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On the Licensing of Innovations under Strategic Delegation
(Department of Economics, 2004)
This paper uses a three-stage licensing-delegation-quantity game to study the licensing of a cost-reducing innovation by a patent-holding firm to its competitor. It is shown that licensing is less likely to occur under strategic delegation compared...
Testing the Bounds: Empirical Behavior of Target Zone Fundamentals
(Department of Economics, 2009)
Standard target zone exchange rate models are based on nonlinear functions of an unobserved economic fundamental, which is assumed to be bounded, similarly to the target zone exchange rates themselves. A violation of this key assumption is a basic...
The Precautionary Premium and the Risk-Downside Risk Tradeoff
(Department of Economics, 2002)
This paper shows that the precautionary premium embodies a tradeoff between risk and downside risk. It is the size of a mean-preserving spread for thish the strength of aversion to risk just offsets the strength of aversion to downside risk. Using...
Estimating the Impact of State Policies and Institutions with Mixed-Level Data
(Department of Economics, 2006)
clustered standard errors as a more straightforward, feasible approach, especially when working with large datasets or many cross-level interactions, our purpose in this Practical Researcher piece is to draw attention to the issue of clustering in state...
Estate and Capital Gains Taxation: Efficiency and Political Economy Considerations
(Department of Economics, 2004)
In this paper a simple dynastic overlapping-generations model with homogeneous agents is used to analyze the optimal use of capital income tax, labor income tax and estate tax. The results of this analysis add to the conventional wisdom about...
When Do Input Prices Matter For Make-Or-Buy Decisions?
(Department of Economics, 2007)
informationally-demanding way to ensure efficient make-or-buy decisions is to price inputs at marginal cost. The extent to which input prices can depart from marginal cost while still inducing efficient make-or-buy decisions depends on the relative efficiency...
How Do States Formulate Medicaid and SCHIP Policy? Economic and Political Determinants of State Eligibility Levels
(Department of Economics, 2009)
We exploit the existence of substantial variation in state policies toward public health insurance for children between 1990 and 2002 to estimate the economic and political determinants of state eligibility levels. Controlling for state and year...
Do Liberals Play Nice? The Effects of Party and Political Ideology in Public Goods and Trust Games
(Department of Economics, 2004)
We test the conventional wisdom that political ideology is associated with generosity or compassion by comparing the behavior of experimental subjects in public goods or trust games. We find that self-described liberals ...
Incentives for Sabotage in Vertically Related Industries
(Department of Economics, 2004)
We show that the incentives a vertically integrated supplier may have to disadvantage or "sabotage" the activities of downstream rivals vary with both the type of sabotage and the nature of downstream competition. ...
Did the Devil Make Them Do It? The Effects of Religion in Public Goods and Trust Games*
(Department of Economics, 2008)
We test whether religious affiliation and participation in religious services are associated with behavior in public goods and trust games. Overall, religious affiliation is unrelated to individual behavior. However, we ...
The Effect of Monetary Policy on Economic Output
(Department of Economics, 2003)
There is substantial research effort devoted to identifying a sufficient statistic for monetary policy. The purpose of this paper is to broaden the scope of the on-going investigation along three dimensions. First, we follow up the Rudebusch...
Environmental Policy Attitudes: Issues, Geographical Scale, and Political Trust
(Department of Economics, 2008)
Objectives. This article examines environmental policy attitudes, focusing on the differences in preferences across issue type (i.e., pollution, resource preservation) and geographical scale (i.e., local, national, global). ...
An Experimental Study of the Effects of Inequality and Relative Deprivation on Trusting Behavior
(Department of Economics, 2005)
Several non-experimental studies report that income inequality and other forms of population-based heterogeneity reduce levels of trust in society. However, recent work by Glaeser et al. (2000) calls into question the reliability of widely used...
Explaining Public Attitudes on State Legislative Professionalism
(Department of Economics, 2008)
Scholars have long argued that state legislative professionalism, or the provision of staff, legislator salary, and session length, has behavioral incentives for legislators and implications for legislative capacity. Scant ...
What's in a Name?
(Department of Economics, 2004)
Plenty. This paper analyzes two broad questions: Does your first name matter? And how did you get your first name anyway? Using data from the National Opinion Research Center's (NORC's) General Social Survey, including access to respondent's first...
Optimal Commodity Taxation When Land and Structures Must Be Taxed at the Same Rate
(Department of Economics, 2005)
We show that the optimal property tax rate rises with the ratio of land rents to structure and land development costs. California's high ratio of income to property tax revenue and the distribution of Federal housing ...
An Information Theoretic Approach to Flexible Stochastic Frontier Models
(Department of Economics, 2007)
Parametric stochastic frontier models have a long history in applied production economics, but the class of tractible parametric models is relatively small. Consequently, researchers have recently considered non-parametric alternatives...
High Corruption Income in Ming and Qing China
(Department of Economics, 2005)
We develop an economic model that explains historical data on government corruption in Ming and Qing China. In our model, officials' extensive powers result in corrupt income matching land's share in output. We estimate corrupt income to be between...
Campaign Finance Laws and Political Efficacy: Evidence From the States
(Department of Economics, 2005)
The decline of political efficacy and trust in the United States is often linked to the rise of money in politics. Both the courts and reform advocates justify restrictions on campaign donations and spending as necessary ...
The Impact of Welfare Reform on Leaver Characteristics, Employment and Recidivism
(Department of Economics, 2002)
recidivism comparing cohorts of leavers prior to and after welfare reform. We find that after welfare reform leavers are much more likely to be working, have higher total earnings, work for employers with similar characteristics, and are less likely to return...