Faculty publication

Professor Vaninsky publishes in Economic Change and Restructuring

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Professor Alexander Vaninsky, a long-time economics instructor at the Stamford Campus, recently published the article “Optimal environment-friendly economic restructuring: the United States–China cooperation case study” in the journal Economic Change and Restructuring (November 2017).

This paper discusses a model for the restructuring of national economies for the purpose of achieving optimal growth under conditions of decreased energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions. The discussion combines input–output and factorial-decomposition models, and applies projected gradient and factor analysis to find the optimal structural changes that serve all three goals. A comparative analysis of the economies of the United States and China, including opportunities for cooperative restructuring, serves as a case study.

Professor Ross in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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Professor Ross was invited to write a commentary on measuring trends in discrimination.  Specifically, Professor Ross carefully lays out the potential, but also the challenges, of exploiting multiple field studies of discrimination combined with meta-analysis techniques in order to measure changes over time in the level of discrimination.  Professor Ross notes recent research in the same journal that shows very stable levels of employment discrimination against African-Americans over several decades in the U.S.  On the other hand, his own research has documented substantial declines in the level of housing discrimination, especially among real estate agents for owner-occupied housing. Below is a link to the commentary.

http://www.pnas.org/content/114/41/10815.extract

Professor Miceli’s The Economic Approach to Law, Third Edition

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Stanford University Press has just published the third edition of Thomas J. Miceli’s Law and Economics textbook.

From the publisher:

“Master teacher Thomas J. Miceli provides an introduction to law and economics that reveals how economic principles can explain the structure of the law and make it more efficient.

The third edition of this seminal textbook is thoroughly updated to include recent cases and the latest scholarship, with particular attention paid to torts, contracts, property rights, and the economics of crime. A new chapter organization, ideal for quarter- or semester-long courses, strengthens the book’s focus on unifying themes in the field.

As Miceli tells a cohesive, analytical “story” about law from a distinctly economic perspective, exercises and problems encourage students to deepen their knowledge.”

The Economic Approach to Law, Third Edition

Professor Zhao’s Article in VoxChina

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Kai ZhaoAn article by Professor Zhao and his coauthor Ayse Imrohoroglu (USC Marshall) has been posted on VoxChina.org, an independent, non-partisan and nonprofit platform recently initiated by Princeton together with a group of scholars from other institutions including UPenn and CUHK (Shenzhen).

In this article, they discuss their research on the determinants of the Chinese saving rates. They focus on the paper “The Chinese Saving Rate: Long-Term Care Risks, Family Insurance, and Demographics”, in which they find that the combination of the risks faced by the elderly and the deterioration of family insurance due to the one-child policy is an important cause of the increase in China’s saving rate since 1980. This paper is the first major paper growing out of their research agenda on the Chinese economy and its implications for the rest of the world.

Professor Zhao’s article can be found at: http://www.voxchina.org/show-3-43.html

Professor Jungbin Hwang to be Published in Econometric Theory

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Professor Jungbin Hwang and his co-author Yixiao Sun have had their paper, “Simple, Robust, and Accurate F and t Tests in Cointegrated Systems,” accepted by Econometric Theory  as a lead article in a future issue.

In this paper, they propose new, simple, and more accurate statistical tests in a cointegrated system that allows for endogenous regressors and serially dependent errors. The approach involves first transforming the time series using orthonormal basis functions in L-2 space, which have energy concentrated at low frequencies, and then running an augmented regression based on the transformed data and constructing the test statistics in the usual way. The F and t tests developed in this article, are extremely simple to implement have more accurate size in finite samples than existing tests such as the asymptotic chi-squared and normal tests based on the fully modified OLS estimator of Phillips and Hansen (1990) and can be made as powerful as the latter test.

Professor Hwang Publishes in Journal of Econometrics

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Professor Jungbin Hwang has published the paper “Asymptotic F and t tests in an efficient GMM setting” with his co-author Yixiao Sun in the Journal of Econometrics Volume 198, Issue 2, June 2017, Pages 277-295.

In this paper, they propose a simple and easy-to-implement modification to the trinity of test statistics in the two-step efficient GMM setting and show that the modified test statistics are all asymptotically F distributed under the so-called fixed-smoothing asymptotics. The main contributions of this paper are developing convenient asymptotic F tests whose critical values, i.e., the standard F critical values, are readily available from standard statistical tables and programming environments. For testing a single restriction with a one-sided alternative, the paper also develops an asymptotic test theory using the standard t distribution as the reference distribution.

Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India

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The American Economic Association has posted an interview with Karthik Muralidharan on “Cycling to School: Increasing Secondary School Enrollment for Girls in India“, the paper that he and Professor Nishith Prakash have published in the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

The interview is online at

Biking to a better future

An interview with Karthik Muralidharan about closing the education gender gap in India

Professor Prakash is following up on this work with his new project, ‘Wheels of Change: Impact of Cycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia’.  For more information, see Professor Prakash Studies the Impact of Bicycles on Female Education and Empowerment in Zambia

Professor Prakash publishes in Social Science & Medicine

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Professor Nishith Prakash and his co-author Professor Kumar (Sam Houston State University) have had their paper titled “Effect of political decentralization and female leadership on institutional births and child mortality in Bihar” accepted for publication at Social Science & Medicine.

In this paper, they investigate the impacts of political decentralization and women reservation in rural local governance on institutional births and child mortality in the state of Bihar in India. Using difference-in-differences methodology, they find a significant positive association between political decentralization and institutional births. They also find that the increased participation of women at local governance led to increased survival rate of children belonging to richer households. They argue that their results are consistent with female leaders having policy preference for women and child well-being.

This project was funded by International Growth Center at London School of Economics (http://www.theigc.org).

Professor Agüero publishes in the Journal of Health Economics

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Professor Jorge Agüero and his coauthor Trinidad Beleche have had their paper “Health Shocks and their Long-Lasting Impact on Health Behaviors: Evidence from the 2009 H1N1 Pandemic in Mexico” accepted for publication in the Journal of Health Economics.

Abstract: Worldwide, the leading causes of death could be avoided with health behaviors that are low-cost but also difficult to adopt. We show that exogenous health shocks could facilitate the adoption of these behaviors and provide long-lasting effects on health outcomes.

Specifically, we exploit the spatial and temporal variation of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic in Mexico and show that areas with a higher incidence of H1N1 experienced larger reductions in diarrhea-related cases among young children. These reductions continue even three years after the shock ended. Changes in hand washing behaviors are behind these health improvements. Several robustness checks validate our findings and mechanism.

 

Professor Naknoi publishes in Canadian Journal of Economics

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Canadian Journal of EconomicsProfessor Kanda Naknoi published a sole-authored article in the February 2017 issue of the Canadian Journal of Economics.

The title of her article is “Real Exchange Rate Fluctuations, Wage Stickiness and Tradability“

Abstract: When we classify factors of production by their tradability, the relative wage of nontraded labour influences the real exchange rate through the relative cost of distribution services. We confirm this prediction using monthly data on the sector-level US–Canada real exchange rate and the relative wage of service-producing labour. The relative wage accounts for 40% of the variability of the real exchange rate at a one-month horizon. Furthermore, when we use the effective nontraded labour content to classify goods into nontraded and traded ones, the variability of the price of the nontraded-goods basket accounts for more than half of the variability of the real exchange rate.