Search
Now showing items 1-20 of 604
An Evaluation of Missouri's A+ Schools' Program
(Department of Economics, 2004)
The A+ Schools Program was initiated to offer financial incentives to students to attend Missouri's public 2-year post-secondary schools. Under the program, the state government provides eligible students with college ...
Customization: Ideal Varieties, Product Uniqueness and Price Competition
(Department of Economics, 2009)
We study customization in the Hotelling model with two firms. In addition to providing ideal varieties, the perceived uniqueness of a customized product contributes independently to consumer utility. We show that only when ...
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...
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...
Exact FGLS Asymptotics for MA Errors
(Department of Economics, 2004)
We show under very parsimonious assumptions that FGLS and GLS are asymptotically equivalent when errors follow an invertible MA(1) process. Although the linear regression model with MA errors has been studied for many ...
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...
Increasing Outer Risk
(Department of Economics, 2004)
Recent empirical research has established that the distributions of a wide range of economic variables are kurtotic in that they have higher peak(s) in the neighborhood of the mean and greater elongation in the tails than the normal distribution...
Sub-Optimality of the Friedman Rule in Townsend's Turnpike and Limited Communication Models of money: Do finite lives and initial dates matter?
(Department of Economics, 2004)
We construct an economy populated with infinitely-lived agents and show that the Friedman rule is suboptimal. We do that by showing that our economy and an overlapping generations model in which the Friedman rule is known ...
Money, output and the payment system: Optimal monetary policy in a model with hidden effort
(Department of Economics, 2007)
We propose a new explanation for the observed difference in the cost of intraday and overnight liquidity. We argue that the low cost of intraday liquidity is an application of the Friedman rule in an environment where a ...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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 ...
State Social Capital and Individual Health Status
(Department of Economics, 2004)
Recent studies have found that two state-level measures of social capital, average levels of civic participation and trust, are associated with improvements in individual health status. In this study we employ these measures, ...
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. ...
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...
Asymmetric Information and Bank Runs
(Department of Economics, 2007)
. In this paper, I extend the analysis of panic-based runs to include an asymmetric-information, extrinsic randomizing device. Depositors observe different, but correlated, signals on the stability of the bank. I find that if the signals that depositors obtain...