"

• Authors: William Darity, Jr., Lewis Davis
• Abstract: Theories of growth and international trade are reviewed critically from the perspective of understanding persistent inter-country and inter-regional income inequality. Three separate literatures are considered for the insights they offer about international disparity: Classical political economy, the North–South trade models, and the ‘new’ growth and trade theories that incorporate increasing returns and/or product differentiation. Classical antecedents of the more recent theories are identified, and contrasts are drawn between structuralist and neoclassical approaches to explaining the income gap between rich and poor nations.
• Article: "Growth, Trade and Uneven Development"

• Authors: Hsien-Hen Lu, Julian Palmer, Younghwan Song, Mary Clare Lennon, J. Lawrence Aber
• Abstract: This paper helps document significant improvements in the child low-income rate as well as the significant decrease in the proportion of children who relied on public assistance in the United States during the 1990s. Many disadvantaged groups of children were less likely to live in poor or low-income families in the late 1990s than such children a decade earlier. The improvement in the child low-income rates of these disadvantaged groups was accompanied by a substantial increase in parental employment. However, parental employment appears to do less to protect children from economic hardship than it did a decade earlier. This paper shows that working families’ children in many disadvantaged social groups, especially groups in medium risk ranks—children in families with parents between ages 25 to 29, with parents who only had a high-school diploma, and in father-only families—suffered the largest increase in economic hardship. Our results indicate that the increased odds of falling below low-income lines among children in working families facing multiple disadvantaged characteristics and the increased proportion of these children in various subgroups of working families in the 1990s can help explain the increased economic hardship among subgroups in the medium risk ranks listed above. Finally, the paper also notes that the official measure of poverty tends to underestimate low-income rates.
• Article: "Children Facing Economic Hardships in the United States: Differentials and Changes in the 1990s"

• Authors: Neil Bennett, Hsien-Hen Lu, Younghwan Song
• Abstract: Since the implementation of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program in late-1996, welfare rolls have declined by more than half. This paper explores whether improvements in the economic well-being of children have accompanied this dramatic reduction in welfare participation. Further, we examine the degree to which the success or failure of welfare reform has been shared equally among families of varying educational background. We analyze data from the March Current Population Surveys (CPS) over the years 1988 through 2001. Specifically, we link data for families with children who are interviewed in adjacent years and determine whether their economic circumstances either improved or deteriorated. We use two alternative approaches to address this general issue: a variety of regression models and a difference-in-differences methodology. These approaches provide consistent answers. In a bivariate framework TANF is associated with higher incomes; but this association becomes insignificant in the presence of business cycle controls. We also determine that children who were poor at an initial time period benefit differently, depending on their parents' educational attainment level. Poor children with parents who do not have a high school degree are significantly worse off in the TANF era, relative to the era prior to welfare reform, than are poor children of more educated parents.
• Article: "Welfare Reform and Changes in the Economic Well-Being of Children"

• Author: Tomas Dvorak
• Abstract: This paper shows that the behavior of gross capital flows can identify the nature of information asymmetries in international equity markets. Information asymmetry between foreign and domestic investors implies a correlation between net flows and returns. Information asymmetry within groups of foreign and domestic investors implies that gross flows and absolute returns are correlated. I find that the correlation between gross flows and absolute returns is stronger than the correlation between net flows and returns, suggesting that information asymmetries within countries are more important than those between countries.
• Article: “Asymmetric Information and Gross Capital Flows”

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: This paper develops a dynamic, general equilibrium model of specialization-driven growth in which private coordination costs are decreasing in public expenditure on physical and institutional infrastructure. The model provides an explicitly economic explanation of the secular rise of government. In addition, endogenous specialization decisions imply the existence of four development stages, characterized by distinct outcomes regarding the division of labor, the role of government and the return to capital. Growth is characterized by capital accumulation, market integration, the division of labor and the growth of government. The effectiveness of government plays a central role in determining whether an economy converges to a high or low level equilibrium.
• Article: "The Division of Labor and the Growth of Government"

• Authors: Lewis Davis, Bruce Dehning, Theophanis Stratopoulos
• Abstract: There is a belief that the payoffs from investments in information technology (IT) are difficult to recognize, and therefore a sustained competitive advantage from an IT-enabled strategy is difficult to distinguish from a temporary competitive advantage. We develop a model to test whether market participants are able to recognize a sustained competitive advantage due to an IT-enabled strategy, and test the model empirically. We find that a competitive advantage due to an IT-enabled strategy is discernable by market participants, and as apparent as a competitive advantage obtained through other means.
• Article: "Does the Market Recognize IT-Enabled Competitive Advantage?"

• Author: Lewis Davis
• Abstract: This paper develops a general equilibrium model endogenizing labor specialization, firm size, firm specialization, interfirm trade, and economic fragmentation. In contrast to the standard neoinstitutionalist understanding of firms and markets as substitutes in organizing production, firms and markets are shown to be complements in reaping economies to the division of labor. As a result, firm size varies directly, rather than inversely, with the extent of interfirm trade. Growth is facilitated by increases in the complexity of economic organization, involving increases in the division of labor, the size and specialization of firms, market size, and the complexity of interfirm trade.
• Article: "Toward a Unified Transaction Cost Theory of Economic Organization"

• Authors: Therese McCarty, Terri Sexton, Steven Sheffrin, Stephen Shelby
• Abstract: In this paper we explore alternative strategies for allocating property tax revenues among the local governments in a county. We identify allocation rules that are flexible with respect to local demand and cost conditions and yet are not overly complex. Before describing our methodology, we explain how property tax revenue is allocated in California.
• Article: "Allocating Property Tax Revenue in California: Living with Proposition 13"

• Author: Stephen Schmidt
• Abstract: The author discusses the advantages of using computers and the World Wide Web in classroom simulation exercises. Using networked computers permits a richer simulation design, allows more complicated decisions by the students, and facilitates reporting results for later discussion. The Web is an ideal technology for such simulations because computers already have Web-capable browsers, with which students are familiar, and information on creating Web sites is readily available. The author discusses these points in the context of a sample simulation that teaches basic economic principles of trade, investment, and public goods in the context of American economic history.
• Article: "Active and Cooperative Learning Using the World Wide Web"

• Author: Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: This paper develops a dynamic general equilibrium model of R&D-generated growth without scale effects and knowledge-based trade of higher quality products between two structurally-identical countries. A product replacement mechanism coupled with a time-consuming job-matching process generates Schumpeterian unemployment. A global reduction in tariffs stimulates innovation and growth. It also raises the relative wage of skilled workers, motivating more individuals to undergo skill upgrading. In addition, trade liberalization increases the unemployment rate of unskilled labor, but has an ambiguous effect on the economy-wide unemployment rate.
• Article: "Schumpeterian Unemployment, Trade and Wages"

• Authors: Therese McCarty, Stephen Schmidt
• Abstract: The authors estimate vector autoregressions for three categories of state government expenditure: education, highways, and welfare. Each regression contains state expenditure on that category, federal aid to the state in that category, total federal aid to the state, state general revenue, and personal income. The authors calculate impulse response functions for these vector autoregressions to analyze changes in aid and expenditure over time. The authors find that deviations in expenditure and category-specific aid have large and long-lasting effects on future expenditure. Category-specific aid has a much stronger effect than aid, revenue, or income, suggesting a flypaper effect in which aid is spent disproportionately in the category in which it is granted. This effect persists for up to 5 years, suggesting that there are structural dynamic links between category-specific aid and expenditure by states on those categories.
• Article: "Dynamic Patterns in State Government Finance"

• Author: Stephen Schmidt
• Abstract: Public subsidies to industries firms incentives to alter their behavior. When calculating the effects of such programs, previous assessments of transit subsidies have not included the effects of these incentives on the firms' output. This article reports the responses of mass transit firms to the federal transit subsidy program and changes the Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA 21) made to that program, as predicted by a structural model of output choice. TEA 21 increases bus service in medium‐sized cities by 6‐8 percent, but increases service in large cities by only 1‐2 percent. The formula's incentive tier is weak, and the size of the subsidy depends little on whether that output results in increased ridership. The formula could be redesigned to provide stronger incentives to lower cost and increase ridership, thus encouraging a more efficient response from transit firms.
• Article: "Incentive Effects of Expanding Federal Mass Transit Formula Grants"

• Author: Stephen Schmidt
• Abstract: Using cross-section data on a national sample of city-pair markets for rail freight, I examine correlations between prices, quantities, and the number of single-line and interline firms serving markets. I estimate the reduced form of a structural model in which rail rates and quantities depend on the number of firms. I find that rates increase as the number of firms serving the market falls, and quantities shipped rise as the number of firms falls. The result is consistent with market power for rail freight shippers that causes markups to rise when fewer firms serve the market, and is not consistent with other explanations of the relationship between number of firms and rates and quantities. Interline shipment is much more costly than single-line, suggesting that mergers may be desirable even if they exacerbate market power problems.
• Article: "Market Structure and Market Outcomes in Deregulated Rail Freight Markets"

• Author: Mehmet Sener
• Abstract: This paper constructs a general equilibrium model of equilibrium unemployment by combining an endogenous growth model with a variant of equilibrium search theory. The analysis offers two explanations for the causes of widening wage gap between skilled and less-skilled labor, and rising unemployment rate among the less skilled: technological change in the form of an increase in the size of innovations or skilled labor saving technological change in R&D activity. In addition, the model identifies two distinct effects of faster technological progress on the aggregate unemployment rate. First, it increases the rate of labor turnover and therefore increases the aggregate unemployment rate – the creative destruction effect. Second, it creates R&D jobs, which offer workers complete job security, and consequently reduces the aggregate unemployment rate – the resource reallocation effect.
• Article: "A Schumpeterian Model of Equilibrium Unemployment and Labour Turnover"