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Now showing items 21-40 of 71
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 ...
Race, Bureaucratic Discretion, and the Implementation of Welfare Reform
(Department of Economics, 2003)
This paper explores the impact of the race of individual clients and of the local racial context on the implementation of sanctions for recipients of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) in a Midwestern state. We find that although...
Bayesian Estimator of Vector-Autoregressive Model Under the Entropy Loss
(Department of Economics, 2002)
it difficult to compute the Bayesian estimates via standard Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedures. The second contribution of the paper concerns MCMC simulation of the Bayesian estimator without using the closed-form expression of the frequentist...
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...
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 ...
Competing for Customers' Attention: Advertising When Consumers Have Imperfect Memory
(Department of Economics, 2006)
This paper applies the theory of memory for advertising, developed in the consumer behavior literature, to an industrial organization setting to provide insight into advertising strategies in imperfectly competitive markets. There are two firms...
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). ...
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...
Alternative Bayesian Estimators for Vector-Autoregressive Models
(Department of Economics, 2002)
This paper compares frequentist risks of several Bayesian estimators of the VAR lag parameters and covariance matrix under alternative priors. With the constant prior on the VAR lag parameters, the asymmetric LINEX estimator for the lag parameters...
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...
Estimating Estate-Specific Price-to-Rent Ratios in Shanghai and Shenzhen: A Bayesian Approach
(Department of Economics, 2010)
in the same estate. We find that the price-to-rent ratios tend to be higher for low-end properties. We discuss economic explanations for the phenomenon and the policy implications....
TELRIC Pricing with Vintage Capital
(Department of Economics, 2001)
This paper studies the effect of technical progress on competitive equilibrium prices in a formal dynamic setting that includes the dynamic effects of business income taxes. The model is designed to facilitate comparison between competitive...
Networks, Standards and Intellectual Property Rights
(Department of Economics, 2007)
This paper reviews issues that lie at the intersection between intellectual property rights (IPR) and network effects, especially in the context of the global economy. Some of the relevant questions are: (1) How do IPR influence the provision...
Long-Term Oil Price Forecasts: A New Perspective on Oil and the Macroeconomy
(Department of Economics, 2010)
-space oil market model, in which global real economic activity and real oil prices share a common stochastic trend. Changes in unanticipated fluctuations and changes in the forecasted longterm average of discounted real oil prices sum to real oil price...
The Effects of Welfare-to-Work Program Activities on Labor Market Outcomes
(Department of Economics, 2006)
Studies examining welfare-to-work program effectiveness present mixed and sometimes discrepant findings, partly due to research design, data, and methodological limitations. Using administrative data on Missouri and North Carolina welfare recipients...
Is Teacher Pay “Adequate”?
(Department of Economics, 2005)
In school finance lawsuits plaintiffs often claim that pay levels are not sufficient to recruit teachers who can deliver constitutionally-mandated levels of educational services. In this paper I consider several ways in which one might bring...
Accounting for Fluctuations in Social Network Usage and Migration Dynamics
(Department of Economics, 2004)
In this paper, we examine network capital usage and migration patterns in a theoretical model. Networks are modeled as impacting the migration decision in many ways. When young, larger networks reduce the time lost moving from one region to another...
Extracting a Common Stochastic Trend: Theory with Some Applications
(Department of Economics, 2008)
This paper investigates the statistical properties of estimators of the parameters and unobserved series for state space models with integrated time series. In particular, we derive the full asymptotic results for maximum likelihood estimation using...
Herding and Bank Runs
(Department of Economics, 2007)
Traditional models of bank runs do not allow for herding effects, because in these models withdrawal decisions are assumed to be made simultaneously. I extend the banking model to allow a depositor to choose his withdrawal ...