Open Access Publications

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Open access publications by faculty, staff, postdocs, and graduate students in the Department of Economics.

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Now showing 1 - 11 of 11

A transaction-cost model of chronic specie scarcity and the evolution of monetary structures in constrained colonial economies
(Cliometrica, 2025-02-06) Grubb, Farley
A transaction-cost model of monetary choice is used to justify colonists’ claims that specie money for executing within-colony trades and paying local taxes was chronically scarce in Britain’s pre-nineteenth century North American colonies. This scarcity is shown to be the result of individual rational maximizing choice behavior given the constraints imposed on the colonies by their mother country. By contrast, the conventional quantity-theory-of-money, specie-flow model indicates that a chronic specie scarcity equilibrium is impossible. Implicit assumptions in the quantity-theory-of-money model are shown to not apply to these colonial economies. The transaction-cost model developed here builds on the Walrasian–Arrow–Debreu general equilibrium model by incorporating transaction costs and media-of-exchange structures into the market clearing mechanism. Specie (outside money) and non-specie-money media-of-exchange structures (inside monies), which have differing transaction costs, are added to the model. Those additions, along with import substitution and trade-control constraints, identify the plausible circumstances that yield a chronic specie scarcity outcome in a colony. Whether the individual rational maximizing monetary choices that produce chronic specie scarcity in a colony lead to sub-optimal or to optimal social welfare outcomes in that colony depends on what non-specie media-of-exchange structures emerge as the inside money in that colony.
Spillovers From Medicaid Contraceptive Use to Non-Medicaid Patients: Evidence From New York
(Health Economics, 2025-02-03) Callison, Kevin; Carlos, Marisa; Willage, Barton
This study examines spillovers from a 2014 New York Medicaid policy change that increased reimbursement for immediate postpartum long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) insertion. Using administrative data on hospital deliveries from 2011 through 2019, we analyze whether physicians who inserted immediate postpartum LARCs for Medicaid patients following the policy change were more likely to subsequently perform the procedure on non-Medicaid patients. We find significant spillovers, as physicians who first perform an immediate postpartum Medicaid LARC insertion following the 2014 payment reform are 9.3 percentage points more likely to perform immediate postpartum non-Medicaid LARC insertions; an association that increases with the physician's share of Medicaid deliveries. To distinguish between physician-specific and hospital-specific factors driving spillovers, we compare physicians within the same hospital-year. Results indicate approximately half the spillover is due to physician-specific factors and half to hospital-specific factors. Our findings highlight how targeted reimbursement policies can have broader impacts beyond the intended population and demonstrate the influence of both individual physician behavior and institutional factors in shaping clinical practice patterns. Understanding these spillover dynamics is important for policymakers and healthcare providers aiming to promote effective and equitable contraceptive care across patient populations.
Assessing the 1921–1922 federal financial rescue: the War Finance Corporation Bank lending program
(Financial History Review, 2025-02-25) Butkiewicz, James L.; Solcan, Mihaela
The 1920–1 recession did not transpire entirely without federal intervention, as commonly believed. Following lending by several Federal Reserve banks, the federally chartered War Finance Corporation (WFC) lent to support exports and shortly after the recession, it lent aggressively to assist banks in agricultural regions, as numerous bank suspensions resulted from the agricultural depression of the early 1920s. Bank suspensions decreased markedly in 1922 to the lowest annual total during the 1921–33 period. This article assesses the impact of WFC lending on bank suspensions, and to what extent the WFC's provision of liquidity helped to resolve the existing difficulties.
Factors contributing to the use of references to diversity, inclusion, and gender issues in undergraduate economics courses: Findings from the sixth national “chalk and talk” survey
(Journal of Education for Business, 2024-01-08) Ahlstrom, Laura J.; Asarta, Carlos J.; Harter, Cynthia
This study uses data from the sixth national quinquennial survey on teaching and assessment methods in economics, also known as the “chalk and talk” survey, to examine, for the first time, how instructor, departmental, and institutional characteristics may contribute to the use of references to diversity, inclusion, and gender issues in undergraduate economics courses. Findings suggest that undergraduate students are differently exposed to these issues depending on the characteristics of the instructors, departments, and institutions. Our work provides a baseline for supporting targeted interventions to increase the use of issues related to diversity, inclusion, and gender in the economics classroom.
Got (clean) milk? Organization, incentives, and management in Indian dairy cooperatives
(Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 2023-08) Rao, Manaswini; Shenoy, Ashish
Smallholder producers in developing countries often collaborate in teams that take advantage of scale economies and allocate surplus among members. We experimentally evaluate team-level incentive contracts for quality upgrading among Indian dairy cooperatives where there is a risk of free-riding because individual quality cannot be traced. Incentives improve aggregate quality, with evidence of increased effort from both producers and cooperative managers. However, several managers decline incentive payments when they cannot control how payment information is disclosed to cooperative members. Survey evidence indicates publicity lowers managerial returns, suggesting transparency-based efforts to constrain elites can undermine the core policy goal.
Hotels vs. Guest Satisfaction
(International Journal of Gaming, Hospitality and Tourism, 2023-06-06) Sposato, Emily; Kline, Sheryl
In order to be successful in the hotel industry, one must look for different ways to satisfy their guests and improve that guest experience. This is a challenge for many hotels, but one way to meet and even exceed the guest satisfaction is by using technology. Technology can change so much for guests during their stay, for it can make the possibility of guest satisfaction increase. Attempting to analyze whether a guest is satisfied with a hotel and their service is what hotels should do in order to keep their business successful, and that is where technology becomes important for hotels needing it for practically everything that is run, so using methods that are useful and satisfactory should be looked into. This technology aids this issue in personalizing the guests' experience, using revenue management to attract guests to your hotel property, allowing self-service technologies to get more attention, and making sure the technology is even better than what guests are used to in their homes. Looking into technology from a guest’s perspective and whether these different methods make their stay pleasurable comes into consideration to many hotels, for they are making attempts of these different methods. As hotels are attempting these methods in order to achieve this ultimate goal of receiving guest satisfaction, a deep understanding of whether these methods are doing justice for a hotel's success is important to analyze and look further into.
Household food waste trending upwards in the United States: Insights from a National Tracking Survey
(Journal of the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, 2023-06-08) Li, Ran; Shu, Yiheng; Bender, Kathryn E.; Roe, Brian E.
Three successive administrations have supported the United States' 2015 goal to reduce food waste. Households waste more food than other supply chain segments, however, few data sources are available to track US households' progress toward this goal. We provide insights from the first four waves of a novel national survey designed to track such waste. We find a 280% year-over-year increase in self-reported waste between early 2021 and early 2022, which militates against national goal achievement. We find households wasted more food during weeks they dined out and that sample households dined out significantly more in 2022 than in 2021.
A novel agreement statistic using data on uncertainty in ratings
(Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series C, 2023-07-15) Zee, Jarcy; Mariani, Laura; Barisoni, Laura; Mahajan, Parag; Gillespie, Brenda
Many existing methods for estimating agreement correct for chance agreement by adjusting the observed proportion agreement by the probability of chance agreement based on different assumptions. These assumptions may not always be appropriate, as demonstrated by pathologists’ ratings of kidney biopsy descriptors. We propose a novel agreement statistic that accounts for the empirical probability of chance agreement, estimated by collecting additional data on rater uncertainty for each rating. A standard error estimator for the proposed statistic is derived. Simulation studies show that in most cases, our proposed statistic is unbiased in estimating the probability of agreement after removing chance agreement.
Using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak Mechanism to Teach Willingness to Pay and Consumer Surplus
(Journal of Economics Teaching, 2023) Schubert, Jens
The Becker DeGroot Marschak (BDM) mechanism is a widely-used technique to elicit subjects’ willingness to pay for ordinary consumer and environmental goods. In this article, I show an application of the BDM mechanism to teach the concepts of willingness to pay and consumer surplus in introductory economics classes. The procedure is easy to implement, even in courses with large enrollments, and it actively engages all students. Evidence suggests this technique improves learning outcomes.
The Lived Experiences of Top Women Contributors to Leading Economic Education Journals
(American Economist, 2022-11-21) Ferrara, Zachary; Asarta, Carlos J.
Despite the substantial literature on women in economics, very little qualitative work has been devoted to exploring women’s lived experiences, and even less so on their presence in the economic education subfield. Through interviewing top female contributors to the three leading economic education journals, new insights regarding their experiences within the profession are presented, including challenges they have faced and addressed, the roles colleagues and institutions play in their scholarship, and how research itself fits into their overall careers.
The effects of unemployment insurance in late career: Evidence from Social Security offsets
(Southern Economic Journal, 2021-09-07) Toohey, Desmond
This paper studies the effects of unemployment insurance (UI) benefits for retirement-age workers. It shows that UI benefits can raise reported search effort and labor force participation for this population. Estimated effects on subsequent employment are positive but small and statistically indistinguishable from zero. The results are contrasted with estimates showing negative effects of UI on reemployment for younger workers. The identifying variation is generated by the elimination of Social Security offsets: state-level policies that reduce unemployment benefits for Social Security beneficiaries. The findings are consistent with a simple model of UI claiming with participation and work search requirements.

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