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The Future of Payment Transactions: The Convenience and Security of Mobile Payments
by Shane Cashin Abstract This study aims to evaluate the American consumers drive for payment choice. With cash, credit, and debit still covering most of the payment transactions that occur across the country every day, there has been a trend toward the use of mobile payments as the technology improves and more businesses have started […]
Adoption Subsidy, Foster Care Payment, and Foster Care Adoption: A Two-stage Least Squares Approach
By Chun Sun Bak This paper examines the effect of the change in the magnitude of monthly governmental adoption subsidy on the adoption rate for foster children in foster family structures. In order to account for omitted variable bias attached to the amount of subsidy that a child receives, I construct an instrumental variable that […]
Assessing the Effects of Earnings Surprise on Returns and Volatility with High Frequency Data
By Sam Lim This paper aims to explore how “earnings surprise”—the difference between earnings estimates and the actual announced earnings—affects a stock’s volatility and returns using high frequency data. The results show that earnings surprise is significantly correlated with volatility and overnight returns. Furthermore, an earnings surprise is significantly correlated with an increase in volatility […]
Currency Crisis Early Warning Systems: Robust Adjustments to the Signal-Based Approach
By Andrew Kindman This research proposes and tests several novel strategies for enhancing the strength of conventional, signal-based currency crisis Early Warning Systems (EWS). Using country level, monthly macroeconomic time-series data, it develops an algorithmic process for identifying periods of elevated currency crisis risk and achieves robust results. The proposed changes to current EWS include: […]
Forecasting Existing Home Sales using Google Search Engine Queries
By Brian Humphrey This paper employs OLS regressions to determine whether Google search query data improves national and local existing home sales forecasts. The local dataset features metropolitan statistical area data from Texas. Initially, the national and local regressions are estimated without macroeconomic variables. Macroeconomic variables are subsequently included in order to determine if Google […]
Oil Price Shocks and the Monetary Policy
By Ying-te Huang Essentially all US recessions have been preceded by oil price shocks and subsequently tighter monetary policies. (Bernanke, Gertler and Watson, 1997). Whereas some scholars, including Herrera and Hamilton (2001) claimed that such oil price shocks contributed to the recession that followed, others, including, Bernanke et al. (1997), believed that the Fed‘s endogenous […]
Movements in the Digital Divide
By Benjamin Berg I explore how the “Digital Divide” in the United States manifests during the period from 2000 to 2007. I find that the digital divide is decreasing with home computer and Internet use. But a new divide has emerged with high-speed Internet. Even though the income gap is closing with home computer use, […]
A Model of Speculative Attacks and Devaluations in Korea and Indonesia
By Austin Lin Since the beginning of the Bretton Woods era, currency crises and speculative attacks have affected the world economy. This paper presents a model, originally derived by Blanco and Garber, that predicts one-period ahead probabilities of a currency devaluation and the expected exchange rate conditional on a devaluation. The analysis is then applied […]
Does the Quality of Public Transit Affect Commuters’ Response to Gasoline Price Changes?
By Allison Smith The effect of public transportation on commuters’ sensitivity to gas prices is examined using a proxy for the quality of public transportation. This proxy is measured as the difference in the individual’s predicted commute times by private transit and public transit, estimated using the individual’s observable characteristics. The interaction of gasoline price […]
