Trailer Park Economics
By Caitlin Gorback In this paper, we explore the various reasons behind the development of the American institution of trailer parks. The first two models arise in equilibrium, the last two respond to housing shocks. Models include “Bad Tenants” in which tenants and landowners contract to protect against bad neighbors, a basic “Capital Constraints model […]
Taming the Dragon: The Modernization of the Chinese Equity Markets and its Effects on IPO Underpricing
By William Benesh The extreme underpricing of Chinese Initial Public Offerings in the early days of the Chinese equity markets was reduced by several reforms instituted by the Chinese government from around 2000 to 2002. These reforms reduced 1-day returns on IPOs from 295% to 72%. The reforms reduced IPO underpricing by decreasing the inequality […]
Neighborhood Effects and School Performance: The Impact of Public Housing Demolitions on Children in North Carolina
By Rebecca Aqostino This study explores how the demolitions of particularly distressed public housing units, through the Home Ownership for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) grants program, have affected academic outcomes for children in adjacent neighborhoods in Durham and Wilmington, North Carolina. I measure neighborhood-level changes and individual effects through regression analysis. All students in demolition […]
Market Power & Reciprocity Among Vertically Integrated Cable Providers
By Jeffery Shih-kai Shen This paper seeks to investigate the effects of vertical integration on the cable industry. There are two main goals that the research paper will attempt to address. The first is to build upon existing research on favoritism shown by multichannel video programming distributors (MVPDs) to affiliated video programming networks. Second, the […]
Incentives in Professional Tennis: Tournament Theory and Intangible Factors
By Steven Seidel and Joshua Silverman This paper analyzes the incentives of professional tennis players in a tournament setting, as a proxy for workers in a firm. Previous studies have asserted that workers exert more effort when monetary incentives are increased, and that effort is maximized when marginal pay dispersion varies directly with position in […]
Beta Estimation Using High Frequency Data
By Angela Ryu Using high frequency stock price data in estimating nancial measures often causes serious distortion. It is due to the existence of the market microstructure noise, the lag of the observed price to the underlying value due to market friction. The adverse eect of the noise can be avoided by choosing an appropriate […]
“Winner-Take-All Economics” Professional Inquiry and Public Discourse on Material Inequality
By Jonathan Pryor What can account for the failure of economists to extend a firm guiding hand into the public discourse on material inequality in contemporary America? This paper reviews historical and modern economic literature and then extends its focus to the debates in the public sector, private opinion, “think tanks,” the news media, the […]
The Nurture Effect: Like Father, Like Son. What about for an Adopted Child? A Study of Korean-American Adoptees on the Impact of Family Environment and Genes
By Suanna Seung-yun Oh I investigate the influences of family environment and genes on children’s educational outcomes by working with data on Korean American adoptees and their non-adoptive siblings. I make use of the natural experiment setting where children were quasi-randomly assigned to families. From Sacerdote’s discussion of the three different approaches of analyzing the […]
Extending the Possibilities of Kidney Exchange with Compatible Pairs
By Karna Mital Kidney exchange enables incompatible pairs to exchange kidneys so each recipient can receive a transplant. Compatible pairs have not yet been incorporated in any kidney exchange program. The present study incorporates compatible pairs in cycles-only mechanism, and focuses on the HLA match aspect of match quality. When 27.7% of compatible pairs participate, […]
Time-Varying Beta: The Heterogeneous Autoregressive Beta Model
By Kunal Jain Conventional models of volatility estimation do not capture the persistence in high-frequency market data and are not able to limit the impact of market micro-structure noise present at very finely sampled intervals. In an attempt to incorporate these two elements, we use the beta-metric as a proxy for equity-specific volatility and use […]
